Gary Dexter

‘You can never be too rich or too thin’: so said Wallis Simpson. Or perhaps Dorothy Parker. Or perhaps Joan Rivers. No one really knows. But whoever said it, Japan appears to have had it engraved on its national escutcheon. Japan is officially the world’s thinnest rich country, with an obesity rate of just 4.3 per cent of the population. By comparison, it’s 28 per cent in the UK and 40 per cent in the USA. A close comparison to Japan is Bangladesh, where the rate is 4.5 per cent - but where one in ten people is dangerously undernourished. These are extraordinary statistics. What on earth is going on?  The most reached-for reason is diet. Japanese food, so it is thought, is healthy and lean.

AI is set to take over all cognitive tasks in the next few years. Your hard-won career as a paralegal, data analyst, radiologist, coder or novelist is about to be hacked out from under you. So far, so apocalyptic. But what about the jobs that are primarily embodied? Sous-chef, rehabilitation nurse, plumber, dog-trainer? These are expected to lag behind, awaiting the next generation of robots. But there is an important further question. Who will train these robots? Answer: you will.  This is the concept of the arm farm. On an arm farm, practitioners of the aforementioned jobs - chefs, nurses, plumbers etc. - wear Go-pro helmets, pressure-sensitive gloves, even full motion-capture rigs, and do the jobs that the robots will ultimately usurp.

There’s a trend on YouTube at the moment for videos in which older people give advice. They speak directly to camera, frankly and without pretension. One can almost sense the care home staff hovering in the background, coaxing their barely extant charges into making one last testament of their time on Earth. The videos have titles such as ‘Things I’d tell my 30-year-old self’, ‘Harsh realities of being an 85-year-old woman’, ‘A girl and a woman talk about life’, ‘Lessons learned’ and ‘How to deal with loneliness.’   The commenters below the videos respond, largely, with gratitude and a surprising lack of trollery. ‘I’m terrified of dying,’ one commenter writes. ‘I fear many things, but nothing scares me as much as death does.

Imagine going into an English pub and slapping a tenner down on the bar. ‘All I can drink, please,’ you say. ‘Certainly sir,’ says the barman. ‘You’ve got two hours.’ ‘Right then,’ you say. ‘I’ll start with a pint.’ Ten minutes later: ‘Whisky, please, no ice.’ Shortly afterwards: ‘I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary.’ Then: ‘Pint of that there. The green one. Please.’ Shortly afterwards. ‘Large white wine.’ And so the night wears on. You can have absolutely anything you like: cocktails, double G&Ts, rum and coke, Jack Daniels and Jack Daniels. Two hours is enough to render you senseless. You have drunk the equivalent of £100 of booze for £10, and you need a taxi, a chicken fajita and an urgent visit to the toilet.

There are several class actions going on against developers of Large Language Models. Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and several other well-known authors are among those engaging in long-drawn-out lawsuits with tech companies such as Meta (who developed the chatbot LLaMA), OpenAI (who developed ChatGPT) and Google DeepMind (who developed Gemini). These companies, without seeking permission (imagine!), used books, newspapers, websites and other text sources to generate datasets to train their machines. The lawyers for these tech companies claim it was ‘fair use’. No one actually copied and resold anything, they say; it was used to train, and only to train.  One of my novels was ‘scraped’ by Meta, and features, in a tiny way, in the lawsuit.

Everyone’s seen stories about the creep of AI into art of all kinds. Recently the people behind the music-fabrication website Suno have been making outrageous statements to the effect that people don't enjoy learning musical instruments and writing their own songs, so why not let AI do it for them? This is very new, very disturbing and very consequential. I could talk about graphic art and video and film-making, but you’ll know what’s been going on there. I’ll just cut to the chase and get to how AI tools are impacting and will continue to impact the writing of fiction.  I anticipate a future in which human authorship will need to be proven. A few years ago I simply wouldn’t have believed that this landscape could be possible.