Sam Leith

The foul-mouthed puppet musical Avenue Q, way back in 2003, caught the spirit of the age to come. 'The internet is for porn!/ The internet is for porn!' runs one of its more memorable songs. 'Why do you think the net was born?/ Porn! Porn! Porn!' Never was a truer word sung by a copyright-skirting knockoff of The Muppet Show. What those puppets didn’t see coming, though, was the effect on this basic truth of the development of artificial intelligence.   A report this weekend in the Wall Street Journal came headlined: 'AI fake nudes are booming. It’s ruining real teenagers’ lives.' The story opened with a case study.

Alex Kaplo lives, apparently, the life of Riley. The 31-year-old's website shows him roaring around in a Mercedes, and he boasts of taking 'extravagant' holidays and living in a high-end apartment. He has made all his dosh, as it turns out, as a 'publishing chief executive'. He has caused hundreds of books to be released, none of which he has written. His story appears, alongside a few others, in a report in yesterday’s Sunday Times about the people who are really getting rich from publishing these days. And, spoiler alert: it isn’t traditional publishers, still less (ha ha) actual authors.

‘Hi Jacques,’ I say as the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions appears on my Zoom screen with his Franz Hals facial hair. ‘Thanks for making the time.’ I explain, apologetically but cheerily, that I’m going to be asking him to give his basic ‘how I keep winning Nobel Prizes’ spiel – at which, I say, he’s probably by now well practised. ‘Hm,’ he says, ‘I’m not sure about that. I’ll do my best.’ Though he’s grateful for what it’s done for his tiny publishing company, you sense that Jacques Testard probably finds it a bit irksome that it takes the ephemeral showbiz razzle of the Swedish academy to bring the experimental writing he publishes anything much in the way of public attention. But there again, the Nobel thing is hard to ignore.

Qui tacet consentire videtur: who keeps silent is seen to consent. That Latin tag haunts the western response to the situation in Israel. We’re already seeing, amid the rage and grief, people being called out for what they don’t say as much as for what they do. But what are those of us – the ordinary schmoes, the many bystanders – who don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of Israel/Palestine, a clever take on the geopolitical implications, or a shrewd understanding of the hidden hands at work, to say? Who see only horror clambering over horror, to which any amount of historical or geopolitical subtlety seems, viscerally, to miss the point. What is the appropriate response? What we’re seeing in Israel and Gaza now activates an instinctive response.

In 1983 Samantha Fox was sixteen years old when she first appeared topless on Page Three of the Sun. That paper and its kind used to delight in doing birthday countdowns: in just three days, they’d promise, alongside a picture of a provocatively pouting fifteen-year-old, it’ll be legal for us to show you her breasts. Wahey! In more recent memory (a 2003 change in the law having outlawed topless shots of under-18s) Emma Watson was 'upskirted' by photographers on her 18th birthday: they were handsomely compensated for images that, a few hours previously, would have landed them in jail. The Daily Mail’s so-called sidebar of shame likes to use the phrase 'all grown up' to signpost sexualised paparazzi images of young women.