Sean Thomas

I can remember when I first realised that something strange was happening to white men in Hollywood. It was around 2014, and my younger colleagues in LA – often British writers, directors and actors who had moved to California to ‘make it’ – began reporting, anecdotally, that their work was disappearing. By that I don’t mean the normal vicissitudes of a volatile creative industry. I don’t mean actors ‘resting’ or scripts getting stuck in ‘development hell’. I mean that all jobs, and job opportunities, were abruptly vanishing. Applications went nowhere, CVs were binned, hopeful meetings were suddenly cancelled.

It feels, pleasingly, like a scene from a cerebral James Bond film, or perhaps an episode of Slow Horses. I am in a shadowy corner of a plush, buzzy Soho members’ bar. A mild December twilight is falling over London. Across the table from me sits an old acquaintance, a senior English barrister, greying, quietly handsome, in his mid fifties. And he wants to speak anonymously, because what he is about to say will earn the loathing of his entire profession. Let’s call him James. I’ve known him for a few years, and over these years we’ve discussed all kinds of things, from politics to architecture to the misfortunes of Chelsea FC. We’ve also discussed technology and AI. James’s views of AI were always like his politics: centrist, clever, moderate, sceptical.

It is estimated that, sometime in the past few months, the content on the internet produced by AI finally overtook content produced by the human mind. In other words, if you go online these days – from YouTube to X, from Facebook to TikTok to can-that-really-be-a-fetish.com – you are more likely than not to be looking through, gasping about, or getting horribly enraged at something created by a silent machine. And I am afraid to say The Spectator, at least in this article, is not going to be an exception. What I am about to tell you, or show you, is partly written by AI – in this case GPT5. However – of course, there is a however – I have a good reason for dousing you with ‘AI slop’. I want to prove that it isn’t always slop, certainly not when it comes to antiques.

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top-floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old ‘Spanish Quarter’ – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender. Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods 3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded ‘live translate’ function. Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is it really like the sci-fi Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

I am in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I am standing in a historic complex of madrasas and mosques, courtyards and dusty roses and I am staring at the “oldest Quran in the world.” It is a strange and enormous thing: written in bold Kufic script on deerskin parchment; it was supposedly compiled by Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph of Islam, who was murdered while reading it. And so it is, as I linger here and reverently regard the Book, while scrolling my phone for more fascinating info, that I discover the world’s oldest Quran is actually in Birmingham. Yes, that’s right, Birmingham, England. It’s probably in some obscure library, lodged between a thesis on post-colonial emojis and a flyer for Falafel Night.

No one is quite sure who invented the phrase ‘the shock of the new’. It may have been the American writer Harold Rosenberg back in the 1960s. Alternatively, it may have been the late, great Australian intellectual Robert Hughes, who used it as a title for a TV series. Whatever the answer, the phrase aptly captures a very human moment: when you encounter something so strangely and profoundly innovative you experience a visceral, emotional jolt. Those two thinkers applied the phrase to modern art, to the first jarring encounter with impressionism, Cubism, abstract expressionism. But it can also be applied, perhaps more appositely, to the first encounter with remarkable technology. Technology, in the famous vision of Arthur C.