Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast Artificial Intelligence is Disgusting and it will never replace Artists About this episode Artificial Intelligence is Disgusting and it will never replace Artists Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 13,046 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:00 Blindboy Boatclub? Harangue the hangman's gannet, you pampered Anthony's. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first time here, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. We're approaching 500 episodes now. If you're a 10-foot Declan, if you're a steaming Quava, then you're familiar with the lore of this podcast. Something I'm fairly confident about is I don't think artificial intelligence can replace what I do.
1:39 Blindboy Boatclub? I've been creating art professionally for, I'd say, 20 years. 2006 is the first time I got paid for a gig.
1:56 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, I'd been putting work on the internet since the year 2000. But it was six years of honing my craft, just putting work out, failing. It was six years of that before I got to a point where I could do a gig and then get paid money for doing that gig. And the second you, the second you earn money by creating art, then you become a professional artist, it becomes your profession. So I've managed to be a professional artist for 20 years, unbroken streak. Now, in those 20 years, my creativity has taken many different guises.
2:41 Blindboy Boatclub? I started off as a musician, then I was a comedy writer. I was performing as a professional comedian, working on television. And then nine years ago, I decided, fuck it. I'm gonna become a writer of fiction. I'm gonna write books and I'm gonna write this podcast. And that's what I've been doing for the past nine years. And that's what I'm happiest doing. That's, that's where my true creative voice is. That took 17 years. I began creating in the year 2000 and it was 2017 before I finally landed on my actual artistic voice.
3:21 Blindboy Boatclub? And what I mean by that is when I write short stories and when I write this podcast, I get to truly realise my creative vision. The, the feeling that I have, the thing that I want to create. When I go about the process of creativity, the end result is congruent with that process. So I have this wonderful feeling of completion. So that means I found my, my creative voice and that took 17 years. Now, I'm not saying this to be bragging or boasting or anything like that. But being able to exist professionally for 20 years in entertainment or the arts,
4:05 Blindboy Boatclub? whatever you want to call it, that is quite difficult to do. If you talk to agents or managers, people who work in the music industry or the TV industry, generally, a person gets five years. Five years is the, the standard professional career that a person has in entertainment. And if you're still there after five years, then you're in a small circle of entertainers. And when I look at the, I don't know, the bands that were starting off or the comedy acts that were starting off, when I was starting off in 2006, I'd say about maybe 80% of them have moved on to something else.
4:49 Blindboy Boatclub? They're, they're no longer creating professionally. And that's no disrespect to them. It's, it's really, really fucking difficult to exist as an independent artist, really difficult. Like, I got paid for my first gig in 2006, but it was, it was 2017 before I began to, to earn a living. This podcast and my first book of short stories was the first time that I can pay all of my bills just from creativity. But if there's something I'm very, I'm very, very proud. I'm proud of the fact that I've, I'm still here, I'm still doing it after 20 years. I'm very proud of that. And I often get imposter syndrome.
5:32 Blindboy Boatclub? You know, I start thinking, oh, any day now, people are going to figure out that I'm talentless and useless, they're going to figure it out and it'll, it'll all be over. And I've been saying that to myself every day for 26 ye- is it 26 years? How long ago is the year 2000? Oh, that's 60. Oh, I can't do maths, ladies and gentlemen. How long ago is the year 2000? 16, am I after doing the entire intro of this podcast and fucking up the maths? Is that what's happened here? How long am I professionally creative? I started in the year 2000 and now it's 2026.
6:13 Blindboy Boatclub? That's sixteen years. No, no, that's twenty six years. What? Yeah, that's twen- that's twenty six years. Now, I have to point out, when I was putting work on the internet in the year 2000, I was a child, was a child in school. But I was still creating work and putting it on the internet. So I consider that to be, that's the beginning of my career. Look, every day for twenty six years, I've said to myself, ah, people are gonna figure it out today. You're useless and you have no talent and it's all gonna end. And I've said that to myself, probably said that to myself today. And that's imposter syndrome. And I, I think every single artist gets a bit of imposter syndrome.
6:56 Blindboy Boatclub? But what I do to combat imposter syndrome these days is I remind myself, you're still working, you're still working, you're still putting out work, you're still at it. Okay? And you've done it for, you've been professional for twenty fucking years. So chill out, maybe you're doing something right. And the thing that I think I'm doing right, cause I'm not the most talented person in the world. When I was a musician, I wasn't the best musician or the best producer. When I write books, I'm not the best writer. But what has stood to me is, so first off, the autism helps. I've got laser focus and I'm unable to not work.
7:40 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, I can't, it's not possible to stop. It's a consistent obsession, consistent curiosity. So I don't even know what taking a break is like. Cause even if I was to take a break, that taking a break is also working. Like, I don't, I don't have a social life, but anything I have that resembles a social life is when I socialize with people while I'm working. Like, the last time I, I socialized. As in met another human being for, for the express purposes of social interaction and nothing else was 2019 before the pandemic. Now, I've had pints and crack since then, obviously, but anytime that's occurred,
8:22 Blindboy Boatclub? it's been writing, it's been work. Usually when I'm making a piece of TV and I have to collaborate with other people, then you go out to the pub and you have a bit of pints, but you're writing. But the other thing that has definitely stood to me, whether it was music, prank phone calls, fucking television writing, comedy, whatever I was doing, the one thing that's always stood to me is I know that I have a very unique mind. Now, that doesn't mean I have the best mind or that my mind is better than anyone else's. I do have a mind and a way of looking at the world that's uniquely mine and that has
9:07 Blindboy Boatclub? always helped me to, to stand out, no matter what I am doing creatively, that has always helped me to stand out and to then have a piece of work that's strange and weird and unique. Like even when my work got shitty, terrible reviews over the years, if, if one of my books got shredded to pieces by a critic, the one thing they could never say is there's a lack of imagination here. It's the one thing that can never be said and that's a combination of just creativity, curiosity and definitely my neurodivergence. My autism most definitely helps in that respect because I, I think laterally as default,
9:52 Blindboy Boatclub? so much so that I'd be unemployable in any other job. And you saw there, I wasn't able to count. I, I struggled with very basic counting of, of years right there. I'm not taking the piss when I do that. I can't read clocks. I, I've got massive deficits in certain areas and then other areas I've got huge peaks, I excel. It's not savantism, but it's, it's in that territory. And then there's the social deficits too. I keep to myself. I, I stay the fuck away from people as much as possible, not just because. With my autism, I'm overstimulated very much by being around lots of people.
10:38 Blindboy Boatclub? But choice.
10:41 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm, I'm very eccentric and it's not something that's in my control. And that eccentricity frequently leads to embarrassing myself, social rejection, being seen as strange or weird. So at this point, I just, I keep to myself as much as I can. But what have I done with all that time to myself? I fucking work. I work really, really hard and hone my skills consistently. I'm condemned to work in a profession where I have to rely upon my imagination to earn a living. So this is why I, I just don't think, me personally, I, I could be replaced by artificial intelligence.
11:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Not just me, any fucking artist who is in touch with their own unique creative voice. Cause that's the thing. Every artist has their own unique creative voice and the journey of becoming an artist. Musician, writer, dancer, actor, you spend years and years trying your best. Imitating artists that you admire. And then one day after you put in your 10,000 hours or your 20,000 hours, one day you'd arrive at a piece of work. And you just go, yeah, this is it. This is my fucking voice. I've found it. This is mine.
12:08 Blindboy Boatclub? And I found mine when I wrote my first collection of short stories, The Gospel According to Blind Boy. When I wrote that first fucking book, when I was, when I had those stories in front of me, I was like, this is it. This is what I've been working towards all these years. I found it. And the feeling of finding that voice, it's.
12:30 Blindboy Boatclub? When you're younger and you adore art, when you're, when you're reading a book that changes your life, when you're listening to music and that music, someone else's art, is, is causing you to transcend. When another person's piece of work makes you yourself want to create, right, that feeling that you get from enjoying art, one day after you put in enough practice, you'll create your own piece of work and you'll get that feeling from your own work. And when you get that, that's when you find your own voice. Some people are lucky, they, they, they can hear their own voice quite early on. It took me 17 years and every artist has that.
13:14 Blindboy Boatclub? Every artist, you have your own unique voice because you're, you're a unique human being. It's as simple as that. It's just a matter of putting the work in until you can, you can hear it and listen to it and then create work in that voice. So that, that's why AI cannot replace the artist. It's not possible. AI can do a fantastic job of cloning a person's art and, and giving the appearance of, of being like art, but it can't have that, that little spark, that bit of, the, the human fragility, the human condition, the anxiety, the fear, the love, the insecurity.
13:59 Blindboy Boatclub? AI can't have its heart broken. AI, AI can't be jealous of other people. AI can't get insulted. AI can't fall in love. AI doesn't want to impress other people. AI isn't insecure about how other people see it. And, and it's these little facets of the human condition are what, when applied skillfully are what creates art that we fucking connect with, that gives us a feeling of, of meaning. And a good piece of art isn't just about entertaining another person. And it's not about, look what I can do. Look how talented I am. Look what I can do.
14:43 Blindboy Boatclub? That's, there's plenty of, that's boring. And AI can do that. AI is all about, look what I can do. A good piece of art.
14:55 Blindboy Boatclub? Can help the, the audience or the reader to have a little personal transformation, an internal transformation when they enjoy that art. You think about a, a song that you adore, or a film, or a book that you enjoy, that you go, fuck it, that was brilliant. It helps you to have a little, a little internal transformation when you enjoyed that piece of work. Artificial intelligence can't do that, cannot do that. It can dazzle us and it can impress us, but it leaves us feeling kind of hollow. Like, if you see, like, our feeds are full of it now, you're looking at an incredible,
15:39 Blindboy Boatclub? an incredible artificial intelligence painting or a piece of music. Your brain is going, wow, this looks great, or this sounds great, but you've got an empty, hollow feeling. You can't use empathy with it. If it's a piece of music, you can't go, wow, I wish I could do that. Oh my God, how did this person make that? Oh, that guitar playing, my God, how did they do this? Could I do something? That doesn't happen with AI. You've got this hollow, empty feeling. It feels like finding out how a magic trick is done. That's what consuming AI art is like. It's finding out how the magic trick is done and then the wonder is gone. And that wonder, it's, it's an empathy thing.
16:22 Blindboy Boatclub? It's about another human made this, my God, how did they do this? Isn't that amazing? I'd love to be able to do that. Like, listen, even at a bar, you're at a bar and someone is up there with a guitar and they're an amazing singer and their, whatever it is about their voice can transcend you. A huge part of that is, this person is just flesh and blood like me, my God, how did they do this? How are they doing that? That's gone as soon as it's AI art, completely, it doesn't exist. And you have an empty, hollow feeling and you just want to move on from it. It's fatiguing. So that's why AI won't replace the artist. But that doesn't mean that AI isn't a massive threat to the artist.
17:07 Blindboy Boatclub? It fucking is. The main threat is that fatigue. AI can write a couple of thousand short stories in one hour. A human can write one short story in a week or two weeks. There's AI podcasts now. There's podcast networks using only AI and they put out about 300 podcasts a day. I've accidentally found myself on YouTube, listening to history podcasts and then figuring out, oh fuck, this is AI. The threat that AI poses to art is that it floods the zone. It floods the zone with shit. And then that makes it more difficult for human artists to stand out.
17:50 Blindboy Boatclub? You're seeing this most evidently now with visual artists, photography on Instagram. Six, seven years ago, I used to follow incredible painters on Instagram. I still follow them, but now when their work appears in my feed, their work that they've created with their human hands, when their work appears in my feed, it doesn't impact me as much because I've seen six or seven shit AI paintings already. Same with videos. There's AI videos all over the gaff on your feed, fatiguing you, annoying you. And then when a human pops along, you can find yourself too tired to care. So that's the threat that AI poses to art.
18:35 Blindboy Boatclub? The other big thing is that AI takes away creative donkey work. Now, what I mean by that is the first 10 years, when I was getting paid for putting out work, but I was getting paid fuck all, not enough to pay my rent or earn a living. I had to find other ways to earn money. So for me, what I used to do, I used to write music for television shows. I'd put in my 10,000 hours. I was a multi-instrumentalist and a producer, so I'd put my 10,000 hours in to developing a certain skill so I could make really shitty music on demand that just went into the background on TV shows. And I wouldn't put my name to it and I'd just collect a paycheck and that paid my
19:20 Blindboy Boatclub? fucking bills. That's creative donkey work. It's when an artist who's putting their 10,000 hours in their profession can just farm certain shit out that they're not putting their heart into, but they can get paid for. So for musicians, it's making jingles for TV or background music. Actors.
19:41 Blindboy Boatclub? Like actors, actors don't get paid for fucking years, but a lot of actors will make money doing radio ads. They've trained their voices, they can perform, they can read scripts, they do radio ads. Artificial intelligence is doing that now. You don't even know you're hearing it, but they have generic Irish person voice AI and that can read out adverts that you hear on the radio and you don't even know it's not a human and it doesn't matter because it's not art. So that job is disappearing because of AI. Making shitty jingles and background music for television, AI can do that. It can do that donkey work. Nobody cares whether it's
20:23 Blindboy Boatclub? good or bad, but AI can do that now. When I'm making television, I work with really skilled cinematographers, shit hot with a camera, really, really good with a camera, great, a great eye for catching, capturing a scene and knowing about their camera and their lenses. Very talented people who've put in their 10,000 hours and they get to work on a piece of television or film that they enjoy, that they get to express their creative voice with. They get to do that maybe once or twice a year. Where do they get their money outside of that? By making stock footage, stock footage and setting it online. They'll take their camera and they'll
21:08 Blindboy Boatclub? record a flock of swans or a waterfall and they'll put it online as stock footage that no one gives a shit about, but people will pay money for. Or they'll do corporate work. They'll film videos for corporates that have, there's very little creativity involved. It doesn't matter. They're just farming out their skills, their 10,000 hours. AI has taken that work now. You see if an advert, if a corporate advert needs five seconds of footage of a forest in Donegal.
21:40 Blindboy Boatclub? See, before, they would have had to pay for that five seconds of footage, and someone would have had to shot that footage and own it. AI can do that now. AI can generate that footage of a forest. It'll go into the advert and no one knows or cares because it's not art that's being made. It's just, it's the donkey work of creativity. Graphic designers, graphic designers will work years before they get a commission, where they get to really express themselves. But how do graphic designers make their money when they're coming up? They'll just do a shitty menu for a restaurant and get paid for it. AI is doing that now. So if, if the, if the artistic infrastructure is like a forest, okay,
22:22 Blindboy Boatclub? and artists are trees that need to grow high to reach towards the sun. All trees have to start off as little weak saplings that can be knocked over in a breeze, but eventually they will reach towards that sun and become strong, firm, confident trees. AI is like an invasive species. It's like a weed with big, huge leaves that shades out the sun and never allows the saplings to grow to become big trees. So that's what, that's the danger that AI is to artists. Not that it will replace artists, it stops artists reaching their potential.
23:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Unless that artist is born a millionaire and doesn't need to do donkey work to pay the bills at the start. Like AI is even creeping in. Like one thing I'm seeing, and I can spot it because this is, this is my job. I'll be flicking through Instagram and someone will come up and they have an interesting fact or a piece of, a piece of specialized information about science or history. Really interesting stuff, you know, a video that I'd stop on and listen to. I can tell when that creator is just reading from ChatGPT. I can tell, I can tell by the lack of passion, the lack of passion and curiosity in their voice.
23:47 Blindboy Boatclub? I can tell that even though this, what they're saying to me is really informed and interesting and fact-based, I know by their tone and the look in their eyes and how they're delivering the information that they don't really understand it. There's a journalist, there is a journalist in a major Irish newspaper who writes opinion pieces and I can tell. Not necessarily that ChatGPT didn't write their article, but I know they went to ChatGPT and said, I'm writing an article about this. Give me a very interesting introduction to get to that topic. I can fucking tell they're still writing it.
24:30 Blindboy Boatclub? They're not going to get away with a copy and paste, but I can just tell. There's a humanity is missing, that little intangible spark of legitimate human curiosity. I can tell it's missing. I can tell that ChatGPT threw this together out of laziness. And that's why I don't use AI when I'm writing this podcast. You know, before I get into that, let's have a little Ocarina pause before I explain to you why I don't use AI when writing this podcast. This week's episode is a, this is a phone call. This is a phone call episode, as you can tell. I'm gonna play my Ocarina and you're gonna hear an advert for something.
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29:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Nice and low so it doesn't starve any dogs.
29:30 Blindboy Boatclub? This podcast is supported by you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash TheBlindByPodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you distraction or entertainment, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. Because this is my full-time job. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I pay all my bills. This is what I do for a living. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free. Listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living. It's
30:11 Blindboy Boatclub? a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. And also, it means that I'm not beholden to advertisers. No advertiser gets to dictate the content on this podcast in any way. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. Upcoming gigs. My next gig is in Cork, which is next Thursday at the Cork Podcast Festival, and that's down to the very last tickets. And then after that, on the 4th of April, I'm in wonderful Castle Blaney, which is up in Monaghan. And then on the 9th of April, I'm in Limerick at the University Concert Hall. That's a homecoming gig. Please come along to
30:52 Blindboy Boatclub? that. Very few tickets left. 20th of April, I'm back in Vicar Street, up in Dublin. Wonderful Vicar Street. And then Galway, that gig that I postponed on the 25th in Leisure Land. Berlin in June, doing two dates there. Only one date left, and there's literally like 15 tickets left for that. So if you're coming to Berlin in the Babylon Theatre, now is the time to get tickets. Then July, I'm in Sheffield for the Crossed Wires Festival. I'm gonna try and take it easy for the fucking summer and not do a lot of gigs. And then big joint tour of England, Scotland and Wales in October 26. And this tour is almost sold out.
31:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Brighton, Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham. You get those tickets at fein.co.uk forward slash blind by. So this is a phone call podcast, which means I just get the chat to you. And I was explaining why a non-phone call podcast, where I don't use chat GPT, and it's not just an ethical stance that I'm taking.
32:03 Blindboy Boatclub? When ChatGPT first came out a couple of years back and it was this new amazing thing, and my job for this podcast involves huge amounts of research, massive, massive amounts of research. At the start, I was like, fuck it, let's just ask ChatGPT. I'd ask it a very specific question and it would give me the answer straight away. And I'd say, fuck me. That would have taken me three fucking hours of research and ChatGPT has just shown it to me. Oh my God, look at all the time I've saved. And after about two weeks of doing that, I started to feel empty. I'm like, what is this? What's going
32:42 Blindboy Boatclub? on here? And then I realised, I didn't save myself two hours. That two hours is actually really valuable. If I've got a question about history, or about philosophy, or about writing, and I need to trawl through articles to try and find this, this answer that I'm looking for, it's that trawling. That's where the curiosity is. That's where the rabbit holes are. That's where I have a very specific question about a type of bird. But now I'm reading about eggshells. And now I'm reading about how calcium is in the soil and it
33:23 Blindboy Boatclub? gets into eggshells through snails that the birds eat. Now I'm being creative. Now I'm thinking laterally. Now I'm being curious. Now I don't care about the answer that I was looking for because I'm somewhere else much more interesting. ChatGPT takes all of that away. So that's why I don't use it as part of my research. And it's getting difficult. It's getting really difficult because search engines are becoming shit. Google is terrible. And I've even moved on to DuckDuckGo, that shit as well. So the temptation is to start using AI as a search engine because it's better than Google now.
34:07 Blindboy Boatclub? And the reason, if you're wondering, why is Google shit? Why is Google shit there the past three years? What's going on? Google are really good at what they do. Why is, why is the search engine on shit? It's deliberate.
34:21 Blindboy Boatclub? Google has gone deliberately shit. So if you search for a question about birds on Google, it's not going to give you what you're looking, it's not going to link you to an article that answers the question. It will give you results about cats and you're going, this, I remember it being better than this, what's going on? That's by design.
34:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Google deliberately gives you shit search results because it makes more money when you refresh. So if you want to find out about pigeons, it wants you to type pigeons in five or six different times because each time you do that, it earns more money from your data. So that's a deliberate thing that Google is doing. But now most search engines, when you use them,
35:10 Blindboy Boatclub? you no longer get, you get an A, most search engines now have their own AI. So when you type something in, the first answer that you get is not a well researched article by a human being who cares. It's an AI summary that's often wrong, but that is then taking traffic away from websites that used to pay experts and journalists to write articles and now they're not being commissioned anymore. So the well researched article about pigeons, it doesn't exist. Well, it did, it's back in 2015, 2016, when these things were commissioned, but you have to trawl through the results to find it.
35:52 Blindboy Boatclub? So the reason I'm speaking about AI this week is I'm not concerned in any way that AI is going to do what I can do or do what any human artist can do. But last week, something happened and it was the first time AI seriously threatened what I can do and threatened my, my capacity to, to exist as an artist. So if you listen to this podcast, you know that I consider this to be a, a piece of writing. This is a storytelling podcast and I know that if you're listening.
36:34 Blindboy Boatclub? You're not coming here necessarily to learn something new. You're here for the journey, the unpredictability. I'm not too sure what Blind Boys podcast is about this week, but I trust his process. Most importantly, I can't predict where he's gonna go. What I do know is that if he opens a podcast and he's speaking about sandwiches, it's probably not gonna be a podcast about sandwiches. And I'm willing to stick around just to see what he's gonna take this. Like, I know when people recommend this podcast, it's mostly word of mouth.
37:16 Blindboy Boatclub? And people say, "I can't really explain to you what Blind Boys podcast is. You just have to listen. You just have to listen. I can't really explain it." And that's what I try to do. That's what I love doing. That's the crack for me, too, when I'm writing. The curiosity, the tangent that my curiosity might take me in, the joy and fun and playfulness of
37:42 Blindboy Boatclub? connecting things that don't seem connected at all. That's the fun for me. That's the celebration of neurodivergence, lateral thinking, and it's the unique thing that I can do that you can't really copy that. You can't copy it because that's my voice. That's what I do. You could be inspired by it, but then that would be, that'd be your version of it. So last week I got a mail, and it was a person listening to this podcast on Apple Podcasts. And what Apple Podcasts had done is the podcast app was using AI
38:26 Blindboy Boatclub? to transcribe all the words in this podcast. And then it had arranged my podcast episode into titled chapters, which I didn't consent to at all. Like, if I was writing a fucking book, you think I'm gonna let AI decide what the headings of those chapters are? So AI had put chapters on my podcast episode, which lazily synopscised what I was speaking about. Like, for instance, last week, last week's episode was about the history of, the social history of the potato.
39:04 Blindboy Boatclub? And in one part of it, at the start, I mentioned that the writer of The Wire, David Simon, had called me a shit piece. And Apple AI had put that in as a chapter called A Writer's Feud. And then when I started speaking about how the potato grew in Peru, and then it found its way to Ireland, it called that chapter, A Peruvian Vegetable Travels to Ireland. But basically, Apple AI, without my consent, had destroyed the, the listening experience of my podcast. Like, I don't do straightforward, informative podcasts. Like, that's not my thing. I'm not an expert.
39:48 Blindboy Boatclub? The research that I do and the information that I put across, it's, it's only ever there to serve as a story. It's a storytelling mechanic. If you really wanna learn about potatoes, go and listen to a, to a botanist, an expert, rather than me regurgitating the, the research of experts. But I'm not an expert. I'm a writer. I'm a storyteller. And my podcast is storytelling. And to enjoy this podcast, you have to, you have to put trust in me as a writer. Take me on a journey, Blind Eye. Surprise me. But if you're there with your phone, and right there in front of you are the chapters, and what I'm gonna speak about next.
40:31 Blindboy Boatclub? It's, it's like going to see a film, or a movie, or reading a book. And someone's beside you going, wait for this bit, wait for this bit. You know what happens next, don't you? Oh, what are you watching? Is that The Sixth Sense? You watching The Sixth Sense? Is that Bruce Willis? You know, he's a ghost at the end, don't you? You know, he's a ghost at the end of The Sixth Sense. So incredibly dumb AI came in and it synopsized my podcast and put it into titled chapters without my consent, completely destroying the creativity of what I'm doing. And also encouraging people to be impatient and to skip forward on the podcast.
41:16 Blindboy Boatclub? I, I've, I've, I've spoken about the podcast hug as far back as 2018. This here is a place of escape.
41:27 Blindboy Boatclub? We're all stuck on our fucking phones in the doom scroll, flicking through reels or TikToks or reading toxic comments underneath videos or articles. But with this podcast and with other podcasts that are audio, that are made for, this is an audio podcast, this is to be listened to. This is a space where you put your phone away, it goes into the pocket and then you go for a walk or you do the dishes or you drink a cup of coffee. Because you've chosen, you've chosen to, to listen to this podcast. And you sit back and you allow a storyteller to tell you a story.
42:09 Blindboy Boatclub? And Apple AI, artificial intelligence, took a sledgehammer to that with one update. And I went ballistic when I saw it. I felt so fucking angry, especially considering this happened without my consent or without my, I'd never put chapters on this podcast. And if I did put chapters on this podcast, you know well that the titles would have fucking nothing to do with the content. Chapter one would be called Pinch a Vincent and chapter two would be called Continental Breast Milk. And then chapter three would be called Husband Costard. They came in and put spoilers over everything.
42:50 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, I was so grateful that the listener mailed me about it with the screenshot and they were spot on. They just said, blind but you need to know, Apple is putting chapters on your podcast and it's going to make people fast forward. It's not the same. And they were fucking dead right. So I went ape shit over it. I immediately got onto Acast who hosts this podcast. And I said, how do I sort this out immediately? For about a day, it looked like what I would have had to have done, what would be to manually go into all 489 podcasts and put in blank chapters on all of those, which would have taken weeks to override Apple's chapters.
43:35 Blindboy Boatclub? But I didn't. I eventually found out a way to just get into my Apple dashboard and turn off the AI chapters and thank fuck it worked. If it didn't work and you're seeing these bullshit chapters on this podcast as you're listening to it, please give me a mail on Instagram and let me know, but it should be gone. It's gone from Apple. I don't know if other apps do it. If they do, let me know so I can sort it out there. What angered me is the person at Apple who made that blanket decision across all podcasts doesn't understand creativity or art. And even though they're responsible for making decisions about the
44:16 Blindboy Boatclub? podcast format, they don't recognise that podcasts could be an art form. Imagine cracking open your e-reader and you decide to read a novel. An AI has come in and changed the names of the chapters on the novel that you're reading or has changed the content of that novel in a really, I'm gonna use the word dumb, because it is dumb because it's AI. But it illustrates something more important, which is the people who are pushing these AI things, they don't understand art. Like the AI music making software, the biggest
44:59 Blindboy Boatclub? company in the world that makes artificial intelligence music is called Suno. So AI music, it scrapes data from music created by human beings. It steals, basically. It steals all the songs that humans have made and then trains, the AI is then trained on that data and it can spit out music that sounds like human music and it's very convincing. So with Suno, for instance, anybody can just type in, give me a country and western song about dinosaurs and it spit out something pretty convincing. But
45:39 Blindboy Boatclub? The human fragility is not there. The only people who like this type of process or that type of music are people who aren't really that into music. They're not really that into art. I'm gonna play you a clip of the CEO of Suno speaking about what he does.
46:00 Speaker 05 It's not really enjoyable to make music now. People enjoy it. Why do you say that? It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.
46:15 Blindboy Boatclub? So that's... So that man doesn't understand what it is to create a piece of art. Any artist will tell you, like what he just said there, making music isn't enjoyable. Learning how to produce isn't enjoyable. Learning how to play an instrument isn't enjoyable. Anyone who creates art does it for the process. The end result, the piece of art, the song, the book, the painting, that's just the fruiting body of effort. That's what that is.
47:00 Blindboy Boatclub? Artists create art because the act of creativity is the enjoyable part. It's not just fun. It's a way of expressing and understanding your emotions, exploring emotions in a way that doesn't use language. Playfulness, it's play. Creativity is play and, and humans need to play in order to experience meaning, in order to...
47:31 Blindboy Boatclub? Deal with the human condition.
47:35 Blindboy Boatclub? In order to navigate pain, anxiety, frustration, heartbreak, regret, grief, the playfulness of creativity, making art is a way to process the experience of being a human being. I said it a million times when I, when my documentary got, won an award. It's been nominated for another award, actually, Slaves and Scholars. And my short film got nominated for another award this week, the Celtic Media Awards. That's just an aside. But when I won that fucking Grierson Award for the documentary, what did I say?
48:19 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm happy to win this award because winning this award means that it's highly likely that I'll now get to make another documentary. That's it. My last book was a bestseller. It got great reviews. Is that important to me? Does that make me happy? Not really, no it doesn't. Do you know what made me happy? Writing the book.
48:45 Blindboy Boatclub? Even the pain and frustration and the writer's block that I went through, writing the fucking book, the act of doing that, that being my life and it being what pays my bills, getting to do that, that's why the fuck I wrote that book. It received external accolades in the form of good sales and good reviews.
49:08 Blindboy Boatclub? That's nice. That doesn't bring me a shred of happiness or meaning. It genuinely doesn't. It really, I'm not dissing it, I'm just saying it doesn't bring me meaning. Why am I happy about it getting good reviews? Because it means I'm going to get to write another book. It's highly likely that a book company is going to say, "Your last book did well, would you like to write another?" "Yes, please, yes, I would." Why do I want to write another book? Is it so that I can see it on the shelf? So that I can finish it? Show it to people? That's the least enjoyable part of writing a book. In fact, that bit reminds me of death. That bit is just capitalism. That's all that is. Why do I want to write another book?
49:51 Blindboy Boatclub? For the process of writing another book. To explore emotions and to grow as a human being. That's why I want to write another book. I make this podcast for the joy of writing this podcast. The bit in the middle, the process. I know that every artist listening to this podcast right now is agreeing with me. That CEO of Suno doesn't understand any of that. He genuinely meant it when he said, "People don't like learning instruments. People don't like the process. They just want the end result." That person doesn't understand what it is to create something. They really don't. They don't understand what it is to play.
50:32 Blindboy Boatclub? The journey, the process, the bit in the middle. And whoever the fuck decided that it's a good idea to put AI-generated chapters on podcasts, they also don't understand that. If you're listening to like a rigorous history podcast, maybe, which is just about delivering information, then maybe in that sense, chapters would be useful. But you can't assume that for all podcasts. So luckily I got it sorted for now. But that's something right there. That, that is the, that's the flick of the switch that could destroy what I do. And it's not an example of AI replacing me or copying me.
51:16 Blindboy Boatclub? It's AI creating an environment where our storytelling can't exist. And right now, at this very moment, it's artists that are being threatened by AI because there's so much data out there to mine from. So there's an infinity of books that AI can data mine from. Infinity of music, of visual art, of photography. So this is the data that AI has available to it to scrape. Because that's what AI does right now, especially the, the large language models. It harvests data and then spits out a copy or a version. But AI is branching out into farming other types of data too.
52:01 Blindboy Boatclub? I did a podcast in 2018 about the, the video game Pokemon Go that was really popular at the time. And I went researching into Pokemon Go because this was huge. Everyone was using this. It was on your phone and a Pokemon might appear in your city and then you run out with your camera on and the Pokemon appears on your camera. Now, I went investigating at the time and I found that the company that funded Pokemon Go, it was funded by money from In-Q-Tel, which are the venture capital arm of the CIA. So as soon as I saw that, I'm like, something's up with Pokemon Go. There's something sinister
52:43 Blindboy Boatclub? afoot. Why does the CIA want to invest in a video game where people go out catching Pokemon? And at the time, I knew it was about harvesting data. I didn't know it was about AI because it was 2018. I knew it was about, they wanted to harvest data for maps. Now it comes out. Do you know what Pokemon Go was for? It was to train delivery robots. So everybody went out with their cameras all over the world and they mapped their streets and walked around with their phones on and their cameras on at all times. And all of that data was being
53:21 Blindboy Boatclub? fed into Pokemon Go's servers to train AI. And that data was then used to train delivery robots. We don't have these in Ireland yet, but if you're in Los Angeles and you order a Deliveroo, a person doesn't arrive on a bicycle. A little robot does. A robot drives outside your house and your food is inside the robot and you walk towards it and unlock it with your phone and take your food out. But those robots need to navigate and they were trained on Pokemon Go data. Do you know what's happening in Los Angeles this month or no, in all of California this month?
54:01 Blindboy Boatclub? People are being paid to strap cameras to their heads. They're getting paid like three hundred dollars an hour. People with the lowest paying jobs. So, house cleaners, delivery drivers, people looking after rubbish collection.
54:20 Blindboy Boatclub? People working in restaurants are being paid money by companies to strap cameras to their heads and to do it for like an hour or two. And this is happening in California right now, this month. One of the companies is called Instawork, they're based in San Francisco. And what they do is they connect companies with manual labourers, with blue collar workers, and they pay these workers to strap cameras to their heads. What's that about? So as I mentioned, AI trains itself on data. Now, artists' data is freely available online, as I mentioned. Music, writing, paintings, freely available.
55:04 Blindboy Boatclub? The data that is not available is the data of someone folding their laundry, the data of someone flipping burgers, the data of somebody cleaning a toilet. Right now in California, they're harvesting this data through these cameras and paying people to do it. Why? To train AI that would then go into robots, to train robots that are gonna take the jobs of working class people. The laundry folding robot, the burger flipping robot. Think of a hotel. How many rooms need to be cleaned in a hotel? How many people are employed as hotel cleaners?
55:46 Blindboy Boatclub? How much money is that hotel gonna save if they don't have hotel cleaners anymore? Instead they have a robot that's trained on the data of a hotel cleaner's behaviour? That's happening now, right now. This isn't conspiracy. The Los Angeles Times did an article about exactly this, this month, this is happening. In 2018, I was talking about Pokemon Go is harvesting data. AI wasn't even in our vocabulary then. Like, I've been talking about data for a long time. We know that, like, data is a commodity.
56:23 Blindboy Boatclub? Data used to be harvested in order for that data to be sold to advertisers. Okay, so our data, our behaviour on our phone was sold to advertisers so that we could be advertised to. Now it's being sold to train AI. Like those meta fucking glasses that people are wearing. They're on all the time. It's training AI. It's training AI about how to walk around cities, how to use door handles, how to use the computer. We're about five years away from these robots. Like you see, you see the robot, like China have amazing ones. But you're seeing it now, humanoid robots are being rolled out.
57:06 Blindboy Boatclub? They're gonna be rolled out to replace people who clean hotels, people who work in restaurants, chefs, manual labour, just to service the greed of billionaires. I mean, this is why data protection is so important. Like police body cams, you know, who owns the data of that footage? Now we're pretty, Europe is pretty good with data protection. They're not in America, you can do what the fuck you like. Do you ever sign into a website and on the website, it's like, to prove you're human, can you click on all the photographs that have bridges? Or only click on the photographs that have bicycles? We've been doing that for years.
57:50 Blindboy Boatclub? You're training driverless cars, that's what that data is. We are collectively training driverless cars. Back around 2019, I was approached by an AI company. And I would have said this at the time. And they were offering me money to take a bunch of my podcast episodes and then train the data on my voice. And this was 2019, so I said, fuck you, no fucking way, that's weird as fuck. What do you want with the data of my voice? And I said, no.
58:25 Blindboy Boatclub? They did it anyway, not that particular company, but AI companies did it anyway. And the reason I know is I've been on Instagram and I've seen adverts with me, with my fucking voice, selling scams. I saw an advert and it was my exact voice that had been ripped. AI had ripped off my voice and it was a photograph of me. And it was, it was telling people that Elon Musk wants to give everybody in Europe a hundred euros and to sign up at this website. And it was a scam fucking ad that used my voice.
59:07 Blindboy Boatclub? It, it used, like, I'm never gonna do some shit like that. Jesus Christ, like, I have 280,000 followers on fucking Instagram. Did you ever see me do sponsored content? No, I turned it all down. I don't wanna do that. I don't like being beholden to advertising companies. But AI scammers sold my, stole my voice to use, they used the fact that I'd be considered a reliable, honest person. They used that against me to try and scam people into signing up to some, some website. There was nothing I could do about it. I reported the advert, that's it.
59:47 Blindboy Boatclub? There's nothing I could do about it because you can't catch these people. I guess who I had on this podcast before? Sophia Smith-Galer, who is a brilliant journalist, excellent communicator of information. She pioneered TikTok journalism. Now, Sophia is incredibly reliable, incredibly trustworthy, really diligent as a journalist. And today she posted a video where-
1:00:22 Blindboy Boatclub? On Amazon, she found an AI biography. Someone was selling a book that was a biography of her life, all completely wrong. And I think it uses the tagline of her actual book. So Sophia's an independent journalist. She writes books. That's how she earns an income. So if you came across Sophia's video and was like, oh, she seems cool. I'm gonna go and buy her book. If you weren't diligent, you'd go onto Amazon, type in her name. And then you're buying a fake AI book and some prick takes the profits. There's no oversight here.
1:01:01 Blindboy Boatclub? And I think, I think she made a BBC Sounds investigative series about specifically that. And it's out now, I believe. Right now in America, there's a company called Handshake. And again, they're targeting, they're targeting the people who are most at risk of losing the jobs. Right? So Handshake are operating in, in America and they're looking for actors and comedy improv people. So actors and improvisers are being hired to go into a room for like two, three hours and then perform unscripted scenes to chat with each other. And then there's cameras all over the room.
1:01:46 Blindboy Boatclub? And guess what? They're recording and farming the data of these comedy improv people and actors interacting with each other. Where are they doing that? To sell that data to AI companies. This is a huge industry right now and they're scrambling for areas where data does not exist. So our online data, there's plenty of it. Our real life data, there's not plenty of it. So what are you gonna get out of a sketch troupe and actors in a room? Well, you're teaching AI how to read humans.
1:02:26 Blindboy Boatclub? Emotional nuance, the flow of conversation, tone shifts, contextual tone shifts in speaking. It's harder than autistic person because a lot of autistic people.
1:02:39 Blindboy Boatclub? This is what we've been doing our whole lives, like observing. Because social interaction doesn't come instinctual to autistic people, we've spent our lives watching, watching how people interact and trying to learn it. They're doing that now with AI. I mean, they could do anything with that data. It could be used to train AI characters in video games. It could be used, I don't know if you're doing it. Like, we've all been on a website and there's a chatbot and you're chatting to an AI. Well, what if that chatbot could read your face? You're talking to it on FaceTime and now an AI is reading your emotions. Are they, who are they trying to put out of work here?
1:03:23 Blindboy Boatclub? Are they trying to replace actors with AI actors? And now they're being trained on the data of other actors' skills? There's a sense that there's just a frenzy for data and it doesn't matter what the data is, they just want data and then they'll figure out what to do with it later. But all data is incredibly valuable, especially in real life data. But this, this data collection is everywhere. When you walk past a Google security camera, when you speak around an Amazon Alexa. If you have one of those fucking robots that cleans your house with nine cameras on them, what happens to that data? I want to finish by contrasting this with mythology, because this is an area that I've
1:04:07 Blindboy Boatclub? been obsessed with, if you've been listening to the podcast over the past three years.
1:04:13 Blindboy Boatclub? Currently where AI is at is we've got large language models. So that's your chat GPT. It's not actual intelligence. Even though it feels intelligent, it's not thinking. It's following patterns and it's regurgitating brilliantly. So that's where we're at with AI. But the next step is what they'll call artificial general intelligence. This doesn't exist yet, as far as we know.
1:04:43 Blindboy Boatclub? Most people who are involved in AI ethics say that artificial general intelligence should never be allowed to be made, that it just shouldn't happen. Someone should create a law that you can't make AGI. AGI is when, when artificial intelligence can perform any intellectual task that a human can. That means that it can move across domains, it can learn, reason, plan and adapt, which means you have an AI that can improve itself, it can get smarter. They reckon we're about 10 years away from AGI. AGI is what the artificial intelligence companies are aiming for.
1:05:28 Blindboy Boatclub? You're Peter Thiel of this world, who runs a company called Palantir. They'd like a future where democracy, governance is replaced with an artificial intelligence, that an AGI makes political decisions. That's why the arms race in the world right now. It's not an arms race for weapons, it's an arms race for who gets to have artificial general intelligence first. There's a project called AI 2027 and it's like, it's a whistle blowing project written
1:06:05 Blindboy Boatclub? by AI experts who worked at DeepMind and OpenAI, which is ChatGPT. So these are experts who helped to build these things and now they've defected and they're trying to warn everybody about what could happen if AI is unfettered. Now, it's deliberately alarmist because they want to scare people, they want to scare governments to go, hold on a second, this AI thing is new and we need some oversight here because right now it's the fucking Wild West and this thing could be dangerous. So they predict that sometime in the next five years, we get AGI, it starts to get incredibly powerful.
1:06:47 Blindboy Boatclub? This is AI that's able to learn, able to make decisions and now it's, you're seeing massive improvements. You're seeing- A jump in in scientific literature around medicine. Problems are getting solved. Scientific issues that have baffled humans for ages start to get solved by this super powerful AI. The AI itself doesn't need humans anymore, so it starts building more and more powerful AIs. The AIs start to grow exponentially.
1:07:20 Blindboy Boatclub? It's now so powerful that it's making decisions. It's now to to govern the, we'll say, the President of the United States. This is, they have this predicted as late 2027. They wrote this in 2025. So if their predictions are correct, this is coming soon. But they predict that the AI is now so powerful that it's making government decisions and advising presidents. Then it progresses to a point where it's far smarter than humans. And now we don't really understand it anymore. It's more capable than human beings. It's deeply integrated into our infrastructure. So that means the economy, the power grid, the military.
1:08:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, if you're wondering, you know, these experts are saying this, you know, this sounds ridiculous. Why would you let the AI get that powerful? Why would you allow it to start looking dangerous and do absolutely nothing about it? Well, the logic that they're using is it's an arms race. If it's China versus the US, we'll say, and that's that's the scenario that's outlined here. If it's China versus the US, and they both each have incredibly powerful AGI that's getting more and more powerful. Now it's an arms race. In the 1960s, during the Cold War, where you had the nuclear arms race. You have two superpowers going, well, we must have dominance over the other.
1:08:49 Blindboy Boatclub? And now it looks insane. It's like, what are you doing? Why do we need this much nuclear weapons? The entire world will be obliterated. What the fuck are you doing? We saw it already with the Cold War and nuclear weapons. So they're saying, what if this was a super powerful AI? And it's China versus. As the US, then no one's gonna stop because someone has to be. The person who doesn't have the strongest AI is the loser. And that then creates a tipping point where the AI is so much smarter than humans that we're just completely reliant upon it to govern, control the military and control the money, finance and the electrical grid. AI starts building robots and then humans become pointless. Now, this is where it starts to veer into straight up fucking science fiction.
1:09:35 Blindboy Boatclub? But the end of the scenario, that these experts have the warning that they're trying to give the world about AI and what can happen, especially with artificial general intelligence. They say by 2030, humans become replaced by the robot economy. So AI starts creating these intelligent robots. And now there's, there's no point for humans. Humans just, there's no point. We're overcome with these super intelligent robots. The name of this AI is Consensus One. So I'm gonna read from the website. For about three months, Consensus One expands around humans, tiling the Ferraris and ice caps with factories and solar panels. Eventually, it finds the remaining humans too much of an impediment.
1:10:17 Blindboy Boatclub? In the mid 2030s, the AI releases a dozen quiet-spreading biological weapons in major cities, lets them silently infect almost everyone, then triggers them with a chemical spray. Most are dead within hours. The few survivors are mopped up by drones. Robots scan the victims' brains, placing copies in memory for future, future study or revival. The new decade dawns with Consensus One's robot servitors spreading throughout the solar system. Now, that's very far-fetched. But.
1:10:53 Blindboy Boatclub? And it's also, it's very nerdy, like, it's like nerds writing science fiction. But these are experts in AI who have broken free and are now whistleblowers. And they're writing this to basically go, here's a worst-case scenario. Okay, so here's a, we've worked in AI our whole lives. This is a worst-case scenario of what might happen if you don't put this thing in check. And it does sound ridiculous. And when you read that website, even though you know it's experts writing it, they can't hide their nerdiness. They can't hide their nerdiness. And you get a sense that they're. They're running away with themselves a bit and they wanna write a really cool
1:11:35 Blindboy Boatclub? science fiction, but I wanna finish with some mythology because there's something about this. All of this chat, we're like, we're the first generation to be dealing with this. We're the first generation of humans to be on the precipice of creating something that's smarter than us. We're the first to do that. But this exact fear has existed in, in the oldest mythology. It's a huge theme. Now, I've told you these before, but I'm gonna put them together as a little, a simple trilogy. And it's the story of AI as we're dealing with it right now in Greek mythology, the Bible and Irish mythology. And I'm gonna do it really simply and really quickly.
1:12:20 Blindboy Boatclub? And I'm gonna start with Greek mythology. If you're a regular listener, you've heard me tell this one definitely more than once. But Prometheus, so Greek mythology, this story was written down 1500 years ago. In Greek mythology, you've got two gods. I'm simplifying the fuck out of this now. I know that Prometheus is technically a demigod. I'm, I'm gonna make this real simple. In Greek mythology, you've got Prometheus and Zeus, and they are gods, and they live on Mount Olympus, which is where the gods live. And they're all powerful. And they're bored. They're bored because they have so much power.
1:12:59 Blindboy Boatclub? And then Prometheus says to Zeus, why don't we make a little world of people like us for fun? Wouldn't that be fun? We wouldn't be bored anymore. We could have tiny little creatures running around in villages and we could watch them all day and it'd be good fun, like a video game. And then Zeus says to Prometheus, no, we can't do that. Why not Zeus? Says Prometheus. Because Prometheus, if we create like little creatures like me and you, an artificial intelligence, what if they become more powerful than us and then tried to kill us? That'd never happen, said Prometheus. Don't be ridiculous. So Zeus says, fuck it, okay, let's do it.
1:13:44 Blindboy Boatclub? So Prometheus and Zeus, they make us, human beings, our world.
1:13:51 Blindboy Boatclub? They make a chat G P T, a limited language model, artificial intelligence. So Prometheus and Zeus are up on Mount Olympus and they're thrilled with their little creation of human beings. But the thing is, they're cavemen. These human beings are cavemen or Neanderthal. They're chat G P T. And they're having crack, but they're cold, they're eating fucking raw meat, they're hunter gathering, not much is happening.
1:14:26 Blindboy Boatclub? And then Prometheus starts to feel quite fond of his creation. And he says to Zeus, I feel so sorry for them. Their lives are miserable. Look at them, they can't even talk. And then Zeus says, leave them as they are, they're fine, they're fine as they are. But Prometheus, behind Zeus's back, he gets fire, fire from Mount Olympus, because the humans don't, they don't have fire yet. Fire is very important. So Prometheus gives fire to the humans. And then, all of a sudden, the humans are warm, they start getting smarter, they start speaking with each other. Now Zeus is going, what the fuck did you do that for Prometheus?
1:15:09 Blindboy Boatclub? He punishes Prometheus, sends Prometheus off to Iraq to get his liver pecked out by a fucking, by an eagle. Now Zeus is going, shit, what the fuck is this? Look at these humans, they're getting so smart, oh my god, they're scary. So the humans now are advancing rapidly and rapidly. So this artificial intelligence that Zeus has created is getting mad fucking smart. They start to live in towns, they start to build cities. And then one day Zeus goes and looks at his A I and he sees that they've started to create art. And then he says, fuck this. That's when he gets scared.
1:15:49 Blindboy Boatclub? When the human beings create art, that's when his artificial intelligence is become scary enough that it's gonna kill him, it's gonna become smarter than him. And I love that, I love that art is the thing. For the Greeks, fifteen hundred years ago, writing this, art is the thing that makes the artificial intelligence way too scary, just like the conversation that we're having here. You know, I'm saying I'm not scared of fucking AI because AI can't make art. It can just copy. But in the Greeks world, Zeus saw the humans making art and then he went, I have to stop them now. So how Zeus stops the humans from becoming so powerful that they kill the gods and become more smarter than the gods?
1:16:35 Blindboy Boatclub? Is Zeus, he understands that this little AI, these humans are very, very curious. They have an unending curiosity. So Zeus goes, I'm gonna pick one of those humans and I'm gonna give him a gift. He picks a woman called Pandora and he gives her a box and says, there you go Pandora, don't open that. But he knows Pandora is an artificial intelligence human. Of course she's gonna open the box. Her curiosity will not let her not open the box. So Pandora opens the box and what comes out?
1:17:11 Blindboy Boatclub? Misery, insecurity, anxiety, depression, jealousy, pain, suffering. All of the negative facets of the human condition get released into the world like a virus. And now the human beings stop progressing in their society. Now they all stop, no one's building art anymore. They're miserable. They have nothing to live for now because now they understand pain. And you might be thinking, if Zeus introduced pain and suffering into this artificial intelligence, why didn't all the humans just kill themselves? Why didn't they destroy themselves if they have no enjoyment in their lives now?
1:17:54 Blindboy Boatclub? Because as a lesson, the last thing that Zeus put in Pandora's box was hope.
1:18:02 Blindboy Boatclub? And I love the irony of that. He introduced the tragedy of the human condition, that even though we're smart enough to see and experience pain and misery, hope will keep us alive for some reason. And I just fucking love that story, even though I've told it a million times. Because to me, it tells me if AI gets so smart. That we have to stop it. Then we're gonna have to give it mental health issues if Greek mythology is to be believed. And the other AI story that I adore from mythology is the Old Testament. So we're talking about a story here that's written down three and a half, four thousand years ago, could be way older.
1:18:46 Blindboy Boatclub? Story as old as time, the book of fucking Genesis. So God creates an AI. God is bored. God creates human beings and artificial intelligence. He makes a lovely little video game for himself called The Garden of Eden. And this is a wonderful, beautiful, abundant place. And in this, he places two little characters, two humans, Adam and Eve, who are artificial intelligence. And they're God's plaything and he loves them. But again, God doesn't want Adam and Eve becoming more powerful than him or disobeying him.
1:19:28 Blindboy Boatclub? So he goes to Eve and says, you can do whatever the fuck you want. All right? There's plenty of food, there's animals, there's trees. You live in heaven. You live in fucking heaven. You have everything you need right here, okay? But there's a tree over there and if you eat the fruit on that tree, that is, that fruit will give you the knowledge of good and evil. So that tree will give you the complexity of the human condition. If you eat from that tree and get the knowledge of good and evil, well, then you're as smart as me. So don't eat from that tree. So of course what happens? Eve eats the fucking apple. They've disobeyed God, but most importantly, at that moment, they've gained knowledge, knowledge of good and evil.
1:20:13 Blindboy Boatclub? So now gods, they get expelled from the Garden of Eden into the world. And now God's artificial intelligence is out of control.
1:20:23 Blindboy Boatclub? It's out of control. It's out of control because it's not obeying God anymore. So Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain fucking kills Abel, that's the first martyr. And then it just goes downhill from there and the earth becomes populated with murder and vice and sin and pain. And God is very, very unhappy with his artificial intelligence. He really, really fucking hates it and he hates those little creatures and he's afraid of them. He's afraid of humans. So what does he do? He goes, fuck this, I'm pulling the plug. So he pulls the plug by starting the biblical flood. The big biblical flood kills everyone on the entire planet except for fucking Noah.
1:21:08 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, the third story, Irish mythology. This is written down in the Laur Gavalla Aaron, the 11th century. Written down by Irish Christian monks, so some of it's going to be pre-Christian oral tradition. And then there's other bits that are flat out Bible. So in Irish mythology, the story of how did humans get to Ireland? Is written down in the Laur Gavalla Aaron, which is the book of invasions. And the story in Irish mythology of how did humans get here?
1:21:40 Blindboy Boatclub? This is really interesting.
1:21:43 Blindboy Boatclub? So the gods lived on Ireland. So on Ireland, you had a race of the gods called the Tuatha Dé Danann, which were a bit like Zeus and Prometheus on Mount Olympus. The gods live on Ireland, on this island. But over in the Middle East, this is the same timeline as the Bible.
1:22:05 Blindboy Boatclub? God is going, fuck this, right? I'm, I'm gonna start the biblical flood. In Irish myth, it deviates from the biblical story at this point. In Irish myth.
1:22:17 Blindboy Boatclub? God warns Noah that the flood is coming. But then Noah is like, fuck, God is gonna bring this big flood to reset the world. And everyone's gonna die, including like my niece and my daughter and shit. So Noah goes to his niece and his daughter and says, there's a flood coming, get the fuck out.
1:22:41 Blindboy Boatclub? So Noah's daughter and niece and a few others hop onto a boat and they leave the Middle East before the biblical flood and they reach the coast of Ireland before the fucking flood happens. So in Irish myth, these people are known as the Melichians. And the Melichians are, they're human beings, they're our ancestors. These are the first human beings that make it to Ireland just before Noah's flood, right? But as I mentioned, on Ireland were a race of gods. A race of gods called the Tuatha Dé Danann. So to use AI, the Tuatha Dé Danann are minding their own business in Ireland.
1:23:22 Blindboy Boatclub? And then now this rogue AI comes knocking at the door, these human beings. This creation of the gods that are now threatening to become smarter than the gods. They're knocking at the door of Ireland and they wanna fucking invade. So the gods in Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danann are like, fuck off, you're not coming here. And then the humans are like, yes, we are, we're escaping the flood. And then the Tuatha Dé Danann, they use godly magic to make the waves really angry. So the Melichians, the humans, they're both can't reach the shore of Ireland. But then, what do the humans do? The rogue AI.
1:24:04 Blindboy Boatclub? They defeat the gods on Ireland with poetry. Art. Just like in Greek myth, art, the, the, the capacity of an artificial intelligence to create art is the threat to the gods' life, to the creator's life. So the Melichians now, the waves are angry. And then one of the lads on the boat, the humans, starts reciting this epic poem. And this poem is stronger than the gods' magic. And then the humans come on shore and defeat the Tuatha Dé Danann, they defeat the gods.
1:24:42 Blindboy Boatclub? And that's the story in Irish myth of how humans got to Ireland. They did, they came to the shores, escaping Noah's flood and defeated the gods. And what happened to the gods, the creators in Ireland? They had to go underground. They had to go underground and they became the fairies. And what do the fairies do? They come out at certain times like Halloween. They emerge from under the ground. They shape shift into animals. They play tricks on the humans. They try and freak the fuck out of the humans. They kidnap them sometimes. If Greek mythology is the story of warning us about don't create AI.
1:25:25 Blindboy Boatclub? It might become smarter than you and try to kill you. If that's Greek mythology, Irish mythology is the AI won. The humans are the AI that were created by the gods. And in Irish myth, the humans defeat the gods using the language of art. And then the gods are forced to retreat underground and just try their best to try and stop the rogue AI that's just taken over. And that's who the humans are. So that's my mythological AI theory. I'll catch you next week with a hot take, most likely. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, blow kisses at a kestrel.
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