Luke Holloway, better known as Lewky, writes songs which are based on actual text exchanges between people on dating apps. In his videos, Lewky also dresses up as both parties in the conversations to great comedic effect. While it isn’t his most famous video, my favourite is a song where a man is trying to figure whether he is talking to a bot pretending to be a person on Tinder. Typically, on social media, middle-aged and older men flirt without suspicion to the most obvious pornbots. In this video though, the man tries to test the bot by saying, “Say potato, Elizabeth”. But Elizabeth (Lewky dressed up hilariously in discount robot gear with a silver-painted face and a blonde wig) relentlessly trots out scripted lines like “Hey, you are my first match” and “Why are you on Tinder?” The short video ends with the protagonist saying “say potato” with increasing desperation and Eliza-bot saying Ahaha. The Ahaha is so beautifully bot approximating human that it reminds of the priceless insult in the children’s show The Bad Guys where Shark pretends to be a killer robot and Snake asks why he sounds like a microwave oven.
These last few weeks, many people wanted a shibboleth like “say potato” to check if what they were looking at was human, bot or microwave oven. First, it came out that there was significant suspicion that the Commonwealth Short Story winner for the Caribbean region, Jamir Nazir’s The Serpent in the Grove (which was published in Granta), was generated by AI. There is no reliable way of establishing the truth about AI usage but plenty of readers have pointed to ChatGPT symptoms in the story, such as a lot of repetition and the infamous “not x, but y” sentence structure. One of my favourite responses to this situation came from the Booker Prize-winning Jamaican author Marlon James who has written book after book without being stuck in any box the world has for him. For instance, he has a complicated novel notionally about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, a Caribbean Gothic novel and also multiple fantasy series. James, now widely accepted as a brilliant blessing to literature, had his first novel rejected 78 times. In response to this suspicious Serpent situation, James posted on Facebook: “Forget AI for a minute. A story won an International Competition with a line like this: ‘The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.’ Maybe her name was Elizabeth.”
The Commonwealth Foundation is continuing to promote the story regardless.
Honestly though, the Commonwealth and Jamir Nazir had a soft landing. That’s because in the same week, we were all shocked by Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk. At an event in Poland, Tokarczuk said that she had been exploring AI to write her latest novel. She said she had used the paid model of an LLM (large language model) to ask questions like what songs her protagonists could have been listening to at a dance a couple decades ago. She apparently said, “Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’”
Understandably, many, many people were appalled not least because Tokarczuk had uttered beatitudes like “perhaps a symbiotic future and cooperation with artificial intelligence will help authors in the future.” Background music: lalalala. Later after the shock had run around the world saying “did you hear Olga ne kya kiya”, she issued a statement to LitHub saying that she uses whatever LLM she uses only for research and not for writing. This short statement then has a plot twist that her darling AI couldn’t have thought up. She wrote, “I am sometimes inspired by dreams, but before this sentence too is cornered and torn to pieces by the experts, I hasten to report that they are my own dreams.” Oho, Olga ji.
Part of the irritation that people have with this situation is that it is being served to us as inevitable. As if it is not actually possible to write a novel or a short story without using an LLM. Many, many writers joke that the best part of writing is having finished it. Yet the impulse to create beauty persists. At this moment a seven-year-old somewhere near you is writing their first poem or drawing their first colour pencil drawing of a dog. That poem is adding to the grain-by-grain arrangement of the beach of human dreams—aka art. Your running in the park every morning may look like it has nothing to do with Sebastian Sawe running a marathon under 2 hours for the first time in history. Yet your thump-thump-thumping around that cracked track is your tribute to the human enterprise of wonderful, pointless running. Using AI to write a short story seems as pointless to me as making a Sawe-bot run a one-hour marathon. That bot doesn’t salute your running in sweat and slush. Your sweat and slush doesn’t salute the Sawe-bot. That seven-year-old, you, Sawe and Marlon James are running in a common dream.
Artists using AI are mimicking the no-limits, all shortcuts, everyone out-of-my-way capitalist model. The same model that is so gleeful about the pyramid scheme that they are selling to all of us if it is inevitable. Is it? Can we not write or research or make goofy memes on Photoshop without sucking up all the water in the world? In 2023, the International Energy Agency estimated that data centres around the world used up 140 billion litres of water (just for cooling not for the much, much more thirsty task of running the centres). It is so easy for billionaires to stroll in and say that a data centre is somehow going to bring jobs, and stroll away in a couple of years, leaving behind literal and metaphorical scorched-earth. At that point, they can say “those were our dreams, oops”.
Hearing the news that a massive data centre is coming to Hyderabad reminded me of an old friend. Twenty years ago, during a summer, temperatures were estimated to hit close to 50 degrees Celsius and back then it was considered a rare level of heat for anywhere in India and certainly dangerous for humans. My friend Basava was working in an NGO that helped children who lived on the streets and in slums. Basava ran around in the early weeks of that summer renting small spaces and stocking them with fans, water and TVs so that the children had a place to get away from the sun. That summer he and his colleagues kept the children they worked with safe and replete with cartoons and fluids. In 2026, we are supposed to accept 50 degrees as inevitable summer. As the giants plan their new data centres all over India, Hyderabad is projected to have a water shortage of 900 million litres a day in the next two years. Time to say baked potato.
Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories.