Show me the money, tech bro

 It's no compliment to know your book has been used to train an AI machine. It feels dismaying, infuriating and gut wrenching.

 'My book has been dismantled, broken up for parts and sold to a wrecking yard.'

'It feels like someone has broken into my house and stolen my stuff.'

'Fucking livid!' 

'Why bother creating anything, if these guys are just gonna steal it for dollars and get away with it?'

'I wanted to vomit when I found out.' 

These are very real responses from Australian authors, as Meta scrapes our books and songs to train their AI Llama3. In January, the world was alerted to Meta's use of pirated copies of books and academic papers. Not long after, The Atlantic published a search option where you could check if your book, song, artwork or academic paper had been scraped by Meta. It's here. One of my books is in there. Fucking Facebook, just like Google, are still being evil.

So ... this week in Australia, the Productivity Commission released a report on 'unlocking the benefits of AI' and suggested that we exclude the Copyright Act for fair dealing with AI companies. 'Fair dealing' means sacrificing our books and songs to the machines. There has been an uproar from creative workers because our government is basically giving a license to mega rich AI companies to steal our books, songs and art without paying us a cent in royalties.

I've had many philosophical conversations recently with artists, writers and academics. We are entering a new age where some creatives are using AI to make really interesting work and others are being pummeled by Copilot's idiotic suggestions and bad memes, while Google's dodgey AI just makes shit up:

(I managed to track down the 'source' of this lie to a 2023 Classics conference where someone gave a paper on Jane Austen, claiming that she considered Wollstonecraft as literary parentage. So, for Google's AI it therefore follows that Wollstonecraft is actually Austen's biological mother.) When accused of lying, the chat bot will come back with the grovelling apology of a problematic drinker. Promises to do better follow.

I teach in areas of English Literature and History. Call me a Luddite but I will die on the hill of arguing that to write an essay or short story is to think through a problem. It is not about getting high distinctions for typing an elegant prompt to ChatGPT. It's about writing through a problem. Mary Wollstonecraft  thought through a problem when she wrote A Vindication for the Rights of Women. Descartes thought through a problem and came up with I think, therefore I am. Both of these thinkers did not need Meta or Copilot to nut out their argument in 2 seconds. Slow work is where great creative breakthroughs happen.

What is happening now feels like a dilution of our brains and our language and it comes at the expense of critical thinking and people who create art, music and literature.

There is hope though, at least in this nook of the woods. Maybe work written by humans will soon be worth more than AI slop. At the moment we are being fleeced by out of control tech billionaires who buy governments and dictate international policy. It's a terrible analogy ... but like free-range, hormone-free chicken, perhaps the product of careful work and thinking can win out in this situation and be worth more.

 The Australian Productivity Commission has proposed to allow big tech companies access to copyrighted Australian content to build their artificial intelligence platforms without compensating creators, like this is a good idea to sell out our national cultural canon! At the moment there are class actions by authors in the US against Meta illegally scraping their books. In Australia, there are no laws yet to prevent this kind of behaviour and the Productivity Commission appears to think it is all cool. So ... crickets.

Valley of the Giants

This is a poem by Dorothy Hewett, an esteemed Western Australian poet with legendary status in these parts.

THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS

In the burnt-out trunk
in the karri forest
myself my little sister
hand in hand
one dark one fair
one bonnetted one
with a nimbus
of platinum hair
like lost children
out of a gothic tale
behind us his akubra hatted
head
sprouting unseen antlers
our father the wood demon
growing out of a tree
snapped up by a box brownie
the 60 year old negative
exposed like a parable
the dark father
the dark child
subdued and powerful
the blonde
in her white dress
blazing into the light
transitory
as a cabbage moth
alighting for an instant
in the forest

those judging figures
orchestrate the scene
rising out of the litter
on the forest floor
implacable as horned owls
the giant tree's fallen down
the children grown
the tragic rotting order overthrown. 

Winter solstice part 3

 

They drove through the night to Ellis Creek Road. Jayden looked over to Matt as he was driving. They turned into an orange gravel road. It was jarrah forest, deep and funky with fungi. He could smell the damp settling in for the night after a day’s meagre sunlight. ‘Close now, yeah?’ He asked Matt. The forest was crowding them now. Jayden could feel it closing around the car. Forget Matt’s bikie family, the trees were enough. They stopped the car at the pine plantation growing in the middle of the jarrah forest.

‘This is the spot,’ said Matt.

‘Hey, we’ve got these,’ Jayden handed Matt an MDMA tab. ‘Special occasion. Let’s go picking.’ The two young men stuffed some beers, rollie papers, water and plastic bags into their backpacks. Jayden locked his car and they walked into the pine forest.

The moon was fully over the trees now and making shadows of them. Their boots trod quiet upon the pine needles. Snuffling of roosting cockatoos and the scampering of critters up trees. A bird flew overhead and screeched at four points of the compass. ‘Owlet nightjar,’ said Jayden. ‘How do you know that shit?’ Said Matt. Jayden couldn’t explain that. Too many references to his Mum’s knowledge would be getting weird now.

‘Do you think anyone’s out here?’ said Matt. ‘… oh hey hey here we go, Jay!’ Matt’s whole dank demeanour changed into a capering Catweasle. In the groove of the trees, he shone his phone torch on a grove of tiny mushrooms. They poked out of the pine needles like tiny fists, all yellowy and nippled in their centres.

As they both stared at the psilocybin mushrooms, Jayden felt his trip coming on. It was almost as though by looking at them, they communicated their properties to him. He bent down to one of them and tapped its cap to loosen the spores into the earth before he picked it. His back teeth began thrumming as the MDMA kicked in. He closed his fingers around the stem of the mushroom. He could feel the muscles in his crouch and the moon’s benevolence. He knew the owlet nightjar was watching him. His balls were tingling and the forest was saying, ‘Best leave now, son!’ The mushroom screamed as he broke it.

Jayden picked just one magic mushroom. The noise of his plastic bag in the moonlight, as he dragged it out of his backpack and put the mushroom inside, felt deafening. Matt was running between channels of pine trees and shouting in a kind of whisper. ‘Oh my God, Jay, Jay! There’s fucking heaps of them.’

Then Jayden saw lights and he wasn’t sure if the lights were behind his own eyes or in front of them. But then Matt was running towards him, his backpack jogging on his back and a white plastic shopping bag swinging to one side. ‘Turn off your light man,’ he said. ‘Got plenty anyway. Turn off your light.’

Matt was on his own trip, Jayden realised. But turning off their phone torches was probably a good idea. They walked together up a slope in the pine plantation until they got to a peak where they could see down to a water reservoir.

Jayden tried. ‘You know Matt, we’ve been mates since like forever.’

The full moon lit up the water.

‘What the fuck,’ Matt said. ‘Dad killed someone. He’s going to jail, Jay. He killed someone.’ Matt began to weep.

Jayden put his arm around his friend’s shoulders. ‘Mum will really like these shrooms too,’ he said and then remembered that night out poaching, when he felt scared and small and cold and his Mum was ranting about poetry or something and about the end of the world.

 

 

 

 

Psychogeography of the inlet

 Psychogeography is a term that emerged in the 1950s and its practice is great for landscape writers and artists:  "the effect of a geographical location on the behaviour and emotions of individuals." Until a few years ago, I was completely unaware of the word but had been thinking about the concept for decades. Writing about people of the sea and islands will do that.

"Unfold a map of London, place a glass rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw around its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go ... footage as footage." Robert MacFarlane, A Road of One's Own.

In an urban context, this exercise forces a re estimation of our surroundings - what is accessible and what is off limits: fences, the concept of private property, the absoluteness of a stoic brick wall, drains and public thoroughfares. Really, it's a form of re-mapping or even anti-mapping. It breaks us out of the unaware carpark and footpath thinking that we have when heading down to the shops.

The reason why this is coming up for me right now is that the inlet broke its sand bar out to the sea last night. Here is a photo from today and you can check out photos from yesterday in my previous posts.

You can see the footprints from where Selkie was wading out to catch a stick that I'd thrown for her last night, those trees then a pretty reflection on the glassed-off water. We have a beach again!

For the last month, we haven't had a beach. As the inlet filled with river water threading through a system of thousands of square kilometres, places to walk became scarce. We are in the bush here: there are few tracks or roads. The inundation began to feel oppressive. On land, ancient marri trees leaned over us, blocking out the sun and keeping us cold and the solar panels failed us. The bush became more dark and damp. I grew up in sand dune, coastal heath country. We always had an horizon, a big sky. Living in the forest takes some getting used to.

From a person unwittingly writing about the psychogeography of islands, I became a person writing about the psychogeography of inlets and how they are kinda negative images of each other. An inlet is a body of water surrounded by land after all. My feelings come back to the original definition of psychogeography: "the effect of a geographical location on the behaviour and emotions of individuals."

Now this is cool. Last night, I strapped the camera trap to a tree at water level to capture the water as it receded. There were only three night time infra red photos. It was glassed off so the waves didn't trigger the motion sensor. What triggered it was the water rat, a marsupial better known as a Rakali, or in the Noongar language a Ngurju.

The automaton and the writer child

 Re my last post, this is interesting: I love this video

Desdemona, or how to make another version of Carver

 Recently I did a presentation on form and genre in literature. Now before you shrivel up and die on me, I'll just say, it was terribly exciting. So bear with me because I'm about to inflict it on you now - it's also a lead-in to my latest published story.

Raymond Carver's book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a classic in the short story collection genre. What he does is so hard and fast, mostly set in the domestic sphere. Carver's stories typically depict the cosy household and then he proceeds to smash it up with the basest instincts of humanity. His style has been largely credited to his editor, Gordon Lish who was famous for his sculpting of Carver's works. Most editors stay behind the scenes. Lish did not, as he described how he'd cut out the last paragraph of a Carver story, to give us a single line, a devastating end to a story cut short ... like a life. Questions follow any ending of a Carver story. A quick look at Carver's book covers for What We Think About illustrates the domestic weird of his work:

 

 

So his story So Much Water So Close To Home, in the above mentioned collection, depicts a wife recounting her feelings after her husband went fishing with his mates on a remote river. They drink whiskey on the first night, they play cards, they hang out. The next morning the men go fishing in the river and they find a woman, a murdered woman, in the river while they are fishing.

This is written from the wife's point of view, and I find it interesting that in Raymond Carver's muscular, masculine form of writing, he quite often does this. What the men do next has spawned several movies and songs - yeah form and genre, told ya.

They tied the dead woman's foot to a tree branch in the river and then they went on fishing. She was on ice, they thought. No point turning back now, they thought. Turns out it was the best fishing trip they'd ever had. It was like mother luck had struck them. Truly amazing. They took lots of photos of them holding up the giant trout. Giant grins. Two days later, they hiked up back to civilization and called the police. The next day, their grinning fishing photos would be on the front page of the papers. Outrage ensued.

This is not a true story, or not as far as I know. Maybe Carver read something in an obscure paper, or maybe he just made it up. But the reality of this situation cuts through to us and that's why his fiction works. We all know how it could happen. And we all know how, as a wife or normal human being, we'd be thinking what the actual fuck? And how do I even know you anymore?

Not long after the So Much Water So Close To Home writer died (1988) ,the Australian songwriter Paul Kelly brought out the song Everything's Turning to White (1989), depicting the wife and her feelings about her husband, basing it on Carver's story. Once again, it's written by a man from a woman's perspective:

 Paul Kelly also wrote the music score for the film Jindabyne, another rendition of Raymond Carver's tale. Jindabyne came out in 2006 and was directed by a man (Ray Lawrence) and narrated by a female lead. The film Jindabyne is based on So Much Water So Close To Home but dwells on unique Australian anxieties. The woman in the river is Aboriginal and there are already racial tensions in the small town. Catholic and Protestants, mental illness and class divides all play out here. It's a drowned town, where the whole town had to move to high water after the hydro scheme took over. In other words, there's so much water, so close to home.

When recently, I was asked to take part in anthology responding to Paul Kelly songs, my brain went in all sorts of strange places. Road trips when there were tape players in cars, that time I was an asshole at one of his concerts and getting naked to swim downstream before said concert in front of a lot of tourists, long conversations about his songs ...

When asked whether or not I could do this, all I could think about was Paul Kelly's song Desdemona and how I've always thought Desdemona had a bad rap and how this story connected with Shakespeare's Othello and then back to Raymond Carver again. 

So here it is, another version of an old story. In this book Minds Went Walking, I tell the story of a young woman who is married to a jealous man. It's always bothered me that Othello is portrayed as a victim of Iago and his situation. This story Desdemona is told by a woman from a woman's point of view.