Max Dunbar

The New York Times has dropped a freelance critic, author Alex Preston, for using AI in a book review.

It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

The New York Times launched an investigation, during which Preston admitted that he had used AI to assist writing the review and did not spot the sections that were pulled from the Guardian before submitting it. In a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Preston said that he was ‘hugely embarrassed’ and had ‘made a serious mistake’.

Allow me to be the first person to talk about artificial intelligence without having conniptions.

It seems to me that the very sensible objections to AI are mixed up with alarmism and a superstitious horror.

It’s natural to be wary of new technology, particularly any kind of artificial life. We have been wary of this since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the ‘Modern Prometheus’, about a scientist who created a new person out of spare parts to disastrous effect. (Prometheus of course was the mythical hero who stole fire from the gods and was punished by being chained to a rock where an eagle visited daily to eat his liver.)

AI may not attack you physically or eat your organs. But from The Terminator on we get the message: if you make technology that is too smart it will become smarter than you and take over. Some of AI’s crazier critics imply this has happened already.

Indeed Alex Preston, if he didn’t want to come clean, could perhaps have argued that the AI algorithm overpowered him and forced him to do its evil bidding.

Like I say there are sensible reasons to be worried about AI. I don’t want to read fiction and news reports written by machinery. I don’t want creatives to be forced out of work or have their art harvested for machine learning, with no renumeration given to the artists involved.

But I agree with Marie le Conte – she argued that ‘of course, AI can now write dogshit PR emails, because too many modern PR jobs involve little more than writing some dogshit emails.’ She goes on to say that ‘we’re spending too much time going ‘oh noooo AI is getting everywhere’ and not enough thinking ‘hang on, how is it that AI can so easily replace all these things”.

And she’s right. A lot of functional writing such as press releases, job descriptions, person specs, corporate policies, political manifestos and speeches could easily be written by AI. The world of entertainment and literature isn’t always as original as it could be. You don’t have to go far from Christopher Booker’s claim that there are only seven basic stories in the world to the prize list filled with average literary novels or the supermarket stand of samey crime thrillers. Times change, but the threat remains the same: received knowledge, overvalued beliefs, cliches of thought, an incuriosity about the world and our fellow creatures… these things will sleepwalk us into obsolescense.

I can assure you that this post was written without machine learning and originated entirely from my organic human brain… for what that’s worth.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson wrote: ‘Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again.’ He remembers that ‘we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.’

But Thompson’s druggy adventure took place in the wreckage of that broken wave. By 1971 the hopes and energies of the last decade had washed out. Polly Chalmers, a character in Stephen King’s Needful Things, escapes to San Francisco in that year because ‘summertime was supposed to be a love-in there.’ But her apartment building ‘was full of jimmied mailboxes and junkies who wore the peace-sign around their necks and, more often than not, kept switchblades in their scuffed and dirty motorcycle boots.’ Police offer no protection: ‘the cops had also missed the love-in, and were pissed about it.’

In Sophie Ward’s 1971 her character Andrea breaks into an Amsterdam theatre where two intellectual giants are debating: Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky. Andrea not only gets to watch the debate but enters into a long dialogue with them after the show. Andrea’s post-debate argument with these two heavy hitters is the only part of Our Better Natures that feels like a drag. It’s a drag for Andrea even, and she begins with rapt intentions: ‘She wanted to see these men who used their minds and bodies against the war in Vietnam. She wanted to craft her world with the immaculate language of rebellion. But on stage, she saw only the formal disagreements of academic semantics; Foucault’s talk of grids, Chomsky’s schemata.’

Even Foucault ripping off his clothes and donning a red nose can’t liven this up. The line of dialogue that resonated from these debate scenes (and don’t worry, the debate will end and Andrea’s story will get a lot more exciting) is Andrea saying: ‘So, I will tell you about wise men. What they do is important, those individual moments. Those moments are, really they are, all that is important about the wise men.’

Fiction made up of just the moment is hard going. Anyone can describe at length the life of one moment but it takes real skill to capture the rush of things happening, one after another, the rush of life.

Which brings us to the chapters about Phyllis Patterson, a housewife in rural Illinois. Andrea and the book’s other protagonist, the poet Muriel, are city people with a cause – fighting the war in Vietnam. Muriel, struggling with diabetes and a history of strokes, is even willing to go to prison after the march in Washington DC.

For Phyllis there are no abstractions, not a lot of passion, just duty and hard work, beginning with her childhood on a chicken farm. The only break from homeworking came during the Second World War, when Phyllis worked at a quarry: ‘she had been too busy to socialise after work, but in the break the girls got together with their paper-bag lunches. One of them had been a croupier in Las Vegas when the dam was being built. She taught Phyllis and the others what she knew about blackjack and poker, and it had been cards every day for a while. Only for pennies, but she had such memories of her heart racing and her head full of the trick of it all.’

It’s a real sadness to think that playing cards on lunch break could be the highlight of a person’s life but Phyllis’s story is compelling rather than gloomy. Her life too is haunted by war, in the more quotidian way that she has lost relatives to it. Her son is a Korea vet who marries and starts a family there. In the small community of White Plains Phyllis is stuck in the homespun web of old compromises, resentments, anecdotes and core beliefs.

But from unpromising circumstances Ward allows her characters to change, in the way of life, when you don’t know you’re changing or waking up. As Lara Feigel notes: ‘Certainly, the reverberations of revolution are felt by Phyllis, as she sees ‘how her life was part of these lives, that she existed in all these moments’, and learns to be both more powerful and more just.’ To more poignant effect, Ward charts the subtle deterioration of Muriel who fights against her body’s decline in the cause of art and peace. The light weave of all this is what makes Our Better Natures brilliant.

Greg Palast said that sometimes the protests that liberate us are quieter. Among other amazing things Our Better Natures demonstrates this to perfection.

If the doors to the Cheers bar stand always open, and everyone inside knows your name, then the gateway to the successor show is a little harder to navigate. This dialogue is from the first episode, where we meet Niles for the first time, having a coffee with Frasier. Niles is talking:

So I said to the gardener: Yoshi. I do not want a Zen garden in my backyard. If I want to rake gravel every 10 minutes to maintain my inner harmony I’ll move to Yokohama. Well this offends him, so he starts pulling up Maris’s prized Camellia’s by the handful. Well, I couldn’t stand for that, so, I marched right in the morning room and locked the door till he cooled down.

We fade in and it’s just Niles talking. He’s prolix, pompous and cowardly, and he seems detached from his older brother, who indeed seems bored by the anecdote. There’s a further exchange between them:

Niles: You know what I think about pop psychiatry.

Frasier: Yes, I know what you think about everything. When was the last time you had an unexpressed thought?

Niles: I’m having one now.

Perfect. But it could be a witty conversation from Wilde or Maupassant. It doesn’t feel like sitcom dialogue. Frasier isn’t going to talk down to you, nor make it easy for you. The title cards for this first episode – ‘The Job’, ‘The Brother’ – are all the orientation we’re getting. Longterm Cranians can amuse each other with the classic lines. Romping through the fens and spinnies. The Cranes of Maine have got your living brain. Catherine-of-Aragon! You are so that other one! And I’m keeping the jewellery!

First-timers are confronted with the bewildering world of upscale Seattle. Everything is unique, bespoke, hand-tailored. Opera, chamber music, the wine club, the Empire Club, Coco Chanel sofas, staffed homes, Henry VII tea sets, goatskin shoes, Le Cigare Volant, Chez Henri. People wear evening dress even if they are only going over to Frasier’s apartment. Even Martin puts on a shirt even though he’s only going to sit in his chair all day. The Drs Crane seem spookily in sync with one another – ‘Do I hear cathedral bells?’ Niles says to Frasier, when Frasier has taken delivery of a pair of Italian shoes so exclusive that the bells of the shoemaker’s Italian village ring on the occasion that he finishes a pair.

And yet – beginning with the intrusion of Martin’s chintzy chair into Frasier’s carefully curated apartment – this world is constantly being punctured and interrupted by reality. Throughout the series Frasier must battle his grown-up school bullies, messy tradesmen, noisy neighbours, radio pranksters, rival celebrities, unscrupulous businessmen, incompetent staff, and what he considers a rude and uneducated public. (It’s interesting that Frasier’s radio show is most popular not with Seattle’s elites but ordinary folks – sous chefs, secretaries, security guards, even prison inmates.) Frasier and Niles throw enormous grand society events but most of them end in disaster – the venue erupting in flames, or the Crane brothers being arrested for murder. The rest of America is always threatening to cramp Frasier’s style. The Atlantic‘s TV writers hit on the show’s democratic genius:

I also think it’s powerful that the butt of the jokes are the protagonists. Rewatching Seinfeld or Friends, those shows also have their own constrained universes, but I don’t love that they tend to make the people outside the universe the butt of the jokes. You’ve got the core people. And then you have the side characters and dating interests who cycle through their lives. And typically, it’s those outsiders who get the brunt of the jokes. They’re expendable and therefore the most mockable, which is not a great dynamic.

But on Frasier, the butt of the jokes is almost always Frasier or Niles themselves. It’s making fun of the protagonist, and there’s something kind of lovely about that in its way. The show is always punching up, you know, and so it doesn’t have a lot of the uncomfortable dynamics of insiders and outsiders and making the fundamental assumption that some sitcoms do, which is that the outsiders are always the ones who should be mocked.

Quite so. But we also never get the sense that the Crane brothers are just pretentious fops to laugh at (though they certainly are that) nor elitists out of touch with ordinary America (though they certainly can be). I don’t know whether Frasier could be made today. So much of twenty-first century politics is based around rage against this or that elite. It’s a nice little cottage industry for people who are angry because they think the wrong wing of the elite is in charge. Or angry because they feel they’re stuck on the outside looking in.

Frasier and Niles are absurd but never less than human. The genius of the show is that it allowed the characters to change. Norm and Cliff will be sitting on their barstools until they die, but in Frasier’s world you’re allowed to pursue a happy ending, though there’s no guarantee you’ll get one. Martin’s arc is the most rewarding to watch. His wife is dead, his career ended by a robber’s bullet, he is catapulted into the charity of his son and now a hostage in Frasier’s incomprehensible world. In one particularly affecting scene, he attends a parole hearing for David Hicks, the convenience-store bandit who shot him in the hip. He doesn’t condemn the shooter but cannot bring himself to forgive either. ‘I have nothing to say,’ Martin tells the panel. We zoom in on his anguished face, a man stuck in a miserable lacuna, seeing the way through but not able to take it.

(One macabre diversion for me, rewatching Frasier, was that I had read Caroline Fraser’s Murderland, her study of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest from which the Cranes hail, and it got me noticing all the dark little details in Frasier itself: the Weeping Lotus mystery, the confession that gets mixed up with Martin’s song lyrics, Roz finds a detached ear while litter picking on community service… and at the end of the show Maris kills her lover with a crossbow, a bizarre storyline that somehow seems fitting for her character and the series.)

Frasier and Martin are at each other’s throats many times in the early seasons. The show focuses on the sheer difficulty of maintaining relationships. The difficulty of ending relationships. The end of Niles’s marriage takes place over three intense seasons. He leaves her, he goes back to her, she sleeps around on him, she tries to reconcile, he’s divorcing her – it takes forever, a long-drawn out process, not a simple cutting off. The flashback episode ‘You Can Go Home Again’ gives us Frasier’s early days in Seattle, where he is more or less estranged from his father and brother. Their interactions in the present day show us that he now has a good relationship with both, even though it doesn’t feel that way a lot of the time.

Change is slow. Incremental. It happens and you don’t notice it. Until you do. When we first meet Niles he is always immaculately dressed, three-piece suit and tie, he is literally a belt-and-braces man. When he gets together with Daphne we can see him relax into ordinary sweaters and jeans. Frasier does wonders with costume. The near-end episode ‘Crock Tales’ takes us backwards in increments, through the last eleven years of the show. The changing styles as we go from 2004 to 1993 underscored for me what I’d believed about this show and Cheers – the two together form a kind of social novel.

While Niles, Martin and Daphne ride off into the sunset of their happy endings, Frasier finds himself ageing, alone and running out of time in Seattle. In his way he’s always tried to help people, and becomes a catalyst for happiness in others, not a happy and completed man in himself. Frasier’s saving grace is that he is always open to change and risk, he’s happy to keep moving, keep living, dedicated to the pursuit. At the end he quotes Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

For me these lines are better.

I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met