Real People

There’s a lot of concern about AI-generated scripts and movies, but consider that the characters have to come from somewhere. As they say, truth is always stranger (and more interesting) than fiction. I can only suppose this is why I’ve found that AI is rather bad at manufacturing all the minute details of a fully-fledged person, even over the space of a brief scene.

My experience with the admittedly free ChatGPT has been that it might give me a few pretty words but it doesn’t understand or explain humanity and its motivations very well. If you want a scene with any depth, it still requires real people (me, in this case) describing real people.

And while I admit I sometimes use known actors to populate a given scene as I write, every circumstance and public novelty around me becomes fodder for the pen. And this, the peripheral vision of the people-watchers who write, is something AI can’t obtain even from analyzing every word ever written, from the Icelandic sagas to the vast content on Newspapers.com. It can’t discern the intangible meaning of an unremarkable moment.

Here is an example. Back in 1981 when I was the local ingénue for a hot minute in our small Oregon town, I enjoyed singing light opera and show tunes wherever I happened to be, even on my solo shift at a place called Stoopid’s Hot Dogs. (Loved that job, and those dogs are the ones, in my opinion, by which all dogs are measured.)

One day a man, probably in his mid-twenties, came in and sat for awhile in our tiny shop, for which the only furniture was a hard wooden bench set against the wall, not four feet from the counter. No idea whether he ordered anything. I don’t even know if we spoke at all–he just wrote in his notebook and I sang. Obviously it struck me at the time because even though I remember little of that job some 45 years later, I still wonder what that guy wrote. In the same circumstance now I might compare the vocal freedom of the young to the inevitable churning of life that turns us all into sausages for sale.

You might imagine a future where AI analyzes facial expressions and the collection of circumstances around us, but it will always miss the heart and soul of such a moment. My findings over the course of this project is that it can barely keep up with people’s names, sex, the items they have, among other key details.

Hollywood being a fickle mistress, perhaps my POV has little meaning and all of our theatrical releases will soon be populated only by manufactured SimOnes. But I’m guessing there will always be an audience for real actors just like there are always audiences for stage plays.

As far as this author’s most recent human conquest, last month in my heavily-researched Charles II chapter I decided to have him play a period guitar. Enter Lauren of Claythorpe Music and everything I needed to know about period instruments and songs. As a bonus she also discussed Playford’s Dancing Master which I felt compelled to mention in the scene in an appropriately mocking gesture, per the info I got from Lauren.

Since the king has a guitar in his Council Chamber, he obviously needs a guitar tech. I was happy to name this character Claythorpe and give him several bits of amusing business. The jury’s still out on whether I will make him a her for Lauren’s sake, but in either case I hope she would be pleased.

Side note: I suppose these days when anyone including a passing Google Street View car can capture your likeness, it’s not such a novel idea that any of us might find ourselves in a meme somewhere, either as image, statement, or passing reference. But if you don’t want to end up in someone’s script or novel, it’s best to avoid writers and their muses altogether, especially on YouTube where we troll for information.

Like AI, we are greedy for details.