AI is coming for artists

It’s a famous theme in science fiction: the idea that, one day, humanity and the thinking machines will somehow go to war. It’s the narrative spine of The Terminator films. It’s implied in 2001, A Space Odyssey. You can find it in Neuromancer, The Hyperian Cantos, Ex Machina, The Creator and I, Robot (the Asimov stories and subsequent film). In one of the fundamental texts of sci-fi, Frank Herbert’s Dune, this apocalyptic conflict is given a name: the ‘Butlerian Jihad’.

Personally, I’ve always dismissed the concept of Butlerian Jihad as fanciful, even as I accept that Artificial General Intelligence – machines as smart as the best of us – is coming at us fast. And yet in recent weeks I’ve started to wonder.

To understand why, we need to recap what’s been happening in AI-world in those recent weeks. As a writer I’ve been paying particular attention to more literary AIs.