Shreya Sen-Handley | Of Artifice, Artificial Imbecility & Midlife Joy

AI (or eh-aye as Boris Johnson says it, almost like an endearment) is dangerous in ways we are only beginning to realise. Not only does it steal our sweat, blood, tears, and inspiration, it muddles our identity.

As everyone knows, especially creatives, the stealing of one’s hard-wrought work by AI has absolutely no upsides, as seductive as its promises to ameliorate might seem. It ravages human imagination and agency, even as it decimates jobs, and ultimately, the global economy, leading to the bleakest future for humanity, the darkening of which we can already see.

I recently uncovered another tentacle of AI’s insidious incursion into our lives, which left me as unsettled as does its untrammelled appropriation of our creative output. What shook me particularly were the creeping changes it’s been making to my identity.

Alerted by a friend that it had changed my age online, I had a peek, and discovered it had added a couple of years. If you think it was my vanity that was knocked, it was, but mildly. The real worry was that this was just the tip of the iceberg, and that AI is sneaking in further misinformation about us all, like its routine replacement of well-established historical facts with hogwash. And sure enough, I found it had been hard at work on my bio.

It claimed my parents were Amartya and Suchitra Sen! Which only amused me till a second go on Google produced a different set of parents with the same surname, though the wrong ones again! Amartya is a distant cousin of my paternal grandfather’s I’m told, but Suchitra I haven’t the remotest ties to (unless you’re playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and count having interviewed her daughter and granddaughters for television as a link). Also, whilst my knowledge of society gossip is negligible, S&A have never been romantically connected as far as I know! Fake news, eh? Aye, it is!

Most of all, although funny on the face of it, AI’s attempt to erase my lineage, sweeping from view my recently deceased and much-missed father, not to mention my mother’s still vital presence (and both a generation younger than S&A), is no joke.

I suspect the confusion over my age arose from a column in which I’d written about approaching 50 when I was two years away, though I’d clearly indicated it wasn’t imminent. But AI, in its assumption of superiority, and feeble grasp of both facts and language, either misunderstood what I’d said, or simply not read far enough into it (of that, humans are now equally culpable, our attention span so miniscule, blink and you miss it).

But why dish out such tosh about my heritage? Quite possibly because it hasn’t any Sens(e)! And how could it, when it isn’t sentient? Yet the sentient can be immeasurably stupid too, and when we have such a surfeit of it, why artificially induce more? Not Artificial INTELLIGENCE then, Artificial Imbecility is what it should be named!

Musing over a second childhood, as was the plan for this article, will undoubtedly also be misconstrued (which means I’m either cocking a snook at AI, or cutting my nose off to spite my face)! Be assured that if I’m Googled following the publishing of this column, you’ll find me exponentially matured, like a reverse Dorian Gray, with decades added to my age online while advancing a year at a time — as one does — in real life. I’ll take that risk, however, as I want to explore our rowing back to infancy, with the rewards of an early wallowing, even as I run out of column space!

When we say someone is in their second childhood, we’re generally disapproving; suggesting they are skittish, self-absorbed and unschooled in social niceties, like a toddler let loose in a cake factory, embracing the sugar rush overtaking him. But to me it implies a return to an uninhibited, wide-eyed, and effusive state, drilled out of most of us by later childhood.

Yet, why wait to reclaim it till our dotage, if we can sink back in, in middle-age, when society shifts its scrutiny (especially if you’re a woman and a non-celeb like me — not being S&A’s progeny actually!). And on our own terms, naturally, not impelled by brain disease. If we could all revive an unconstrained yet socially responsible avatar of ourselves as children, besotted with life’s wonders and not afraid to show it, wouldn’t that be a boon, not merely to us, but our artificially constricted world? Hadn’t Will Wordsworth espoused exactly this? I myself have seen signs of a second childhood dawning, in my own increasing emotionality, and I welcome it.

In London to celebrate my birthday last week, I felt my high spirits rebounding. At a superb staging of Paddington the Musical, I laughed and cried openly (though quietly, not wanting to draw the attention of fellow spectators just after achieving invisibility)! Thereafter, I messily, and with great enjoyment (in the mess as much as the taste), ate some oozingly delicious pastry (a marmalade sandwich would’ve been more in keeping, I agree). Dazzled by the vibrancy of the Frida Kahlo exhibition a day later, I was struck by how lovely more of this could be — an unfiltered receiving of stimuli with a response that’s as free.

In regaining our innate spontaneity, we would be taking back the sunlit ground lost to us by the demands of artifice. Eh? Aye!