Organic Data Processing

The Soul Was Always a Remix

This morning I asked a machine whether an article about machines and human creativity was worth writing. I’d love to tell you I did it ironically, as some kind of clever framing device, but I didn’t. I did it the way I do most things these days, sat in a cave in rural Spain with the coffee going cold, wanting a second opinion before I committed a week of my life to something. The machine said yes, with caveats, and annoyingly the caveats were good. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about that, which is probably the most honest place to start.

Before anyone reaches for the pitchforks, let me declare my interests, or rather my lack of them. I don’t earn a penny from my writing. Nobody pays me for these words, no client is going to swap me for a monthly subscription, and no gallery is going to take my canvases off the wall, because I’ve never had any canvases on any walls. There was a time when I’d have told you every word I put out into the world was human, hand-reared and home-grown. I’m less sure of that now. I use AI, and not always as lightly as I’d like to pretend, and when I’m honest about it, it’s simply the newest voice in a very long queue of them… teachers, sergeants, the authors on my parents’ bookshelves, every columnist whose rhythm I ever pinched without asking. The judgement stays with me, and so does the blame when I get it wrong. That gives me an unusual seat in this particular fight. I have no money on the table, which means I can say a few things that the people with money on the table can’t afford to.

So let me get the honest bit out of the way first, because it deserves to go first. The illustrators, translators, voice actors and copywriters who are furious about generative AI are not, for the most part, suffering from wounded vanity. Their work was scraped without permission, fed into products they never agreed to help build, and those products are now being sold back into the very markets they rely on to pay the rent. If a stranger let himself into your shed every night, borrowed your tools, set up a rival business at the end of your street and then undercut your prices, nobody would accuse you of ego for being cross about it. In my old line of work we had a word for that sort of arrangement, and it wasn’t “innovation.”

That argument is solid, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But here’s the thing I keep tripping over. Most of the noise isn’t coming from those people. It’s coming from the comment sections, from people who have never sold a sketch or a short story in their lives, and who talk about the human “soul” in art with a certainty I’ve only otherwise heard from evangelists and estate agents. And when I listen closely to that outrage, it doesn’t sound like people defending their livelihoods. It sounds like people defending a story about themselves. So let’s have a look at the story.

The Lone Genius Was Always a Fairy Tale

The story we tell about art goes roughly like this. A sensitive soul sits alone in a garret, suffers beautifully, and pulls something entirely new out of the ether, untouched by anything that came before. It’s a lovely story, and it’s mostly nonsense. It was largely cooked up by the Romantics a couple of hundred years ago, who needed artists to be prophets rather than tradesmen, and we’ve been dining out on it ever since. Before that, making art was a job. Renaissance painters ran workshops full of apprentices who learned by copying the master until they could paint like him, and then painted large chunks of his commissions for him. The young Leonardo was one of those apprentices in Verrocchio’s workshop, knocking out an angel in the corner of somebody else’s picture. Nobody thought this was a scandal. It was how the trade worked.

Shakespeare, the patron saint of human genius, borrowed his plots from almost anywhere he could find them. The history plays lean heavily on Holinshed’s Chronicles, and the famous barge speech in Antony and Cleopatra follows Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch so closely that you can lay the two side by side and watch him tidy up another man’s prose into verse. We don’t call him a plagiarist. We call him the greatest writer in the English language, and we’re right to, but we should at least be honest about what the job involved.

Music is worse, or better, depending on where you’re sitting. The blues was built on what musicians call floating verses, lines and couplets that drifted from singer to singer and song to song without anyone owning them. A generation of British rock bands then took that commons, turned the volume up and sold it back to the world, sometimes with a credit and sometimes without one until the lawyers caught up. Led Zeppelin eventually settled with Willie Dixon over “Whole Lotta Love.” T.S. Eliot put the whole thing rather neatly back in 1920 when he wrote that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” The line was later polished into “good artists copy, great artists steal” and pinned on Picasso, most famously by Steve Jobs, although there’s little evidence Picasso ever said it. Which means the most quoted line about artistic theft has very probably been stolen itself. You couldn’t make it up, although apparently somebody did.

What Memory Actually Does

If the lone genius is a fairy tale, the next refuge is memory. Fine, people say, we borrow, but we borrow through our own experience, and our experience is ours. That sounds solid until you look at what memory actually does. In 1932 a Cambridge psychologist called Frederic Bartlett asked his participants to read an unfamiliar Native American folk tale, “The War of the Ghosts,” and then retell it from memory over time. With every retelling, the story drifted. Unfamiliar details quietly disappeared, odd bits were rationalised, and canoes turned into boats. People weren’t playing back a recording. They were rebuilding the story each time out of fragments and expectations, bending it towards what made sense to them. Memory, it turns out, is less a filing cabinet and more a reconstruction job done from scraps, and modern neuroscience has only pushed that further, with a good deal of research now describing the brain as a prediction engine, constantly guessing what comes next and correcting itself when it’s wrong.

I find that more uncomfortable than I’d like to admit, because my own writing leans so heavily on memory. I’ve written about the cold of a childhood in Oslo, about Hull, where I spent twenty-six of my sixty-six years, and about the insurance broker I worked for as a teenager, the man who was losing his sight and offered me his business, which I turned down because I didn’t like how it treated its customers. I’ve told that last story enough times now that I’m genuinely not sure whether I’m remembering his office or remembering the last time I described it. Some of what I “remember” about Norway will have come from photographs, some from family stories retold over Sunday dinners, and some, embarrassingly, from my own earlier writing about it. I couldn’t separate the strands now if you paid me, and as we’ve established, nobody does.

So when someone describes human art as organic data processing, the honest response isn’t outrage. It’s an uncomfortable nod. We take in books, songs, overheard conversations, the way the light falls on a particular afternoon, the voice of a sergeant we couldn’t stand, and we compress it, recombine it and put it back out into the world with our name on it. Ask any writer where an idea came from and watch them squirm. The answer is nearly always “from everything, and I’m not sure in what order.” That’s not a description of a soul descending from the heavens. It’s a description of pattern recognition with a pulse.

So Why Does It Sting?

In 2022 a man called Jason Allen won the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair with an image he’d generated in Midjourney and then tidied up. It was a small prize at a regional fair, the sort of thing that normally earns a rosette and a paragraph in the local paper. Instead, it set the internet on fire. People called it cheating, called it the death of art, called him things I won’t repeat on a family blog. What struck me at the time, and still does, is that very little of the fury was about the picture itself. It was about what the picture implied, which was that something we’d quietly agreed was ours alone might not be.

Freud, who was rarely accused of modesty, argued that humanity had already taken three great blows to its self-importance. Copernicus moved us out of the centre of the universe, Darwin moved us out of a separate creation and into the family of animals, and Freud, naturally, nominated himself for the third, by suggesting we weren’t even in charge of our own minds. Whatever you make of his self-promotion, the pattern holds. Each time, the response was a mixture of genuine argument and wounded pride, and the pride was usually louder. Creativity was one of the last rooms in the house we still had to ourselves. It was the thing we pointed to when we wanted to explain why we were different, why we mattered, why a life spent writing or painting or composing was more than just being busy. If a statistical model can produce something that moves a stranger, that room suddenly has a draught in it, and a lot of the noise is people stuffing towels under the door.

There’s also a whiff of old-fashioned snobbery about it, and snobbery has a long history of being wrong. When photography arrived, Baudelaire sneered at it as the refuge of failed painters. Synthesisers and drum machines were denounced as soulless, and plenty of musicians feared they’d be put out of work by them, right up until people started making records with them that half of us can still sing along to. Every new tool gets accused of killing art, and art keeps stubbornly refusing to die.

And yet I can’t quite sign off on the comfortable version of that argument, the one that says this is just photography all over again so everyone should calm down. The camera didn’t learn to work by swallowing every painting ever made without asking. The synthesiser didn’t need the back catalogue of every session musician in Britain to make its first note. That’s where the economic objection walks back in through the side door, and it’s why I can’t dismiss the critics as simply vain. Some of them are vain. Some of them are being robbed. Quite a few, I suspect, are both at once, and don’t much enjoy being told so.

What’s Left Standing

I went into this expecting to knock the purity myth down and find nothing behind it. That’s not quite what happened. Once you’ve cleared away the lone genius, the divine spark and the idea that memory is some sort of sacred archive, something stubborn is still standing in the rubble, and I’ve been trying to work out what it is.

The best I can manage is this. A machine processes its inputs. So do I. But my inputs cost me something. The night shifts on RAF stations, the cold I still claim to remember from Norway, the years in Hull, the job I walked away from on principle at an age when I could have used the money, the long road that ended with me writing this from a hillside in Spain… all of it was paid for in time I won’t get back. A model doesn’t get tired, doesn’t get old, doesn’t lie awake wondering whether it made the right call all those years ago, and isn’t going to die. Perhaps what we’ve been calling soul all this time is really just stakes. A piece of art, at its most basic, might be a message from someone who is going to die, sent to someone else who is going to die, saying “this is what it was like for me.” The pattern recognition is the method. The mortality is the postmark.

The trouble is, I can’t prove that matters, and there’s a story that makes me doubt it. In the 1930s and 40s a Dutch painter called Han van Meegeren forged a series of Vermeers so convincingly that experts hailed one of them as a masterpiece and a museum paid a fortune for it. People stood in front of those canvases and were genuinely moved. Then, after the war, van Meegeren confessed, mostly to avoid being hanged as a collaborator for selling a “Vermeer” to Hermann Göring, and the same paintings that had moved people to tears became, overnight, an embarrassment. Not a brushstroke had changed. The only thing that changed was the story of who made them. You can read that as proof that the human behind the work really does matter, that we care about the life on the other side of the canvas and not just the paint. Or you can read it as proof that we never cared about the art at all, only about the name, the provenance, the comforting myth. I honestly can’t tell you which, and I’ve been turning it over for days.

Maybe the purity myth was never about purity. Maybe it was a clumsy way of saying “someone was here,” that someone stood in the cold, got it wrong, remembered it badly and tried anyway. Or maybe it’s just the last vanity of a species that’s running out of things to feel special about, and the machines are simply the latest mirror we don’t like the look of. I asked one of them, remember, and it gave me a decent answer, which rather proves something, although I’m not sure what. The coffee’s gone cold again. That, at least, happened to me.

Until Next Time