I am coming for my own job

AI-generated burial plots and ancient treasure.

Hello.

I can’t tell if my brain is particularly soft today, or if they have recently started playing AI pop music in Gails. I don’t remember music playing in here last time, but I don’t remember last time. Normally I like some background noise when I’m writing, but this kind of blandness is deeply distracting. Or maybe my brain is just soft today, I don’t know.

AI is what I came here to write about and it is already beating me into submission. At the bottom of this substack is a list of words that came to me, one after another, when I woke up this morning - a prompt of sorts. I decided to try to write them into something cogent, so that’s what this is.

Recently - for the first time - I have been asked to copywrite prompts to be fed into an AI. Part of me has known for a while that this was in my stars. Commercial briefs have started to come in accompanied by AI-generated “first-go’s”. If you can determine a tone of voice, a computer can spit out all the low-level copy lines you could ever need. I have no problem with that in theory, considering no one reads them and no one fucking cares. Except I realise, as I google “what is a prompt” “how to format a prompt”, that I am not only not really writing, what I am doing is prompting myself out of future days of work. I am writing myself out of rent. The work has gone badly because I feel disturbed by and distant from it. I have the distinct feeling that I have not only written myself out of future jobs, I have also written myself out of this one.

With the advent of AI, all copywriting is pretty much on the way out as far as I can tell. Men who believe in the innate power of apps to change the world smile impishly and ask if I’m "worried”, like I’m somehow entitled by still even being here trying to earn a living. What can you do except bite your lip. I want to look at them and say sorry I’m not thinking about what you’re thinking about. I’m thinking about how to make my body move properly in the way that I think it ought to. I am thinking about why it is that putting on a particular pair of shoes can make me feel suicidal. And how I have assimilated this quickly to the fucking racket in this Gails. And what else I have assimilated too.

So, I dunno, yeah? I reply.

My brother published something on the internet a few weeks ago and now when you ask ChatGPT a question about the subject matter, it vomits up what he wrote almost exactly word for word. That doesn’t seem right. As I type this I am aware that in publishing it, I am adding to the digital landscape that is ‘bertie brandes writing style’. Meaning ChatGPT will be able to generate more convincing, more on point versions of my work, which - sure - I don’t know why it would ever need to, but regardless, it will be able to. Am I writing myself out of existence. Am I writing myself out of the whole point. What is an abstract poem beyond a string of words that contain a secret known only to me. If I don’t tell you what the secret is, if I don’t know it myself, what do the words mean. Can a computer do that? That’s a real question.

I dunno, yeah?

So far this week has been a week of avoiding silence. Sometimes it gets like this, falling asleep to audiobooks, waking up to podcasts, an aversion to self-reflection. My sunglasses are on, meetings and lunches be damned. I am 33 chapters in to The Mythology of the British Isles and have been largely unconscious for most of it. There is a sense of no escape. A few things have made it into my soft brain. A possibly obvious detail about the Sutton Hoo helmet that I recently found out. I never knew, or I guess I never thought about, the fact that the Anglo-Saxon helmet, dug up from a burial mound in Suffolk, was already an artefact in the hands of the King it was buried with 1400 years ago. At first glance it is all just fucking old stuff. But to him that helmet was a relic, imbued with an entire century of spilled blood and history. The idea of this old thing being old to those ancient people felt like discovering a secret buried in a piece of abstract text. I started thinking about layers of time and mud surrounding metal. And then I thought about the way my body feels this week when I try to walk. In another chapter I heard something about fairies being ghosts from the pre-Iron age - “cold iron” a well-documented way to repel them. Fairies as tiny imprints of people from the past who lived in ways which are mysterious and impossible to imagine now, beings that are both savage and superhuman. I wonder what we are living through today that will shiver the skin of our descendants, all that long way down the line. Will it be what Peter Thiel says - the plain horror of being trapped in a mortal body? Will the transhumanists look back and grimace at our fleshiness? I don’t know. Will the transhumanists look back at all?

Recently I’ve had this urge to completely change the way I write. Nothing feels right, all of it belongs to other people, none of it is honest. I want to put words together in a way that is entirely irreplicable. I’m sorry to say it, but I think I need to bore you. I want to confuse you. I’m imagining words spilling all over the place, huge gaps, a kind of text that is written on and across a laptop, long sheets of paper, coffee cups. I want to etch things into the screen of my iphone and then over the table top and on to my thighs. I feel I am too precious with my things, numb to what could actually be done with them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Sutton Hoo. About burying that warrior King with a priceless historical artefact, golden dragons flying over his forehead, rubies in his eyebrows. I have read two theories about these kind of elaborate burials. The first, obvious one, is that a thriving society sends off their dead leaders with opulent treasure to represent their wealth and success. The second is that a dying society will bury their most priceless treasure as a kind of archive, preserving their culture in the face of imminent extermination. Even when the first theory is true, there is an obvious violence to ending a royal line by burying the crown that determines it. It signals the end of an era, the passing over of material power to myth. I don’t know what I’m saying really. Why would I know. Does it matter? Maybe there are some things we just cannot imagine ever leaving our hands. I think I’d like to bury my iphone. Not as a flex to future archeologists, and not to protect it from imminent theft either. I think I'd like to bury it to escape it. And I bet there’s probably always an element of that, too.

Sometimes I play a game with people where you name 4 objects that could be put in a stone circle and used to conjure you and only you. It’s not dissimilar from a burial chamber really. Please send me across the river with my Tiffany heart bracelet and my grandmother’s illustrated book of Rimbaud poems. I had an entirely unserious idea a few years ago to buy a plot of land and build the first bespoke graveyard for millennials. After we’ve paid a lifetime of rent on our homes, phones and student loans, surely we deserve a physical burial. I just have this feeling millennials will want graves, material spaces - something of a hub. I imagine a chic, 3D rendering of the graveyard that you can drop into at any time to check on the status of your plot. You could recommend surrounding graves to friends for an immediate £30 credit if they sign up. You could upload your custom gravestone and check out how it looks ‘in the space’, pick the 4 artefacts you want to be buried with. Your iphone playing you out with an audiobook as you’re lowered mechanically into the ground.

And of course there would be an app. Guys I’m so excited this weeks’ video is sponsored by…

Yeah I don’t know what I’m talking about either. Isn’t it insane that we have all this technology and all this stuff and all these ideas and there still isn’t a website where people can rate their landlords? I’ve had a hole in my ceiling for 5 years. Here’s the list of words anyway, now you’ve read what they prompted out of my soft brain. I wonder if any of it makes any sense.

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hours on my phone

books constantly playing in the background

writing feels like mud

i am coming for my own job

writing myself out of existence, rent

trying to walk like a human

can’t wear that because that’s for other people

google big toe cracking

ai answer just the same but with a picture of a hot toe

stuff being old to the people in the past

sutton hoo helmet

fairies ghosts from the pre iron age

two people in one body

three people

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Obviously I did put the above into ChatGPT and it spat out something that made me feel ill. At the end it wrote I can also push this into an even more disjointed, sentence-fragment / no-capitals version if you want the tone even rawer. I don’t know. I don’t think that’s really what I meant at all. Unless it can generate something so fragmented it cracks the screen from the inside. That could be interesting.

The Sutton Hoo helmet is at the British Museum. I loved The Dig along with this bbc programme about it.