Old MacDonald’s Content Farm

Carrie Marshall

In late 2023 the magazine Variety described the Hollywood writers’ strike as having taken ‘a heavy toll across the content industry.’ Many writers gasped. The what industry? But Variety was right. There is a content industry, and it’s coming to eat us all up.

In Jeff Noon’s SF novel Vurt, avoiding the swarming, ad-spouting BlurbFlies is an essential skill if you want to make it through the streets of near-future Manchester without irritation or injury. The BlurbFlies are semi-organic, semi-mechanical flying drones created by the AnnoDomino Company in their thousands to fill the air with the siren calls of capitalism.

The BlurbFlies are here in Glasgow now, and probably in your city too. But they aren’t the insect drones of Noon’s imagination. They’re the black-clad, masked and gloved illegal e-bike riders of Just Eat and Deliveroo, risking life and limb—theirs and yours—for the terminally tired and time poor. The only reason they’re not wearing ad-blasting screens is because nobody’s worked out how to do it yet.

Noon had the right idea but the wrong assumption: he assumed that tech would eventually become less valuable than people. But as the gig economy shows, that’s simply not true.

The wrong robots

When I was little I devoured SF books and science shows, anticipating adult days of lazy leisure. The robots were coming to cook and to clean and to deliver luxury gay space communism. I may have made that last one up.

And some of those robots did come, and some of them are cleaning. There are robot vacuums to clean our carpets and robot roofers to get gunk from our gutters, smart lights that save us from flicking switches and smart doorbells to deliver us from door to door salvation sellers.

These aren’t the bots we were looking for.

The promise, which we believed, was that these marvellous machines would take our delegated drudgery and give us time: time to think and time to read and time to kiss and time to dream and time to follow those dreams wherever they would lead. The machines would take care of the obstacles in the way of our art.

You know the twist: they didn’t.

They gave the job of making art to the automatons.

The bots took our paintbrushes and left us the brooms.

Hashtag content

One of the reasons for the writer’s strike was over AI, a misleading and massively overhyped term that usually means unprecedentedly powerful plagiarism engines. The large language models of the current AI boom are huge databases of content that’s scanned, analysed and regurgitated in a pale imitation of the style of whoever you wish.

It’s not good, but it’s cheap. And in the content industry, cheap beats good every time.

As I write this, the AI techbros are celebrating their latest milestone: an AI-generated Calvin & Hobbes comic strip. It may resemble Bill Watterson’s work, but it lacks his wisdom, his warmth and his wit. The AI evidently knows where Watterson’s lines are, but not where his heart is.

The plagiarism engines have already consumed the pictures. Now they’re coming for the words. In late 2023, The Atlantic published a searchable database of what it says are the 191,000 books scanned for reuse without permission by the likes of Meta (Facebook), Bloomberg and others. The complete Ian Rankin is in there, along with 33 books by Margaret Atwood and the early works of less well-known writers such as Cumbernauld’s Kirkland Ciccone. The goal is to train the machines to write like the authors it has ingested in its hellish literary lunch.

In an AI world authors become content editors. Operators. Their job is no longer to tell stories but to sand down the rough edges left by AI imitators or to correct errors in the algorithmic adaptations that are now replacing talented translators. Hidden humans are already doing this in faraway silicon sweatshops, turning AI-generated gibberish into content that’s then portrayed as a triumph of technology rather than electronic outsourcing where low-waged workers toil for platform owners instead of Primark.

The engines are coming for audio too. Apple is using AI voices to narrate audiobooks like mine because while AI narrators aren’t as expressive or entertaining they don’t require you to book time or talent. The same deepfake technology that enables funny TikToks of Kurt Cobain singing Puddle of Mudd or Donald Trump doing In Da Club is already being used to create auto-generated Oasis albums and deepfaked Drake, to get artists to convincingly perform songs they’ve never sung and never will.

They’re not just scanning the art. They’re scanning the artists too. Actors went on strike alongside the writers, at least in part because studios wanted to digitise their faces and their bodies to create AI-generated actors to fill future scenes forever without credit, let alone compensation. The same avatars that enable ABBA Voyage to deliver delight every night while its pensionable performers stay snug in Sweden is being eyed with great interest by the labels of other ageing big hitters who know their cash cows may soon croak.

With AI, artists may tour forever as hellish holograms, modern day Pepper’s Ghosts haunting exhibition halls and airless arenas to deliver all the spectacle and none of the soul.

Of course there has always been business around art. The music business, the art market, the publishing industry, the comedy circuit, the comic book trade and others have all seen their share of bandwagon boarders and cold-eyed careerists. But for most of that time the art and the business have co-existed, however awkwardly and inequitably. What happens when there’s all business and no art?

When everything becomes content, it loses all context. It’s just a collection of zeros and ones, no different to and no more important than any other digital data. The only metric that matters is its value to shareholders, which is why so many films and shows are now being buried by streamers who don’t want to pay residual royalties or even screen them once they’ve benefited the balance sheet. It’s why Batgirl and crew came to shut Calton’s streets and take the city’s money to make a movie that’ll never be shown. It’s just content, and in this case the content had more value as a grant-guzzling corporate tax write-off than as a piece of art or entertainment. That’s a heist as audacious and amoral as anything the Penguin ever plotted.

To the content industry, what’s delivered in packets of internet data is no different to what’s delivered in a Just Eat backpack; in the gig economy, the only jobs for creators are as the e-bikers of the arts, Deliveroo-ing their work into the insatiable and impatient maws of AIs. No matter how heartfelt, their creations are just another crop to be harvested. Old MacDonald had a content farm, AI AI oh.

So where does that leave us? How do we resist what Cory Doctorow calls ‘enshittification’ when it’s coming for everything?

Discontent

We can start by refusing to call what we do ‘content’.

Content is a loaded word, a dangerous and destructive description. Content steamrolls everything to the same sliver-thin stratum where a life’s work is of no greater value than a tossed-off TikTok, where a creative professional’s eye and expertise is no more valuable than someone arsing around with an iPhone, where there’s no distinction between heroines and hacks. If everybody is a content creator then all content is of equal value and should be paid for accordingly, if it should even be paid for at all.

The suggestion is never to pay all creators more, of course; rather than raise the tide to lift all boats, content sets out to sink them instead.

The content pushers plead poverty. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s salary last year was a quarter of a billion dollars. Netflix’s Ted Sarandos pocketed $50.3 million. Alex Norström, head of Spotify’s content, was paid $9.2 million. An unnamed Apple TV exec, discussing the writers’ strike, admitted that ‘this isn’t a situation where streaming companies don’t appreciate the value of writing in the content ecosystem. We do. But we will pay the absolute minimum we can.’ Apple CEO Tim Cook took home $99.4 million in 2022.

If you’re looking to save money you should start in the boardrooms, not the writers’ rooms.

Fresh Ludd

I’m no luddite. But the Luddites weren’t luddites either, at least as the term is generally understood. We’re told that they raged against the machines, but that came later; a better soundtrack would have been Fight The Power.

They tried to talk to the mill owners and even the government about the amazing things the machines might do as well as the possible dangers they posed. They spoke of an end to child labour, and of the introduction of minimum labour standards, of safety improvements and of better wages. But the mill owners shunned them and began what the Luddites described as the use of machinery ‘in a fraudulent and deceitful manner’ to sack highly skilled workers and churn out inferior goods because they were capitalists and that’s what capitalists do.

Death to disruption

As the Luddites understood only too well, technology is value neutral; it’s neither productive or destructive until it’s put to work. And it’s how we put it to work and who we put it to work for that matters.

We can’t uninvent AI any more than we can uninvent the spinning jenny or the internet. But what we can do is ask how it should be used, and when, and why, and what checks and balances there are to prevent it from being used in ‘a fraudulent and deceitful manner’—a manner such as, say, scanning pirated copies of hundreds of thousands of published books in order to plagiarise them, or trying to sneakily snap up the rights to actors’ digital likenesses or singers’ voices in perpetuity without payment or informed permission.

And that means we need to look beyond ourselves, because this story is not just about us. The episode in which we currently feature is part of a bigger, sadder story with a much larger and diverse cast of characters that includes child workers in faraway fast-fashion factories, security guards displaced by outsourced webcam viewers and taxi drivers rendered redundant by predatory priced car-calling apps. It’s not a story of technological innovation but of regulatory disruption and sometimes blatantly illegal operations.

And that means we need to show solidarity: solidarity with other workers facing their own electronic erasure, and with other creatives. Solidarity in what we do— writers appalled by the AI book scanning but happy to use AI-generated art on your covers to save paying a cover artist, or writers who’ll put their name to a submission whose real author is ChatGPT, I’m glaring at you here—and in where we shop, what we subscribe to and what we stream. Ethical and local shopping applies just as much to art as it does to fashion and food: money spent more ethically, more consciously, is money working more effectively for a greater good.

Most of all, we need to stand together. The US writers won despite a campaign of union-busting intimidation and defamation that, among many lows, included illegally cutting down trees to expose strikers to the punishing heat of the Hollywood sun. By standing together, and with others standing with them in solidarity, they won a victory over some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world.

Chances are, your kind of creativity has a union too: The Society of Authors, the Musician’s Union, The Scottish Artists’ Union and more.

If you haven’t joined, you should. Because you’re going to need them, and they’re going to need you too.

Originally published in Issue #29

Carrie Marshall is a freelance writer, broadcaster, podcaster and songwriter from Glasgow. Her debut memoir Carrie Kills a Man was a Scotsman Book of the Year in 2023.