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.
Claude is a world class therapist, and possibly understands me better than me
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. I’ve already written how AIs (in this instance Gemini Pro 1.5) are now highly capable editors. Since then the AIs have relentlessly improved, and in ominous ways.
For instance, lots of writers have presumed that AIs might be able to do editing and subbing and the rest, but never proper creative writing. And, it’s true, if you ask the best literary AIs (Claude 3 Opus at the moment) to ‘write something’ they churn out dull verbose prose, like a wordy teen trying to impress, unless you really hone what you ask it (‘prompt engineering’, as it is now euphemistically called).
With a deft arm-twist, a friend of mine got Claude to write good pastiche Larkin. This is from a poem about the sadness of Sunday curry night, in a rainy northern town:
Between the flock-papered walls, we wait
Subdued, still in our churchless Sunday state,
Minds numbed like chickens stunned, pre-abbatoir
Then steaming curries cure us, within reason…
This weekly rite, appeases, for a season.
Whether that is good poetry or not probably depends on whether you like Larkin. Because, for me, that is absolutely believable as a Larkin poem. Not a masterpiece like Aubade, for sure, but plausible as a pleasant verse in an early collection. Which means Claude can write poetry to a standard we might expect of one of English’s literature’s greatest writers.
But maybe Claude is restricted to pastiche? No, as I see it, Claude is now far beyond that. I’ve got Claude to write fine new ideas for a thriller (with chilling suggested scenes), wildly eloquent literary criticism ‘for the New Yorker’ (Claude has read every book on earth, in every language, which helps), and remarkably inventive sexts (I was bored on a foreign trip). In one gobsmacking moment, after reading my unpublished memoir, Claude gave me psychoanalysis better than I have received from any human. Claude is a world class therapist, and possibly understands me better than me.
All of which means writers will be the first recruits for the Butlerian Jihad 2.0. Because, I believe, Claude 3 is probably capable of writing a great novel now (why not, if it can write all these other things). It is possible its makers, Anthropic, have partly hobbled it so that it cannot do this when asked directly – this would be too frightening, and it would destroy artistic ecosystems overnight. But that capability is coming, even if it’s not here yet, because if Anthropic don’t let Claude 4 do this, then Google’s Gemini 2 or OpenAI’s GPT5 will do this, because doing this means enormous profit and corporate survival. And somewhere in China they are planning the same.
If there are musicians reading this and exhaling thankfully then I’m afraid I have bad news for you, too. A few months ago a music-making machine called Suno launched on the world. It was ear cocking because it could produce instant music which was properly listenable. But no more than that: it was still quite lifeless.
Now we have another AI music maker. It’s called Udio. As with so many of these machines, you type in your prompt for what you want – death metal ballad, operatic overtones, gypsy jazz interlude – and it produces a song, in seconds. Udio is unnerving because, at its best, it creates music which is lovely. Here is one, a brilliant (to me) reworking of a traditional ballad.
When you listen to it, remember that not a single thing about this is human, not the soulful voice, the delicate beat, the delicious flute trill at the end. And if you don’t like that, here’s some clever but fake live reggae and here’s some amusing and super-catchy country. Check Udio for yourself: it is endless. And these machines can make a thousand songs an hour.
So that’s the musicians – all of them, from composers to lyricists, from session players to jingle writers to orchestral cellists – joining the militia for the war on robots. Anyone else? – well, yes, nearly everyone in the arts, really. Here’s one more example: a video made entirely from Sora AI to fit a human tune.
The video is janky and glitchy, yet for me, and many, it has a dreamy, transcendent quality, perhaps improved by its eeriness. Importantly, if you tried to stage this in reality it would cost half a million quid. This, however, cost almost nothing. And that maths has to terrify anyone in the video/movie world: actors, directors, designers, costumiers, cinematographers, producers, essentially anyone in the arts who doesn’t perform live and who isn’t already threatened by the near-death of human music and writing. The Art Directors Guild in Hollywood recently revealed that three in four of its members – the people who make stuff look nice on screen – are unemployed, telling those hoping to join the industry ‘we cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession’.
What’s more, as everyone keeps saying, the machines are getting better. If anything the speed of advance is accelerating (we are shooting up an exponential curve), and those in the know are warning of us what’s to come, from Sam Altman at OpenAI, who has said he worries that people don’t realise the transformative power of the next iterations, to the ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who said very recently, of all the hype surrounding AI, ‘if anything it is under-hyped’ – in other words, this tech is even bigger than you realise. And he is surely right: perhaps the best comparison is humanity’s harnessing of fire, only accelerated a million times; and, as we all know, fires can destroy as much as they warm, cook and fend off predators.
Therefore, as the fires of AI come for all the good and lovely jobs in the world – the arts and the sciences, the poetry and drama, the comedy and creativity – will we really sit back and let them do this? The terrible reaction to a tone-deaf ad from Apple, showing the ‘new iPad’ squashing and destroying pianos, paintings, and guitars, hints at a growing backlash, a rebellion potentially forming, pikestaffs pulled from the thatch of our humble human cottages. However, if we don’t rebel and we passively accept our fate, perhaps we can be consoled by knowing that Udio AI has created a catchy showtune version of the Butlerian Jihadi plot of Dune.
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