Wednesday 13th March 2024

So it’s March, which as we all know, is the real start of the year – never mind all the despondency of the Christmas season being over, New Year Resolutions being ignored, and half a bottle of Baileys in the fridge still to drunk. We’ve got Valentine’s and Pancake Day out of the way, the daffodils are out in force, and local gym has space on a fair amount of the machines for the first time in weeks.?

I feel like I’m getting slightly better organised at the moment. I can’t take all the credit – I benefit well from external validation, and getting a couple of acting jobs in the last fortnight or so has made me feel (or reminded me; let’s be kind to myself) that people actually do want to work with me, and so as a result that’s made me slightly more confident to pitch for other stuff and put off the procrastination for a little longer.?

Plus, there was the Willy Wonka Experience. It seems like every year, there is a thing that brings the usually toxic online community together in shared mirth, a moment of adject failure in which crucially nobody actually got hurt and everyone can spool out a lot of memes without feeling like they’re bullying anyone.?

If you missed it, the thumbnail version is that an organisation in Glasgow offered a (copyright teasing) Willy Wonka Experience full of chocolate flowing rivers, Oompa-Loompas, oversized lollipops, and awe-inspiring magic. What families who had forked out ￡35 a ticket got was .. not that.?

One could argue that the photos don’t do it justice, but it’s admittedly difficult to see what justice can be wrestled out of a warehouse-that’s-still-clearly-a-warehouse filled (‘filled’ is exactly the wrong word here) with a couple of vinyl wall hangings, someone wearing the Wilko version of a Ghostface costume, and a single table of plastic cup drinks that will bring PTSD flashbacks of a jumble sale you attended at the local church when you were eight. It was an event that was very much, as the kids are no longer saying, punching above its weight.?

I was unduly fascinated by this story, not in a jeering point-and-laugh kind of way (no, honestly), but because I couldn’t quite comprehend how anyone thought they were going to get away with it. I still get panicky when I’ve already delivered a very decent workshop and received excellent testimonials from people who don’t know who I am, and have already paid me money. What the Willy Wonka Experience was promising was – judging by the script – beyond the remit of a production staged at the Barbican based on a Hayao Miyazaki film. I get nervous when I’m selling a solo show with absolutely no props or special effects whatsoever. If I am going to have a script filled with smoke and mirrors, then I’d want to be assured I was in with a chance of at least delivering the smoke.?

Oh yes, the script. I think this is the most important thing to talk about. Because I’m genuinely not here to point and laugh at the whole affair (a thousand people and their memes have already done that much better than I could, anyway). And this isn’t about my own inherent impostor syndrome (sometimes I don’t think I’m good enough to have impostor syndrome wakka-wakka-wakka). But what is worth unpicking is the script. Not because of what it is, but what it isn’t. And that is, literally: a script.?

The sheer awfulness of the script was one of two positive things about the Willy Wonka Experience. I feel comfortable as a one time theatre critic calling the script awful because it’s quite evident that no human hand or brain touched it. I used to say that I was not particularly concerned as a writer by the possibility of programs like ChatGTP taking my job, because – I believe – you can always ‘tell’ if an article has been written by a human or by a program. And it is, I think, about taste, in much the same way as you might compare a box of French Fancies from Aldi to a box of the same made by Mr Kipling. The first is perfectly acceptable, it gets the job done, it’s fine if you’re on a budget. But! It in no way satisfactorily compares to the brand name: it’s really all you’re going to be happy with. You can tell with no effort what the genuine article is.?

And so I always thought that ChatGTP wasn’t taking my writing job away anytime soon because, put simply, it wasn’t writing: it was just putting words together in a coherent structure, which isn’t the same thing at all. That said, this sort of tech is quite beyond my understanding, and it’s learning (stealing) from online sources all the time, so I did think that there was a possibility that many more articles or online posts could be done effectively (and crucially, without casual detection) in as little as three years. Even Linkedin is offering a ‘Rewrite (your post) with AI’ Option, and pleeeease.)??

But it’s still not the same. It’s not .. human. I mean, you may well think this post is simply not very well written (and if so, well done for making it this far), but hopefully you can see that it’s written by an actual person who hasn’t had enough coffee, is writing this because they’re procrastinating about the job they actually should be doing, and has just remembered they’ve got a piece of chocolate waiting for them. Words are our way of connecting. And even if a factual article about a historical event could be written by a computer (and it in all honesty cannot, since even reportage about a thing that demonstrably happened is still a matter of opinion), stories contained within plays, novels, films, and even family-friendly event experiences can’t be entrusted to anyone other than humans.?

The AI generated script, for instance, not only gave in its stage directions instructions for special effects that were simply impossible to realise (although to be fair, Artaud was doing that a hundred years ago, and that was without the assistance of any artificial intelligence, as far as we’re aware), it also was predicting the exact response that the audience present would have at any one time. Like the clunky-clunky prototype of RoboCop, ChatGTP is simply uninterested in nuance or unpredictability. It can’t envisage a scenario when – to coin a phrase – we go off script. It can write a scene in which Person A disagrees with Person B, but cannot write a moment in which nothing gets resolved, in a way that the characters are not satisfied, while the audience very much is. In short, it can deliver the suggestion? of a box of Lidl French Fancies. But it is incapable – and more importantly, uninterested – in delivering the Real Thing.?

So, I think artists are in no real danger of being replaced by AI anytime too soon. Our potential customers – despite continual warnings to the contrary – are simply not interested in the fakery. Yes, you can get your websites designed by SquareSpace and your posters from Canva (and indeed I actually do), but the person on the other side feels more comfortable, more assured, when it’s bespoke. Yes, that ends up being a privileged thing (how many of us actually have the funding to pay someone to build our websites?), but when it comes to stories, and the way we tell them: only humans will do.?

Which brings me to the second positive take on the Willy Wonka Experience. Yes, it was unprepared, underfunded, and didn’t deliver on the promise. Parents were rightly annoyed and asking for their money back. But. Looking at the video footage, one thing is clear: a lot of the kids are having a great time, a lot of the time. They’re happy, and engaged by what’s in front of them. Not because of the sparkle, spectacle, and impressive costumes (because exactly none of those things are in evidence), but because of the sheer charisma, energy and talent of a group of jobbing actors who, when faced with a thankless task in which they were absolutely primed to fail, and no-one could have blamed if they’d decided to not even start the gig (if you’d been asked to start juggling in the middle of a shopping centre with no training, no signs declaring that that’s what you were doing, and crucially, no juggling balls, the situation wouldn’t have been much worse), they decided that whoever’s fault it was, it definitely wasn’t the kids, and they fully committed to the gig, pulled out the stops, and gave the children a memorable (if deeply weird) experience, one that they absolutely weren’t being paid enough for.?

Fellow writers, actors, artists, directors and more – fellow humans – is what make our stories worth telling, and listening to. Even a story weakly or ineptly told is going to have more soul and taste than a box of artificial flavouring intelligence.?

Must end it here; I’m in the mood for some French Fancies.