Yesterday & Today: 19th April

Lots of time spent doing things yesterday as is usually the case on a Tuesday with my Library session and ‘Write-on Ripon’ – but only half of it was pre-planned.

The things I did expect to get done were some more drafting of “C” (which continues to move on at pace), and ‘Write-on Ripon’. The latter was slightly unusual in that it somehow felt a disjointed session with a whole raft of work offered on the subject of ‘Clouds’.

The most noteworthy portion of the event – at least from my perspective – was a conversation about the nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as two of the members had used an ‘AI bot’ in one way or another to provide material to read out including an AI-generated poem (keeping in mind that the rules for said ‘poem’ had obviously been programmed by a human software engineer). It was interesting to hear the views of some of the attendees. My own somewhat more pragmatic options were driven by the fact that I was a professional programmer for a number of years. As people, I think we have an instinct to transfer human characteristics onto non-human entities in order to relate to them; we do it to dogs and cats all the time! But for my money, an AI bot can’t ‘think’ or ‘feel’, period. Potentially cleverer than us, they remain inanimate and not sentient – though who’s to say that with advances in quantum computing they may not get ever closer to seeming more so?

The unplanned time was spent a) sneaking into June’s venue for another read-through of Crash, and b) starting to work on my second attempt at turning it into a ‘proper’ play (given I have now drafted the second ‘instalment’ of the overall work). This feels like breaking important and ‘new’ ground.

So what about today? Well, ‘life stuff’ rules out just about all of the afternoon, so this morning I’ll try and do some more “C” and the Crash play transference. The highlight, however, will hopefully come this evening when I’m reading at an event hosted by Kim Moore and featuring Liz Berry. My own slot is for a single poem, but there are only 14 of us reading and hopefully will give me the chance to showcase a tiny portion of my work to a new audience. Wish me luck!

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