Roger Waters Was Right About Technology

I have loved Pink Floyd since I was ten years old. At 56, I remain a devotee, especially of the frisson-and-trance-inducing body of work they produced from 1966 through 1975. I love the playful prodromal psychosis of Syd Barrett’s Floyd in songs such as “See Emily Play,” the terrifying grandeur of “Careful with That Axe, Eugene,” the mythic quality and vicious groove of “Echoes,” the strange, uneven beauty of the rest of Meddle, and the acid-rock obscurity of Obscured by Clouds. I could continue in this vein for quite a while, but you don’t care.

I will also mention the crème de la crème, Wish You Were Here. In that masterpiece, Waters permanently established himself as a serious artist and paid a beautiful, grief-stricken tribute to the brilliant and terribly damaged friend who had founded his band.

This is music I have carried around for 46 years. It has become part of the architecture of my mind.

Roger Waters has since become harder to tolerate. He increasingly resembles the Judge in Gerald Scarfe’s wonderful animation for The Wall: a grotesque authority figure with an asshole instead of a mouth. That is Rog now, squatting over public life, pooping out antisemitism and looking ridiculous.

But anyhow.

Long before that degeneration, Waters made a very good point about technology and art. In the documentary footage included in Pink Floyd at Pompeii, the band is challenged about its reliance on electronic equipment.

Waters replies:

It’s like saying, ‘Give a man a Les Paul guitar and he becomes Eric Clapton.’ And of course that’s not true. And if you give a man an amplifier and a synthesizer… he  doesn’t become us.

Pink Floyd never shrank from technology. They took it up and mastered that motherfucker.

From the beginning, Floyd used tape loops, feedback, echo delay, found sounds, unusual amplification, synthesizers, multitracking, clocks, cash registers, footsteps, heartbeats, and whatever else they could get their hands on. They worked with engineers and technicians who understood things they did not. The result was still Pink Floyd.

Nobody hears the opening of “Time” and says, “Sorry, those clocks were technologically assisted.” Nobody listens to the cash-register loop in “Money” and complains that David Gilmour did not personally impersonate a cash register.

The same principle applies to writing with artificial intelligence.

There is now a strange moral panic about AI-assisted writing. Once someone discovers that a writer used ChatGPT or another language model, he may declare the writing fraudulent, worthless, or “not really written” by the person whose name appears on it. The actual quality of the work suddenly becomes irrelevant. The argument may be careful, original, funny, and recognizably the product of a particular mind. None of that matters. AI touched it. Into the garbage it goes.

Give me ChatGPT and I do not become Christopher Hitchens or Philip Roth. I become a much faster and more prolific Joe Rhinewine.

AI can produce grammatically competent prose with astonishing speed. It can also produce acres of bland, swollen, falsely profound crap. Anyone who has spent much time reading LinkedIn has seen the results. The paragraphs arrive wearing a little blue suit. Everything is “pivotal.” Every ordinary collection of things becomes a “tapestry.” Nothing happens in the world; it happens in a “landscape.” No point is merely made when it can be “underscored,” and no subject is discussed when we can “delve into its nuances.”

A capable writer can use the same machine differently. He can argue with it, correct it, redirect it, demand evidence, reject its favorite clichés, pull apart a weak paragraph, try twelve openings, and rescue one sentence from eleven paragraphs of synthetic oatmeal. He can use it to locate a forgotten quotation, discover an objection he has not considered, or notice that his brilliant point rests upon a fact that is completely false.

The machine can supply words. The writer still has to know which words are alive.

There are degrees of AI involvement. Someone who types “Write me a brilliant essay about Israel,” copies the result without thinking, and publishes it under his own name has a weak claim to authorship. He has commissioned an unusually fast and inexpensive ghostwriter, one with no convictions, no reputation, and no objection to surrendering the byline.

A language model can also contribute substantial ideas, arguments, structures, and metaphors. Used seriously, it becomes a remarkable and distinctly nonhuman collaborator: tireless, knowledgeable, and perfectly willing to be contradicted every 45 seconds. The Les Paul analogy therefore has limits.

Serious use of AI requires honesty about what the machine did. Spell-checking a paragraph and ordering an entire book from a prompt are different activities.

Authorship remains a matter of conception, selection, revision, judgment, and responsibility. Who chose the subject? Who supplied the governing idea? Who recognized the bullshit? Who revised the language until it sounded like someone rather than everyone? Who placed his name beneath it and accepted the consequences?

I had a voice before ChatGPT existed. I already had recurring ideas, prejudices, obsessions, jokes, blind spots, and several regrettable stylistic habits. AI did not give me my interest in Jewish survival, clinical psychology, political failure, human self-deception, or the hazards of AI itself. It did not make me severe, profane, argumentative, or occasionally absurd. Left unsupervised, it usually tries to remove those qualities. Actually it does that with maddening persistence.

This essay was developed with AI. The central idea came to me while remembering Waters’ remarks in Pink Floyd at Pompeii. The lifelong love of Pink Floyd is mine. The disgust with Waters’ antisemitism is mine. The asshole-mouth comparison is mine, although Gerald Scarfe deserves most of the credit for the asshole-mouth. I directed the argument, selected what belonged, discarded what did not, and remain responsible for every sentence I publish.

Judge the result. בהצלחה.

If it is tedious, then say it is tedious.

If the analogy fails, explain where it fails.

If a claim is wrong, correct it.

If the prose sounds canned, point to the can.

Those are acts of criticism. Announcing that AI was involved and therefore refusing to read is an act of superstition.

Pink Floyd understood this half a century ago. Technology increases the power available to artists and hacks alike. It helps the artist make something previously impossible. It helps the hack manufacture garbage at tremendous speed. The machine cannot settle which one you are.

A Les Paul does not make you Eric Clapton. A synthesizer does not make you Pink Floyd. AI does not make you a writer.

And using one does not prove that you aren’t.