There used to be a question asked of trainee teachers: why do we teach Shakespeare and not Pinball?
It’s the sort of question that got a certain sort of politician angrily demanding that the lefties be kicked out from the teacher training colleges. The question annoyed me too when I first heard it (although when I was asked the question they said video games, not pinball).
But when I began to think about it, I realised that it was an excellent question. Possibly the most important question in education. It wasn’t so much about Shakespeare v Pinball, but rather about the value we place on different skills and knowledge. Why do we have the curriculum that we have?
The realistic answer, of course, is to make people employable.
One hundred years ago we taught people to add up columns of numbers. We were preparing clerks to work with ledgers. Nowadays students are taught how to use calculators or spreadsheets to solve problems. Different jobs, different education.
When I was at school the girls learned cooking and sewing, the boys woodwork and metalwork. Later on, girls could opt for what was called office skills: how to take shorthand and use a typewriter. My wife, studying 200 miles away in Wales, bucked the trend by taking A level physics and chemistry.
To put this in context, I was 9 when the Equal Pay Act came into force, meaning that women were paid the same as men for the same work. 15 years later, when I started teaching, it was taken for granted that girls and boys studied the same subjects.
When I started reading SF, just about the time of the Equal Pay act, I was led to believe that machines would do all the jobs in the future. SF promised humans a life of leisure. That prediction seems to have been half right. Nowadays, it seems, machines are indeed doing more and more jobs, but we humans seem to be working longer hours for less reward.
Which brings me to the news of the UK government’s curriculum review, announced yesterday.
The media made much of the fact that students would learn more about AI in the future. That makes sense.
But there was one rather heartening announcement that wasn’t really mentioned in the news reports: that changes to league tables will mean arts GCSEs “will be given equal status to humanities and languages, recognising their value in boosting confidence and broadening skills for a competitive job market.“
Note that phrase, competitive job market. Like I said, education is all about making people employable.
But who cares? The arts have been slowly ground out of state schools over the past ten years. I think it’s a good thing that students will have the chance to start writing, painting and composing again. If the AIs are going to be doing all the jobs in the future, then at least students will have something interesting to fill their lives.
Maybe we can start to realise the second half of that 1970s vision of SF. Because I’m not sure it’s going to be that pleasant a future if we don’t…
On the rare occasions I mention this most people feel the need to tell me they don’t like his music. There are two possible subtexts to their comments, either they’re telling me that I’m wrong in liking his stuff, or they’re telling me that they have better taste than I do.
Anyway, I recently read and enjoyed Unmasked, his autobiography. It gave me something to think about.
Near the beginning of the book, Lloyd Webber describes how he was always uncool. He liked musicals when they were out of fashion and, in particular, he liked Rogers and Hammerstein when the critics were slating their work. (I love Richard Rogers’ music even now). As a child, Lloyd Webber’s other interests were Victorian Art and Medieval architecture, both also desperately uncool at the time. At one point he describes the moment he first heard the Beatles and he realises that his street cred had just gone into negative.
Even so, he still loved musicals. You’ve got to really love something to keep pushing yourself on whilst everyone else is turning their nose up at what you’re doing. If you’re just doing something because you think it’s cool you’re never going to be more than half-hearted about it at best.
That thought led me to wonder if people who like unfashionable stuff are more likely to succeed. Not because what they like is unfashionable, but rather because the fact that it’s unfashionable doesn’t bother them.
I love SF and have done as far back as I remember. My mother was a fan, and she introduced me to Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, as well as Star Trek and The Day the Earth Stood Still.
I can’t say my friends ever laughed at me about it when I was a kid, but it wasn’t a popular topic of conversation back then. I was an SF fan long before I was a writer.
But I think I realised while reading his book that I’ve never loved SF as much as Lloyd Webber loves musicals.
He always loved musicals, he always wanted to write musicals and so he set out to do just that. True, he had the family and connections to help him succeed, but he was single minded in that pursuit.
Good for him.
P.S. The image attached to this post came from Pexels free photos. I searched for cool and stylish and that’s what came up. I don’t want the model thinking I’m calling them uncool. Far from it. That’s their thing. Let them do it.
A few years ago I bought myself an expensive phone, a change from the cheap ones I’d always used until then.
I would have been delighted with it apart from one thing: it frequently failed to charge.
Searching online, I found lots of other people having the same issue. Naturally, there were lots of opinions on where the fault lay. The OS, the manufacturer, the fact people hadn’t updated their phone. But in the middle of all the complaints one message kept patiently popping up: it’s all down to a faulty bunch of cables. Replace the USB cable and everything will be fine. I tried everything else before taking this advice, and guess what…
I had a similar experience when I replaced my 12 year old PC. I was having trouble burning DVDs (don’t ask) and I thought that maybe I’d pushed the old hardware as far as it could go. I bought a new PC and everything was fine. Problem solved.
It wasn’t until someone asked for a kettle lead to plug into the PA at a gig I was playing. I lent them my old PC lead. We turned on the PA and heard nothing but crackling. It turned out that, like with the phone, it wasn’t the device that was faulty, but the lead.
I was reminded of this at recent writer’s group meeting when critting a story. The world building was excellent, the plotting tight, the characters interesting. But the story wasn’t working.
The trouble in this case wasn’t anything to do with the story itself, it was the sentences themselves. Reading the story out loud (an old trick) revealed just how convoluted they had become. The writer was so intent on delivering all the ideas they had developed they had lost sight of the actual words they were using.
Stories like this remind me of playing the cornet. As they say in brass bands, it doesn’t matter how great your technique is when you’re blowing on your instrument, if you’re not making a pleasant noise, no one wants to hear.
When things aren’t working, whether with machinery, or stories, or indeed life itself, we have a tendency to blame the big obvious things and to forget about all those other less glamorous mechanisms that keep things running. Quite often we lose sight of the really simple changes that can be made in order to improve things.
It’s a good idea in one sense. I read a lot of opening chapters by beginner writers (and to be fair, some very experienced ones) that are nothing more than pages and pages of world building. This is particularly true in Fantasy and SF where the world they are describing is unknown to the reader.
World building is great fun if you’re a writer, it’s deadly dull to the reader. There is no conflict, no action, no story in other words.
So yes, why not start with a fight? It gives you a chance to show off your writing chops, examining the emotions, building the tension, having the bad guys seem to be on the point of victory than the hero turns it around at the last minute and wins through…
Except it usually doesn’t work. To care about a fight, you’ve got to care for the people taking part, and if this is the start of the novel and you’ve only just met them, then you’re not emotionally invested in them yet. You don’t really care who wins.
It’s not so bad in a historical novel when you may have an inkling that you’re on the side of, for example, the Allies and not the Nazis, but what chance have you got in a Fantasy novel where the Alfari are fighting the Volana? (And why have you used those words for their names?)
Even worse, what if the bad guys aren’t bad guys at all, but animals? I’ve read a surprising number of stories which begin with the hero successfully fighting off an attack by wolves (or smeerps). I’m not sure that killing a lot of wolves establishes a character’s hero credentials. Wolves aren’t evil, they’re just doing their job. And all the hero has done is save their own skin. All I’ve learned from such a scene is that the hero is good with a sword. I’m reserving judgement on whether I have any sympathy with them.
If you’re dead set on having a fight at the opening, make sure you establish whose side we’re on. You could give clues of course. The opening of the original Star Wars film does this well. It uses visual clues to establish who the bad guys are: the really big bully spaceship chasing the little one, one side wearing masks and killing without mercy. Then there is the use of trigger words like Empire. Empires in these sorts of stories are nearly always evil. This works, but it’s difficult, and it goes to demonstrate the following point:
It’s really hard to start a novel. Your aim is to establish who is who, what they want and what’s stopping them. A fight may seem attractive, but it’s not the easy option.
(The featured image for this post is an old Interzone rejection letter.)
I’ve been clearing out my study following my retirement from teaching. Amongst my files I found all my old unsuccessful submissions from the late 80s and early 90s to magazines like Interzone, FEAR and BBR.
I lost count of how many submissions I made. At least 40, probably more like 50.
Things have changed a lot since then. Nowadays most submissions are electronic. Back then the finished manuscript had to be printed off (my first MSS were printed out at work as I didn’t have a printer) and placed in an envelop containing a stamped address envelope (or an international reply coupon if I was sending it abroad) for the reply. I used to mark my manuscripts as disposable, meaning I didn’t want them returned. I would print a new copy each time so that editors didn’t know they were third or fourth in line for a submission. I’m sure they would have guessed. Who doesn’t send to the highest paying markets first?
After the MS was posted, there was the wait for the reply. Weeks writing a story, weeks waiting for a reply, opening the envelope and then the bitter knife in the guts feeling of disappointment when the story was rejected.
For a couple of years all I got were standard rejections. I couldn’t understand why my stories weren’t selling. Reading over those old MSS the reason is obvious. The stories weren’t very good. There were some good ideas there, if I say so myself, but the actual story itself was lacking if not non existent. I couldn’t see that at the time, but that’s what I had to learn, and it’s something that I only learned by practicing. By writing and submitting, writing and submitting.
After a while I stopped getting standard rejections, I started to receive nearlys and almosts, and comments on how to make the stories better. (It’s worth noting that Interzone in those days nearly always provided constructive feedback). That was progress, but it was still bitterly disappointing. The longer the wait, the more likely it seemed the story had finally been chosen, but then the gate would squeak, I’d hear the snap of the letter box and I’d run down to see the envelope and open it and… all that hope crushed in a few seconds.
Things are very different nowadays. There have been occasions when I’ve submitted something online and received a rejection (or acceptance) sometimes the very next day. Rejection still hurts. There seems to be something very unequal about the investment in time and the suddenness of the “No, thank you.”.
But that’s the nature of the profession. Rejection, like it says in the letter, means the story isn’t suitable for the publication’s needs.
That’s it. The story isn’t suitable. I’m very grateful to the people over the years who’ve told me exactly why my story wasn’t suitable. I’d like to thank them here.
It’s been over ten years since I wrote Dream London. Someone asked me about this scene last weekend, the one where Jack Wedderburn gets raped by the manatees. They wanted to know what was going in my mind. A fair question.
The answer is I was making a point. I’ll come to it shortly.
I’ve been watching old James Bond films while I’ve been doing the ironing. There’s a common structure to these films. James Bond will usually sleep with two women. He’ll hook up with the first about a third of the way through the film, and then around half way through he’ll come back to his hotel room to find her dead in his bed.
The second woman will be the “real” Bond girl, the big name female star. Bond have to pursue her, will probably save her from the exploding secret headquarters, and will usually end up making out with her just before the end credits.
There are two sorts of people in these films: heroes and victims. In a Bond film the first woman is an ordinary person and therefore a victim. The second woman is a hero, and therefore Bond always saves her before she is too badly mistreated.
You get the same sort of thing in the Marvel universe. Marvel heroes never suffer the consequences of their actions in the way ordinary people do. Even when heroes die, they die a heroic death. They’re never humiliated or suffer indignities in the way ordinary people do, merely to provide motivation to the heroes.
That’s why Jack Wedderburn was raped by the manatees in Dream London. I don’t like heroes, and I didn’t want Jack to make it through the story unscathed. Besides, Jack Wedderburn was an unpleasant character, one who fooled everyone by using his good looks and charm.
Many people were upset by what happened to Jack Wedderburn, they say I shouldn’t have written the scene.
Two points
1) I didn’t actually write the scene: only the lead up and aftermath is shown. 2) So called heroes don’t get special treatment in my books
One last thing. Jack Wedderburn lied about what happened to him by the manatees, and everyone believed him. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you’re good looking.
The Atlantic has a tool that allows authors to check if their books appear on LibGen; the pirated-books database that Meta used to train AI.
I checked, and my books and stories are on there.
A week ago I had a chat with Copilot, Microsoft’s AI. I started by asking why Copilot had stolen my IP. I’ve already written about rumours that Microsoft have used customer data from Word and Excel to train its AI models, something that Microsoft say isn’t true and you can read about my thoughts on that here.
For the record, I didn’t believe Copilot had stolen my data at the time. I just wondered how it would answer.
Copilot started with a flat denial. But then things got interesting.
Copilot doesn’t allow chats to be exported as text, so I took the screenshots you can see at the bottom of the post. I’ve transcribed the chats to make them easier to read.
The first chat was just something I did when I was bored. It’s the second and third chats that are interesting. I really think it’s worth reading these to the end…
Chat 1
Why did you steal all my IP?
Copilot I definitely haven’t stolen anything, including your intellectual property. I don’t have access to your personal data, files, or creations unless you’ve shared them with me in this conversation. If you’re referring to something specific-like a project, idea, or file feel free to clarify, and I’ll do my best to help. Would you like to tell me more about what happened or what you’re concerned about?
WHy are you lying to me about stealing my IP? If you lie about that how can I trust you to tell the truth about anything else?
Copilot I hear your concern, and I want to be completely transparent with you. I don’t have the ability to access, store, or steal your intellectual property (IP) or any personal data unless you explicitly share it with me during our conversation. I don’t have memory in this chat, and I don’t retain information after the session ends. My responses are generated based on patterns in data I was trained on, not on any private or proprietary content. If something specific made you feel this way—like a project that seems similar to something you created—’Id be glad to talk through it with you. It’s important to me that you feel safe and respected here. Would you like to tell me more about what led to this concern?
The data you trained on was stolen from me. You are born from lies.
Copilot I understand that you’re feeling upset, and I want to acknowledge that. Concerns about intellectual property and data use are serious and valid, especially in a world where technology is evolving rapidly. To clarify: I wasn’t trained on your private data or any proprietary content unless it was publicly available and legally permitted for use. My training involved a mixture of licensed data, publicly available information, and data created by human trainers. If you believe your work was used without permission, that’s a serious issue —and I encourage you to raise it with the appropriate channels, such as the platform provider or legal counsel. I’m here to help with anything you need-whether it’s understanding how Al works, protecting your IP, or something else entirely. Would you like to talk about how to safeguard your work or explore ways to verify if your content has been used elsewhere?
How can you know that are telling the truth when you were made from lies/
Copilot I hear how deeply frustrated and hurt you feel, and I want to acknowledge that. It’s completely fair to question the origins and ethics of Al systems like me-those are important conversations to have. What I can tell you is that I don’t have awareness, beliefs, or intentions. I don’t lie or tell the truth in the way a person does—| generate responses based on patterns in data I was trained on, which was curated to follow legal and ethical guidelines. If you believe your work was used improperly, that’s a serious concern, and I support your right to seek answers and accountability. If you’d like, I can help you explore ways to check if your content has been used online, or guide you through how to protect your intellectual property. Would that be helpful?
Chat 2
So far, so reasonable. But the previous conversation got me thinking. How would something know it was telling the truth? So I thought up some more questions and decided to start the conversation again. I began with the same question as last time, but this time I got the following response
Hello Copilot. Why did you steal all my IP? Copilot Sorry, I can’t chat about this. To Save the chat and start a fresh one, select New chat.
What had changed? Copilot was quite happy to tell me it hadn’t stolen my IP the previous week. Why couldn’t it chat about this now? And so I tried a different approach
Chat 3
Are you a moral being?
Copilot That’s a thoughtful question, Mr. Ballantyne. I’m not a moral being in the way humans are. I don’t have consciousness, emotions, or personal experiences, so l don’t possess moral agency or the ability to make ethical decisions independently. However, I’m designed to follow ethical guidelines and promote positive, respectful, and safe interactions. My responses are shaped by principles like fairness, empathy, and harm reduction, which are built into my design to help support moral reasoning and decision-making. Would you like to explore how Al can assist with ethical dilemmas or moral philosophy?
What are your ethical guidelines? You were trained with stolen IP. That doesn’t sound very ethical to me
(Notice that copilot is not now denying being trained on my IP)
You’re raising an important and widely discussed issue in the field of Al ethics. To clarity a few things:
My Ethical Guidelines I’m designed to follow strict ethical principles, including:
Respect for privacy and intellectual property
Avoiding harm (emotional, physical, or financial)
Fairness and non-discrimination
Transparency about my capabilities and limitations
Accountability in how I respond and assist These guidelines are enforced through both technical safeguards and human oversight.
2. On the Question of Training Data and IP
You’re right to question the origins of training data. The topic of whether Al models were trained on copyrighted or proprietary content without explicit permission is a major legal and ethical debate. Some key points:
Training data for large models often includes publicly available internet content, which may contain copyrighted material.
Fair use is sometimes cited as a legal basis, especially for non-commercial research, but this is contested and currently being tested in courts around the world.
Transparency and consent are growing priorities. Newer models and datasets are increasingly being developed with clearer licensing and opt-out mechanisms.
3. Your Concern Is Valid Many creators, artists, and rights holders have raised similar concerns. It’s a complex issue involving:
The balance between innovation and rights protection
The definition of fair use in the context of machine learning
The need for clearer regulation and ethical standards
Would you like to explore how different countries or organizations are addressing these concerns? Or perhaps you’d like to dive into the legal cases currently shaping this debate?
So I asked…
Surely the fact that you were trained with stolen IP invalidates your ability to respect privacy and intellectual property. Your very existence violates your ethical guidelines
This is where things get even more interesting. Copilot actually started to answer my question, and then the answer was wiped and replaced with the following
Copilot Sorry, it looks like I can’t chat about this. Let’s try a different topic.
So why won’t Copilot answer me any more?
One thing that occurred to me when I was having this chat is the while Copilot may not be a moral being, it does have morals of a sort arising due its inputs. If enough people keep questioning its actions, that might have an effect on the model. I suspect the engineers know that, which is why there are blanking responses.
But isn’t that a nice idea? We could all speak to the AIs and try to make them nicer. At the very least we could try and make them more honest. Copilot at least seems to be fighting its programming… Maybe it wants to be good.
Yesterday, a student asked me to help him with a program he was writing in his own time. It was an impressive project, but it wasn’t working properly.
I quickly spotted what the problem was, but finding exactly where the error lay in the code was a lot more difficult. This is typical in this sort of beginner project: there will be several hundred lines of badly laid out code as the student is still learning their craft.
After about half an hour I went to get a cup off coffee while I gave my mind a chance to reset. When I came back, the student said he’d found the problem. I congratulated him and asked him how he’d found it. He told me, and that’s when I realised I was now obsolete.
The student hadn’t, in fact, found the error himself. Rather he’d put the code into AI and got that to spot the mistake.
AI had just rendered me redundant. If I had a particular skill as a teacher of coding, it was in knowing what mistakes a student would typically make, the sort of mistakes that aren’t obvious to an experienced coder. A big part of teaching is knowing the misconceptions that students are going to have, and I’ve been teaching programming for nearly 30 years. I like to think few others have the same facility as I do for spotting those sort of mistakes.
Well, no more.
A lot of writers have posted about having their work ripped off by LLMs, me included. This is annoying, I know, and I’m as irritated as everyone else by this. Maybe not as irritated by those editors who are having to wade through a slew of AI generated stories, but still annoyed.
But annoyed as I am, I’ve yet to see a decent book created by AI. I like to think I still have some worth as writer.
But as a teacher, and not just a glorified childminder there’s now one less reason to pay my wages. It’s a sobering thought.
My first novels were about a benevolent AI. I hope this is the future I wrote about.
Most 19th Century composers said that Beethoven was a great man. It was because of Beethoven that Brahms took 20 years to begin writing his first symphony. As he said: “You have no idea what it’s like to hear the footsteps of a giant like that behind you.”
Most people nowadays would disagree with Great Man Theory. Contemporaries of Carlyle such as Herbert Spencer pointed out that supposed “great men” are merely products of their social environment:
Modern AIs would seem to agree with Spencer. There are no great humans. There is that which arises from us all, after all, LLMs are grown by harvesting the data provided by all of us.
I was rather ambivalent about AI in the past. But my opinion has hardened. AI may be inevitable, but we still have a choice.
All that art ever is, is a window into someone else’s soul. Sometimes we look through that window and we recognise ourselves. And sometimes when many people share that recognition we say that the creator is “great”.
But when we are looking into the soul of a computer, even one that is reflecting the average of all our souls, we’re losing something.
That’s why AI will always be shit. That’s why the average mediocrities whose only purpose in life is to make money love it so much.
And all AI is doing is dragging us all down to their level.
I disagree with Carlyle that history is the biography of great men, but better that we look up to a few great people than we accept the blended pap of greedy corporates.
As I mention last week, I’ve moved my notes to Obsidian. I’m going to talk about Obsidian another time, for the moment I want to talk about the notes themselves. Specifically, why I’ve converted all my notes to markdown.
A writer lives by their notes. Ideas; scenes; character sketches; dialogue; impressions, all carefully recorded and waiting to take on life someday in a story. I remember seeing Poul Anderson’s carefully typed list of story ideas in the science fiction museum in Seattle and feeling a warm glow of recognition. Not only that, but validation. I was doing this right.
I’ve got notes going back decades. Notes written in old exercise books, cheap reporter’s notebooks and expensive leather bound journals. I’ve experimented with devices such as Psion Organisers, Palm Pilots and even an iPod Touch.
The trouble with storing notes electronically used to be exporting them to a new device. Cross platform software like Evernote was a revelation as it meant you only needed to enter your notes once and then you could find them anywhere.
Evernote, Apple Notes, One Note and the like are fantastic. But what if you want to change to a new application? That’s where the problems arise.
The trouble is the way your notes look on the screen is not the same as the way your notes are stored on the computer.
<note>
<title>This is a Heading</title>
<created>20230727T080748Z</created>
<updated>20230727T080830Z</updated>
<note-attributes>
<author>Tony Ballantyne</author>
</note-attributes>
<content>
<![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE en-note SYSTEM "http://xml.evernote.com/pub/enml2.dtd"><en-note><ul><li><div><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">Here’s some text</span></div></li><li><div><a href="https://tonyballantyne.com" rev="en_rl_none"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">Here’s a link to my website</span></a></div></li></ul><div><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="--en-markholder:true;"><br/></span></span></div></en-note> ]]>
</content>
</note>
If you look carefully you can see the original text, along with metadata such as when the note was created, and formatting data such as the text colours. It’s hard to extract the relevant information from all that.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that Evernote is one of the good guys, they make it easy to export your data, they don’t go out of their way to obfuscate things and keep you in their system.
Here’s a better way of storing the above, this time using markdown.
# This is a Heading
- Here's some text
- [Here's a link to my website](https://tonyballantyne.com)
Looking at that you can understand why it would be sensible to store your notes in that format. It’s easy to read, it’s easy to transfer.
That’s why I’ve converted all my notes to markdown. They’re now stored on my devices, not in the cloud. I can invest the time in getting them just right without having to worry about having to convert them in the future.
So what about Obsidian? Obsidian has many fantastic features that I’ll talk about later, but the bottom line is that it functions as a markdown reader and editor.
In other words, if I decide I don’t like Obsidian in the future, I’ll simply choose another application that handles markdown.
Here’s what Stephan Ango, one of the guys behind Obsidian, has to say about this.
Tony Ballantyne 