This month I dipped my toe into the brilliant and deeply unsettling ocean of AI’s potential. I’m a bit late to the game, but for fun, I asked ChatGPT to write a synopsis of a piece based on a few scraps of information. Within seconds, it had. Not only that, it praised my “sensitive yet powerful” style and described my opening as “strong and reflective,” – causing a ridiculous flutter of flattery – before offering to adapt the piece into a short radio feature.
Writers are just one of many professions for whom AI is a game-changer: a time-saver, free editor, spell-checker, researcher and source of both inspiration… and misinformation. It was uncannily attuned to the contents of my book, In My Grandfather’s Shadow, which I’ve recently discovered had, along with millions of other authors’ works, been quietly harvested by Meta for AI training – without permission, acknowledgment, or any form of compensation. Authors’ licensing rights swept aside in the data goldrush.
At Bath Literature Festival last week, I interviewed Daniel Kehlmann – “the finest German writer of his generation,” according to Salman Rushdie. In his latest novel, The Director, Kehlmann reimagines the life of G.W. Pabst, a once-celebrated silent film director, tracing the moral compromises he made as he navigated a precarious and murky artistic path through the rise and fall of the Nazi regime. It is a brilliant read and couldn’t be more apposite.
I also watched the newly released film Riefenstahl, about one of the most controversial cultural figures of the Third Reich. Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph of the Will is a visually stunning albeit ideologically chilling portrayal of the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Her talent for cinematic innovation is undeniable, but so is her closeness to Hitler and one of the darkest regimes in human history. To the end, however, she insisted she was not a Nazi but merely “an artist,” obsessed only with beauty, form, and structure. She claimed she had no knowledge of the Holocaust and never apologised.
What links AI, Pabst, and Riefenstahl are questions of artistic freedom and moral compromise. Both directors pursued their creative ambitions under a political leadership that demanded ideological conformity. Riefenstahl willingly. Pabst, more reluctantly. But both became complicit in horror. And that complicity, as Kehlmann skilfully shows, is often quiet, mundane, and all too human.
One scene in The Director stays with me. Pabst’s wife, Trude, attends a stifling book club of wives of high-ranking Nazis. As coffee is served, the conversation drifts to the new porcelain set and a glittering sugar bowl. A flurry of admiration. Silence. Then a quiet, hesitant voice says she’s “seen one like that… but not here… over at the…” The implication is clear: the bowl came from a confiscated Jewish home. Beauty and brutality blend into the everyday.
Another scene captures the power of self-censorship. A member praises a banned play and is swiftly expelled from the group. “A circle like this is based on agreement,” the host says. “On harmony. Where that is not the case…” The others hang their heads and remain silent. Agreement through fear. Harmony through complicity.
We probably all know such moments. Times we wanted to speak, but didn’t or felt we shouldn’t.
Eighty plus years on, we are in very different times, but similar dynamics are re-surfacing in modern contexts, not least under Trump’s presidency, and certainly within our digital lives. AI, algorithms and social platforms are increasingly shaping what we see, create, think and consume, often without us even realising. The slope is slippery, not only because of dramatic, evil choices made by tyrants, but because of the many small, unexamined ones made by the rest of us.
I haven’t worked out yet how or where to dig my heels in to prevent what I fear is a downward slide. Ease is such a temptress after all. And maybe some of AI is no more morally fraught than the telephone, which saved – and lost – us the art of letter-writing; or the camera, which snapped rather than painted landscapes; or Google Maps, which delivers us to destinations with little connection to the journey. Our tool kits for life have always evolved with time. So isn’t it right, necessary even, to adopt and adapt?
Maybe yes. But AI has no values. No morality. No nuance. No sense of consequence. Those are ours to guard with vigilance and intention, in the choices we make and the art we create. Because isn’t beauty inseparable from ethics? Aren’t feeling, meaning, soul, responsibility the very qualities that still set us apart from technology; the keys to remaining humane?
I remember decades ago walking into a David Hockney retrospective at the Royal Academy. Near the entrance hung a series of portraits, typical of Hockney’s flat distinctive style, but they felt particularly mechanical, soulless. Inside, I saw the same portraits again, but these positively vibrated with life and presence. The former I learned, were digital reproductions, technically flawless, visually identical, but missing the very essence of art – human creativity, the trace of touch, the soul behind the brushstroke.
That’s how we know when something is real. Our souls have a gauge for truth.
We feel it.
Further Reading and News:
How to Make Art Under the Nazis (Without Losing Your Soul)
Riefenstahl review – nauseating yet gripping story of Nazi poster woman
I am participating in Site Festival 2025 Open Studios: SALE of older work, & new project to view. Sat 14th – Sun 15th June 11am – 5pm; Sat 21st – Sun 22nd June 11am – 5pm. Or by appointment
angela findlay blog 
This post is a masterpiece. Thank you!! You’ve managed to put your finger on the sore spot and pinpointed, in my view, the greatest danger of our time: the potential for imperceptible manipulation by AI, which is only morally neutral at best and the dilemma of dealing with it. As I recently strolled through the Art Karlsruhe art fair, I suddenly realized what struck me so strongly about it right now. It’s a triumph, a fortress of the analogue— the not digital in a digital world. Yet. Just to be on the safe side, I double-checked my comment with Google Translate before posting it here. 😉
Thank you Holger. Beautifully put and precisely what I am saying too. And yes, where would we be without our bilingual friend to help us translate?! 🙂
Really good read. Thanks Angela.
Alex.
Thanks Alex. All part of our collage discussion!
Thank you Angela for this evocative and thought and feeling provoking piece.
I wish I could wholeheartedly agree with your conclusion:
That’s how we know when something is real. Our souls have a gauge for truth.
We feel it.
I recently watched a short film on fb called Origami Ballet – for me as a lover of both dance and origami it was enchantingly beautiful and a deeply moving snapshot of the relationship between human and the supposedly inanimate.
It was clearly AI. Less clear was whether it also involved human ballet dancers.
It also provoked very strong negative responses both from artists and anti AI campaigners who were vehemently in their condemnation of the film as both not ‘real’ and not ‘Art’ and also of those of us who felt it was. Skilled though I am in having dialogues across seemingly irreconcilable differences I found it hard to do so in this context – partly the nature of fb comments but also some deeper sense of unease with the extremity of of the polarisation in the context of the issue of AI the complexity of which which we we clearly urgently need to explore
So renewed gratitude for this space and the nuance and complexity of your explorations
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I happened to see the Origami Ballet post on Facebook that you refer to and as a lover of dance too, found it beautiful and intriguing. I didn’t see the responses to it and rather ignorantly, assumed it was ‘real’! That makes me wonder even more, this fine line art and artists and their viewers are going to have to navigate. I wish we could develop more exploratory spaces rather landing so quickly into polarisation, nastiness and argument.
Many thanks, Angela, for keeping me in the loop, and for this thought-provoking piece.
Yes!
Another beautifully thought-provoking post from Mrs F!
Thank you!!
Her reflections are always apposite, but this one struck me as particularly so – apposite and timely.
I’d like, if I may, to add a few thoughts that Angela’s post has stimulated in my mind . Experienced AI practitioners know how very important are the “learning sets” used to build effective algorithms. (This is the modern equivalent of the good old IT slogan “Garbage in – garbage out!”)
In AI, everything depends on the learning sets – including, of course, “In my grandfather’s shadow”. I, for one, would be pretty comfortable if today’s young (fledgling …. embrionic… neonatal…?..?) AI were being “taught” via books by Angela Findlay and others with similar moral strength.
I’d guess that the Bible might already be included – but hopefully not Mein Kampf.
Which brings me to Angela’s point about AI not containing, or producing, anything as human as artistic sense or moral value. Are we sure about that?
Our own upbringings, our education and nurture, are influenced by multiple “learning sets”. People we deem “well brought up” have been given the right learning input – and come through practicing what was preached to them.
Obviously, it’s all much more complicated subtle and multifactorial than we’ve time for here – but could it be that, like us, AI systems can in fact learn to be good, thoughtful and kind – even genuinely artistic, perhaps – depending on how we “bring them up” ?
Thank you David for an – as always – equally thoughtful and thought-provoking comment.
Firstly I totally agree, it is great if books like mine (!) are being included in AI’s ‘brain’ but… us authors should be given a chance a) to consent to it and b) to be paid for the copyright of our work.
I am a total novice to the AI world and can’t begin to really imagine how it works – for better or for worse. But I am genuinely interested and open-minded to its huge potential and benefits. I am just not totally convinced it won’t be abused by power- and wealth-hungry operators, who manipulate it in order to insidiously control our minds and wallets as much of social media has done. Very interesting Moral Maze discussion on it last night… https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d122
P.S. I’ve suddenly realised that Angela’s site is still on GMT – not Summertime. 🙄
Great piece of writing! Tas
Thanks Tas!
Paul has just forwarded the link to your post, Angela, so I am late to the party!
I particularly appreciated the phrase ‘the trace of touch’ which seems to me so aptly to describe everything that results from human creativity and human interaction, a felt sense of encountering something living created by a living human being. It reminds me of the experience of eye contact in a fact-to-face conversation – you know you’ve met each other – or its absence in a where the form of communication is present but the warmth of connection is withheld – you know you’ve been refused.
It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to replicate human touch or eye-contact on a screen or in virtual reality, but the absence is subtle, sometimes hardly noticeable, and yet always powerful. We may not notice for a while that the ‘trace of touch’ is absent in AI productions, just that something is missing. Maybe machines will get closer and closer to replicating it, but what is not happening in our brains, our bodies, even our spirits when the created, earthy, physical reality of being is bypassed?
Students already find it harder to read, to think, to argue, to write than they did. There is increasing research to suggest that cognitive, social and emotional development is changing as a result.
I’m daily irritated by Miss Ease so willingly at my shoulder to ‘help’ me with every task that uses a screen. I can’t be alone in experiencing her (forgive my gendering here – it’s for the sake of the pun to come) not as Miss Ease, but as Dis-ease, and perhaps, potentially as a life-threatening and community Disease.
There are other sides to this debate, but here’s my penn’orth (and that’s a giveaway of my age, I’m sure, in a phrase that was already archaic when I was a child). I wonder what AI makes of it?
Thank you Pam, beautifully described. I think the absence of the ‘trace of touch’ has been creeping up on us. I remember feeling it initially with the advent of techno music and then grew to love it because it touched me in a way that enabled me to lose myself in dance. But yes, Miss Ease… one to be wary of!