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