What Do You Think About AI Using Your Writing? (Your Radical Questions with Naomi Alderman)

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Before we get started, I need more of your radical questions for one of our absolutely fantastic guests.

0:48This is something, if you recall, that we started just a few weeks ago as a little experiment. And it's gone rather well. In fact, we're so pleased with how it's going that we're going to continue it into the new year, into 2026 and maybe even beyond. In the first week of January, I'm going to be talking to an influential young academic called Louisa Munch, who has built a huge following on social media where she applies her field of critical theory to the political issues of the day. She is particularly concerned about the rise of the far right and the power of nostalgia in politics. So we're going to talk a bit about that and also about why, in her view, higher education should be free.

1:26You can ask her about any of that, or perhaps you'd like to know more about life as an academic, or how she built her quite substantial social media following. Whatever it might be, WhatsApp your question to us on 0330 123 9480. Or you can email us radical at bbc.co.uk. We would love to get your radical questions for Louisa Munch. Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where I put your questions to one of our magnificent radical guests. Remember, this is basically your chance to engage very directly and really connect with the super smart, super interesting people that we have on this podcast and to ask them about their ideas for the future.

2:09Thank you so much to all of our guests who've done this so far and to you for your many, many, many questions. We're trying to get through as many of them as we can, I promise. This is our last one of the year, and I'm thrilled to say that I'm joined by the acclaimed bestselling author Naomi Alderman. She's written several massively, massively popular novels, including Disobedience and The Power. This year, she released her first nonfiction book. It's called Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today. It's inspired by a Radio 4 series on the third information age, a third information crisis. and she made that series really to illustrate how new technologies often open up new ways of thinking and I really I listened to it I really really recommend it we actually spoke ahead of her coming on the today program and I in preparation for that listen to the series I thought it was absolutely fantastic which is why it's been such a pleasure to get to know Naomi in the radical studio I also really recommend and I know I would say this wouldn't I but I do really recommend the main episode which was out last Thursday the main interview that we did because it really does speak to some of the growing concerns that we've addressed on this podcast about the way in which technology is reshaping our lives in ways we can't fully understand.

3:18It was an absolute hoot, but enough from me. This is about you and about Naomi and Naomi's here. You feeling ready? I am. You can deal with me, but I'm not sure you can deal with our listeners. Clever bunch. Right, here we go. This is our first question and this is a voice note from Loic. Hi Naomi and Amal, of course. having established yourself as a novelist and been able to through your fiction analyze issues of technology and obviously as an extension wider social and societal issues have you found that moving into a non-fiction realm has given you different limitations or perhaps different formal responsibilities do you find one to be more liberating than the other certainly in terms of the fact that fiction has a certain premise or a guise or a veneer of entertainment, right?

4:11Whereas do you feel less of a responsibility to entertain with this and more to teach or instruct? Thank you very much. Best of luck with the book. Loic, thank you so much. What a brilliant question about the liberation of nonfiction or otherwise. Yeah, I mean, I think it is true that the things that I was thinking about when I was writing Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake today felt so urgent to me that I just thought, God, I have to get this out as quickly as possible and therefore I don't have time to write a novel. Where a novel for me, that is a really long process of thinking myself into a different set of characters, a different way of viewing the world, different realities.

4:54And nonfiction, you can just write what you think apparently. You can just put in a book whatever you happen to think about things. But that's, some people might consider that somewhat counterintuitive, that it takes longer to write a novel. Because with non-fiction, I mean, it depends on the non-fiction, what you're writing. But with non-fiction, you've got to do research, you've got to check it, you've got to make sure your argument stacks up. There is a kind of, for those of us who haven't yet written one, let alone several best-selling novels, there's this idea that if it's a novel, it just sort of flows like the milk of ambrosia from your mind.

5:23No? Clearly not. I mean, for me, I would say when it's going well for a novel, it's really, really good. But to write a novel, I have to go into those emotional places, which is very important for me. And it's where my heart lies, but it's less immediately accessible than the intellectual side. So thinking things through, I can do that all day till the cows come home. Yeah. Going and feeling it out. That is a have to let the waters inside go still, have to be willing to accept whatever comes up, be willing to be present with it. I mean, there's a saying you never learn how to write a novel. You only learn how to write the novel.

6:04You're right. You're just writing right now. Right. I wrote something a while ago where I said people say to me, how do you write a novel? And all I can say is you go up to the attic, you put out your hand and then you wait for something to land on it. And then you can tell it and you're not present when it happens. It's just something comes and then you know if it worked because at the end you can see like the little scorch marks in your palm just to go. Oh, OK. All right. That something happened there. I mean, look, for goodness sake, I wrote my first novel. I started out writing it when I was an Orthodox Jew.

6:43And by the time I finished the book, I thought, oh, I think this is not for me anymore. so I evidently write them in quite an intense way. What happens if you put your hand out and no scorch marks appear? It happens sometimes and then you go, oh, well, it's fine, I guess. Wow. Yeah. On Loic's point about feeling whether you found it a constraint to need to instruct or teach, is the fact that you're kind of, with this non-fiction book, prosecuting an argument, is that a kind of burden or is it something you actually think this is quite a joy? I mean, for me, I think it came out of, the book started as a series of quite urgent conversations with friends where I go oh my god I've just been thinking about this what do you think and all of my friends were like oh that I had never thought about that before that seems quite important when you just worked out and so I envisioned the book as that kind of conversation with the reader to just go if at the end and this is to be honest I feel this about all my work if at the end of the book the reader goes I disagree with everything you've just said, delightful.

7:43You know, that is, then we had a conversation, we've come through a topic, we've taken a topic out for a walk together and in the end we have different views but we've examined it together. And I don't have the feeling of, I've got to persuade you, but I really want to tell you what I'm thinking about. People want to have a lot of fun, they can look at your website where you often have, you respond to people who've been rude to you. And I think it's one of the most entertaining things about your incredibly fascinating life. The thing I found very useful about the book as someone who is immersed in this subject and has been reporting on it for years is the threads of history and the fact that you connect the current epoch with previous epochs and also possibly the next epoch which might be driven by AI and we've got a question from one of our magnificent listeners on that very subject.

8:28Hi there, I'm Angie from Brighton and I've been a professional screenwriter since the 90s. I've actually been embracing AI over the past couple of years. I use it to help with research, create images for marketing documents, that sort of thing. How safe is it to research an original high concept idea online? Thank you. So just on Angie's question, is it possible? How do you think about the research? And how do you think about the kind of the concerns that Angie has that you might have around copyright? Yeah, right. For what it's worth, my strong view is don't put stuff into the AI that if it were released onto the internet, you would be devastated.

9:15You can put things... I mean, when you yourself as a punter do use AI just in a consumer way, right? Yeah, when you put things in, just have a little think about whether if that were to come, if somebody... Because as we know, there are such things as hackers, and almost certainly it's not going to happen, But I don't think it's stupid to have that real concern to go, actually, am I putting because I think part of the question here is I'm putting my original ideas in here. And then is it going to share those original ideas with everybody else? The product of my thinking is that then going to go to all the other people?

9:52So I think there are very good reasons to say until the book is published, if I want feedback, I'm not putting the whole of my essay into ChatGPT. I'm, you know, once the book is published and it's out there, then I can use it. But be wary. There's a kind of first mover advantage in the book being published. We've got another question from Henry on this on a similar theme. Just before we take it, though, Angie says she's worked as a screenwriter for a long time. she's concerned about copyright what i don't know if you followed it closely but what do you make of this argument over music and streaming lots of very powerful musicians including elton john have said they're very concerned that ai is going to basically rip them off and the government faces a trade-off here you don't want to annoy elton john on the one hand you don't annoy lots of creators but they also want to kind of unleash uh ai because they think that britain could be an ai superpower they put a money into data centers we've got great universities blah blah blah it's a trade-off between innovation unleashing ai models giving it lots of data and also um making sure uh that you don't rip off creators now i'm sure there's a third way which i haven't articulated but how do you think about that debate all right um i think the technology itself is incredibly interesting and um i think it is a shame that right now it's it's a private company that is or several private companies that are claiming ownership over these things that we all put online for free, essentially.

11:19All of us put our tips on how to do gardening or what to do with if you've got too many beetroots and how to make a soup or how to fix your washing machine or whatever. We just put it online to help the other humans for free. And now the companies have come and scooped that all up and gone, no, this belongs to us. So it seems to me anyway, that how this ought to work is that if you are taking from that great pool of human talent and innovation and thinking and creativity then you must also be putting back into it so if all of these companies instead of hoovering up all this VC funding and just using it on more and more data centers were to be obliged to let's say put 50 % of that into investing in the creative arts in all sorts of different ways so that for every song that you might be inspired by by elton john you're also funding a young person to learn the trumpet you know what i mean then right then at that point you're going all right you're not just draining the well of human creativity taking it all for yourself and letting it go dry extracting bc of course being a venture capital venture capital um all right let's let's take another question from henry on this very subject so my argument is that human progress is defined by two fundamental pillars.

12:35Firstly, product innovation, a relentless drive for efficiency and reduced cognitive load. Think cart to car or candle to light bulb. And secondly, knowledge assimilation, the natural process of building on training data in inverted commas. Think artists studying masters or musicians being influenced by other music. Crucially, both of these pillars are united by creativity, which is everywhere. It drives breakthroughs in science and mathematics just as much as it drives painting or music. Since every innovation and every piece of knowledge is the product of accumulated prior work, AI is a human endeavour that seamlessly converges these two pillars into a technological evolution.

13:17So my question is, instead of being the protectors of their product, shouldn't artists be proud to have played their part in where humans go next? What gives them the right to introduce fiction into this process, especially when they have benefited from the work of others. For sheer erudition, that's the voice note of the year, isn't it? Voice note of the year from Henry. Product innovation and knowledge assimilation, the two great drivers of human history insofar as technology is concerned. And that point which you started laughing at, if I may say, smiling at, whimsically, Naomi, about shouldn't writers feel a certain pride in being there?

13:52I mean, if an AI produces a novel of any quality, maybe, I think some of this goes to the question I was just raising, which is absolutely fine for us all to work together on an amazing new piece of innovative technology. Bit concerned that all the money seems to be going to a few billionaires in Silicon Valley rather than being used to support extra human creativity, which, as we know, is the driver of all progress, innovation and life improvements. I do think it's a very erudite question. I'm not sure I agree that those are the only drivers I think they're the main drivers I think they are some of the drivers but I mean just on the question of how can I feel about the AI having absorbed all of these books I actually don't feel too distressed about it I know that there are writers who feel very angry about it I feel angry about the business side as I've said I don't just think that I should be paid a bit for my work, but I actually think that should be used for the greater good rather than a few people accumulating a lot more money.

15:05But also, I do think that training a machine on your artistic work is different to human beings reading it, listening to it, being inspired by it, having their lives changed by it, wanting to change other people's lives. I think there are emotional and connection features there which are not happening for the machine. Sometimes people say to me, what's the difference between your book being read by a person who's inspired by it and your book being read by an AI? And I go, look, you really don't want to start saying that a large language model is the same as a human. Because if it's the same as a human, we shouldn't be allowed to own that large language model.

15:50That's enslavement. an answer to the match an answer to match the erudition of Henry's question yes and thank you so much for the question it's a very good question brilliant question Henry this is on your you raised the idea of emotion and how that can distinguish between AIs and humans here's a question on that very subject from Theo hi I'm Ola Naomi hope you guys are well if the current problem with liberalism is that people value emotion and reactionary politics over the truth can AI play a role in reconciling this perhaps finding the truth where it may be difficult to see thank you Theo thank you so much can I just a quick thought on that um some people would say just to go to your phrase directly Theo some people would say that when you talk about liberalism there's a kind of moral or cultural liberalism but there's also an economic liberalism which is broadly speaking um free markets and so forth and they would say that the current problem with liberalism is nothing to do with emotional or reactionary politics, but the fact that free markets haven't delivered for young people, the capitalist model hasn't worked, and also that liberalism has elevated one human goal, which is freedom or autonomy, above others such as belonging.

17:03Anyway, that's my tuppence worth in response just to take apart a little bit of the question. Not to undermine it, but to say it's a pretty complicated idea when you talk about the current problem with liberalism. But you're not doing this because you want to know what I think, Theo. You want to I'm here from Naomi Alderman. So can AI play a role in reconciling emotions and reaction politics with the truth? Oh, God, it's so interesting. I have so many different thoughts about this that they are crowding to get out of my mouth. So I think I have found AI to be an incredibly helpful research tool where I have the expertise to tell whether it's telling me something true or not.

17:43Incredibly helpful. So we were talking about my doing a master's and at certain points in that I'm looking for extra resources, sources to go and look at. If I use the AI as the most brilliant form of search in the world and can go point me towards these, what I find is. Right. I ask a question about a topic that I know very well. It comes and it comes back to me with, let's say, 10 sources that it's pointed me towards. Five of them, it's just totally misunderstood the assignment. Three of them, I'm like, I knew that already. And then the last two go, oh, actually, that might be something. And then you can follow it up and try and see if it is actually good.

18:23I think using it in that way, you can get some great stuff out of it. It's very, very useful. I think I'm going to, as we do, I'm going to question some of the underlying assumptions, this very interesting question. The idea that there is a truth that we can get to is a really complicated one. so there's a very good BBC podcast on sounds right now called Radical there's another one there might even be as many as two there's a there's a six-part podcast called Anatomy of a Cancellation which is about a I mean in some ways almost it's almost impossible to imagine how it got as big as it did it was a cancellation there was a writer Kate Clanchy it's actually so it's Presented by Katie Razzle, the brilliant culture media editor.

19:16Honestly, I just don't think anywhere but the BBC could have done it in that incredibly thoughtful way. It's framed as this is a story that's like Rashomon. Rashomon being a Japanese film in which every single witness to an event has a slightly different memory of it and they cannot all be true. And everybody in that story has their own version of the truth. there's something where you need to be able to hold on to. I mean, this is what my book, Don't Burn You at the Stake Today, is really about. It's about going, we're going to have to accept that at the end of the day when all the facts are down, people will still have different views.

20:00And the only way that we've ever managed to make everybody agree is by doing a huge number of human rights atrocities and totalitarianism. And even then it doesn't work because still loads of people, I mean, effectively still there, there are still Catholics and Protestants, right? You just don't get to a point where everybody agrees. What you can hope for is not necessarily reaching a final, this is the answer, but an understanding of why people have different perspectives on it. But on Theo's central question, which is AI playing a role in reconciling, is there a role for AI to play in truth seeking?

20:35You mentioned the 10 examples, five are nonsense, three you don't really rate, and two are quite useful. So is it basically we should think of AI as a tool which aggregates what's been thought and read and is on the internet, and we use that as a way of kind of helping us get to some approximation of the truth? Yeah, I think it's most helpful when it is a tool for broadening out rather than narrowing. Got it. So my sort of annoying, I've got a Masters in Classics answer is people used to love to go to the Oracle at Delphi to ask the Oracle, what is the nature of my life? What is my life's goal?

21:12And then the Oracle at Delphi would say this weird random sentence, probably because this person had been given quite a lot of drugs. And then they would take that away as, oh, this is the kind of weird answer that I have to reflect on. so I think we have that urge to just go I need to ask an authority to give me an answer and if we use the AI in that way I think that's going to be disastrous okay that's a very very very clear answer to Theo's question final question is I got this on Instagram I did a little punt for questions on Instagram and in came Lucy Hicks Beach Thank you very much indeed Lucy Hicks Beach contacting me on Instagram with this voice note I loved your book The Power and I also loved the series with Tony Collette that covered the first half of the book Will there be a second season that covers the second half of the book?

22:09Thanks I just played that off my phone which is for people who are obviously listening to this that was pretty good sound quality That means people can get in touch with me If you've got questions for our future guests Don't get in touch with me with all your strange problems. I just want questions for our future guests of the calibre of Lucy's question on Instagram, which I just played off my phone into this glorious microphone. What's the answer? I'm afraid the answer is no. Oh, come on. I know. I'm going to do this face, like sad, sticking out my lower lip face. Why? What happened with the show?

22:39Unfortunately, we were the show that we started filming in February of 2020 and then we had to close down the set for 18 months. Oh. Pandemic. So by the time we were able to kind of bring it all back together, it was sort of clear that we're not going to be able to do a second season. It was just it happened. We were able to do it. I'm delighted we've been able to do it. Listen, at some point the rights will come back to me and then maybe we can do it again. So for Lucy, who is a big fan of your writing and others who are one of the millions and millions and millions and millions and millions who have loved your novels.

23:14What can they look forward to other than your nonfiction book, Don't Burn Anyone at the Steak Today? So when are you going to be turning your pen and putting your hand in the attic and hoping for that kind of inspiration? I've got a new novel out next year, which is a novel written. So my mother died a couple of years ago. I'm so sorry. Thank you. And it was a very strange time for a lot of different reasons. And my novel is narrated by me, Naomi Alderman, in the year after my mother has died. and also in the novel. A strange new animal has appeared in the United Kingdom. It is about as the size of a badger, quite low to the ground, flat-faced, long proboscis.

23:56They have come from nowhere and now they are everywhere. They are suddenly as common as foxes and no one knows where they came from. Is it called a mole? I mean, that's very good. There's been a long debate between me and my publisher about what this would be called. and in the end I think it's called The Strangers. That's amazing. Yeah, thanks. That's really exciting. That really is. That book, I did not anticipate writing it. I put my hand out and I'm like, oh, okay, that's turned out. Have you written it? Yeah. Is it good? I mean, I think so. Naomi Alderman, it's been such, such a joy chatting to you and thank you for sticking around for our listeners' questions and thank you for the longer chat in last week's episode as well and best of luck with Don't Burn Anyone at the State today but also with The Strangers.

24:43With the strangers. Thank you very much. It's been an absolute treat.

24:49Thank you to Naomi Alderman for answering your radical questions. We hope to have many more in the new year. But before then, you're going to get an episode featuring some of my highlights from the interviews that we've done on this podcast so far. That will be out later this week. And your treat for the start of 2026 is the historian Tom Holland on the history of radicalism. We will speak to you very soon indeed. Goodbye.

25:42I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.