Sheepless in Seattle

It’s all been done already. By some sheep, somewhere.

A few weeks ago in one of my podcasts I wrote about Chat GPT, the new phenomenon that has sent waves through the world of those who keep an eye on the world of Artificial Intelligence. This is the software that will write for you and interact with you in spookily interesting and productive ways.

My brother in law rang up in an excited state having just discovered Chat GPT (it has actually been around since November and there are others vying for AI top dog status). He had been using it to generate silly stories about monks falling in love with terrapins.

My implicit question, which you will find at the tail end of Episode 7 of my podcast, is how people can retain relevance and dignity when so many tasks can potentially be done without them. But there is an equally annoying phenomenon that plagues mankind which I will call Sheepless in Seattle Syndrome or SISS for short. It goes like this. The other day I thought it would be amusing to go in for a bit of wordplay in this podcast and tell a story about a man who goes to Seattle to become a sheep farmer but can’t find any sheep to buy. Hence the title Sheepless in Seattle. I was looking forward to this exercise but thought I would just Google the concept first.

To my annoyance several people had got there first. Someone called Amy Beth Inverness has written a book about a man who takes sheep to the moon with the same title. In Late Night with Seth Meyers’ Karen Chee and illustrator Jonny Sun play a game about romantic movies and animals called, you guessed it, Sheepless in Seattle. There is an instagram user who has it for their handle. And most mind boggling of all there is an eopisode of The Simpsons called Sheepless In Seattle in which Homer and Bart end up crashing into Little Bo Peep’s sheep farm causing all the sheep to escape.

The point I am making is, whatever you think of has probably been thought of already and done by someone else. Before the internet this didn’t matter so much but now you only have to google to see who got there first so you can throw your hands up in the air and say “I give up”. In fact between AI and the rest of the world you are probably screwed. Go back to filming puppies with their head down the toilet and see if you can do it better than anyone else.

My brother in law, bless him, was in a paddy because he had asked ChatGP to tell him tonight’s lottery numbers and even though he knew it wasn’t going to happen he had to get the numbers in the mix and realised that the window for entries closed in ten minutes. As we have a lottery account we could do it for him. 

He had also used ChatGP to write some advertising copy for his rug business, but that excited him far less than stories about monks and terrapins or the prospect of winning the lottery. It seems that Artificial Intelligence may have many positive uses but none of them will be as attractive as finding new and original ways for simply having a laugh. Perhaps that is mankind’s ultimate fate. We will become trivial rather than extinct. Personally I think the latter might be a preferable option.