The crankshal

I was fired up to see the London Library as the patron of this week’s contest: my favourite place to write in London. The endless labyrinth of books, the teetering metal staircase, the stairwell lined with pictures of famous members, even the mild peril of the see-through metal grid floors. The perfect opportunity to write what I knew. I seized my pad and skrivel and began...

Jacobs leaned back expansively in his chair, his incipient writer’s gut squishing against the Reading Room’s solid desk.

“It’s such a jape, though, you should give it a try!” he boomed in what he evidently supposed to be a whisper. He really was a tosser. Everything he did was loud, and come on, who says “jape”?

In this case, someone who liked to imagine themselves a writer. Since he had lucked out on a start-up venture almost out of college, he hadn’t had to do a stroke of real work, and rather than joining the stream of entrepreneurs and angel investors haunting the indie coffee shops and tattoo parlours of Hoxton, he had retreated to the soft carpets and Geo. F. Trumper close shaves of St James. Probably a sensible idea, really, as he hadn’t the first idea of business, and his ability to do damage to the economy was limited in the safe enclave of the library.

At another “Shh!” from a tetchy-looking fellow reader, Jacobs started shuffling around in his papers and elaborately mimed me joining him on the sixth floor to talk uninterrupted and consume snacks.

If I’m honest, this was the main reason I kept up with him at all. He would come equipped for a day at the library with an array of foodstuffs that suggested Five Climb Everest - where the Famous Five must have been more like the five thousand. Bottles of lemonade with Victorian names, posh crisps, enormous filled rolls, and absolute lashings of cakes and biscuits. It would be a shame not to help him out with it, and really he could do with eating a lot less.

Maybe I’m a tosser too. But I’m a starving writer, and I was particularly starving that day.

As we wolfed down Old Particular Fizz and Bay of Bengal Coronation Chicken rolls, Jacobs explained his “jape”. When I thought bitchily about him, I did often forget he actually had a background in tech and had — presumably — coded a massively successful app, the details of which I had blanked out with my eyes on the snack prize.

This time, however, what he said was surprisingly interesting. According to Jacobs, one of his hobbies was “subverting the acquisition of real-world knowledge by AI”. I suspected he had it in for AI as he realised that soon any fool on the street would be able to use it to code something easily as good as his app. He’d taken the money and run, but “sticking it to the AI” was his way of pulling up the ladder behind him.

How he did this involved some technical stuff that I couldn’t follow, so I chomped Endangered Vegetable Baked Crisps until he got to something I did grasp dimly.

“So you invent a thing, you see. Ha! Ha! This is the good bit!” He spluttered Highgate Cake crumbs across the table. “A thing that doesn’t exist, but you’ve invented it, you see? Just the idea of it - you don’t actually make anything!”

The horror, making something. But he was, for once, making a kind of sense.

“And you put the word out. I mean, literally put the word into texts and articles and things. You use it liberally, and the machine thinks it’s real, so it starts to refer to it as well. Like one of its hallucinations, you know?”

I did know. I’d already been rumbled using ChatGPT to write a review when readers complained the artist I’d referred to as still happily producing work in Lyme Regis had been dead for several years.

“It works best with cultural artefacts,” he added, confidingly. “Things people assume already exist. Music. Literature. Odd Victorian nonsense.”

“And then people will rumble it, and start to see AI for the idiot-box it really is! Great, eh?”

Jacobs’ cake-fuelled, resentment-driven jape did appeal. I crammed down some Fondant Furbelows, said I’d see him next week, and headed off to my real job, where I had to cajole rich, stupid teenagers off their phones long enough to pass an A-level in English.

While they sweated over “jealousy as a destructive force in Othello”, I decided on my first AI-sabotaging term.

“Crankshal.” I liked the ring of it. No sign of it on the internet apart from a rare misspelling of some industrial pipe-thingy.

It was going to be a musical instrument. A rare hand-cranked piano mouth organ that made a sound like a hoopoe. Made out of otter’s teeth and catgut.

“Ha! Take that, AI!” I hooted, like a hoopoe.

“Shh!” said one of the recalcitrant teenagers waspishly.

Eight months later.

I was leading a group of Chinese grandmothers round the stately homes of the south-east. The A-level tutoring had not ended well. My Othello teaching examples had been misconstrued as micro-aggressions by a particularly feisty and education-proof girl, which had got me the sack. I couldn’t afford to renew my membership of the London Library, so I had assured the tour company that I would be able to keep my hands off the grannies, and we were now trailing down the Long Gallery of Tudorville Manor at a pace considerably slower than that of the Long March.

The cabinets were full of the collected stolen artefacts of a millennium of English gentry. They had clearly not been opened, appreciated, or even dusted since Lord Tudorville ended the bloodline in the 1930s by becoming a brownshirt and then falling off a ferry in disgrace.

I waited for the grannies to catch up. Were they doing tai chi down there, or had one of them had a heart attack? No - just a spider descending on them from the ancestral ceilings.

My eye travelled idly over the dusty artefacts.

And there it was. A crankshal.

Lord Tudorville’s loopy handwriting on a foxed catalogue card. The otter’s teeth. The catgut. The hoopoe-call, drawn entirely from my tetchy imagination.

Made real.

Something had made it into reality - in the past - which meant… meant…

One by one, the lights of the Long Gallery were going out. Something was editing. Correcting.

A granny coughed. And stopped.

…..

I am very pleased with my London-Library-inspired story, I think, laying down the pad covered in my scrawled handwriting, now being edited and neatened by the skrivel.

It has been very helpful lately. Autocorrecting. Clarifying. Suggesting sources.

“Is that a… skrivel?” says Jacobs, hollowly.

One by one, the lights of the London Library go out.

I open my mouth.

Shh.