In the German fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife, an old man one day catches a strange fish: a talking flounder. It turns out that an enchanted prince is trapped inside this fish and that it can therefore grant any wish. The man’s wife, Ilsebill, is delighted and wishes for increasingly excessive things. She turns their miserable hut into a castle, but that is not enough; eventually she wants to become the pope and, finally, God. This enrages the elements; the sea turns dark and she is transformed back into her original impoverished state. The moral of the story: don’t wish for anything you’re not entitled to.
Several variations of this classic fairytale motif are known. Sometimes, the wishes are not so much excessive or offensive to the divine order of the world, but simply clumsy or contradictory, such as in Charles Perrault’s The Ridiculous Wishes. Or, as in WW Jacobs’ 1902 horror story The Monkey’s Paw, their wishes unintentionally harm someone who is actually much closer to them than the object of their desire.
Today, of course, most young people grow up with an enchanted fish in their pocket. They can wish for their homework to be done, and the fish will grant their wishes. They can wish to see any kind of sexual act imaginable, and (if they work around regional age-controls with a VPN) it will be visible. Soon they will be able to wish for films on a subject of their choice and these will be generated within seconds. They wish they had already finished that university essay – and lo and behold, it’s written.
This change in approach will not just upend our relationship as consumers of the creative arts, of written, musical or visual content, it will also reconfigure what it means to be creative and, therefore, what it means to be human. I can imagine that most people in the near future will be able to task an AI representative with all kinds of tiresome interactions – negotiating contracts on their behalf or acting as their agent, receiving and cushioning criticism, collating information, surveying opinions and so on. And the sea will never turn dark.
For now, young Ilsebills sitting in university lecture halls can still expect to be fined when their professor, who grew up in a different era, notices that she has got the enchanted fish to write yet another one of her essays. But that will only last a few more years, until Ilsebill is part of a self-confident majority and most of the professors grew up as Ilsebills themselves. Ilsebill wishes for a boyfriend, a spiritual coach, a therapist – and in an instant she will have one. With each one of these companions, it will feel as if Ilsebill has known them for years, which is literally true.
One could accuse Ilsebill of complicating matters when, like her mythical predecessor, she one day actually wants to become pope and immediately does so in…
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