Offal magazine is making AI fall over
We delivered the launch issue of Offal magazine to our subscribers last year and I loved it. A self-proclaimed “haggis of literary culture”, it’s made from artistic offcuts and pieces of text that don’t fit elsewhere, and it has a brilliantly anarchic tone, wallowing in the dark and dystopian sludge of a Britain that’s slowly going to the dogs.
I was looking forward to picking up issue two when it came out a few weeks ago, and I thought I knew what to expect. But I was amazed to find that things had somehow got stranger still. Intrigued by the oddness, I set up a podcast conversation with editors Mark Blacklock and Roderick Stanley, to find out what it’s all about.
One of the most puzzling components of the second issue is Dr Smile, “an AI in a suitcase”, inspired by the fictitious psychotherapist of the same name, who provides therapy via portable suitcase in Philip K Dick’s novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
The issue begins with the two editors and Dr Smile on a trip to Paris, the hapless editors trying to follow the AI’s advice for what they should do next. They explain that they started by training an AI chatbot on, “business management theories, publishing guides, psychotherapeutic models, the KLF’s The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way, a manuscript of Offal issue one, and various other ephemera related to our hybrid audio-zine project.” Then they got on with trying to work with it.
Reading the Dr Smile bits, I wasn’t sure whether it really existed. Would they actually have followed a chatbot to Paris, let alone invited it into the decision-making process of publishing their magazine? Surely this was just a conceit for a piece of creative writing?
As you’ll hear in our conversation, it was all totally real. And not just an elaborate joke played for laughs, but a genuine attempt to engage with AI tools and take them beyond their limits.
In fact, that playful approach to AI is a central part of the project, as Mark and Rod (and “the third Offal”, Gavin Weale) try to get it to glitch and fall over, searching for the places where it can get artistically and aesthetically interesting. But of course AI is just one ingredient in their literary sausage, and I hope you’ll enjoy their thoughts on this bricolage project that’s driven by a DIY spirit of play and adventure.
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