I let the devil into a John H. Watson Society meeting today.
Since we started the JHWS Zoom meetings during Covid times, they've been a chatty, free-flowing thing with whatever agenda item I happened to throw in for a given month. Not a good ritual sort, so I'm really not the guy you want hosting regular meetings, but you know how Covid was. We all got out of our routines a bit. The world changed on us.
And for the December meeting, I had decided to do an adaptation of "Blue Carbuncle," as one does around this time of year. But as the meeting grew closer and my adaptation was only half done, I had one of those moments of weakness where temptations find easy prey.
I wondered how AI would do at adapting "Blue Carbuncle." And Google Gemini was right there on the browser. So I asked it to do a modern adaptation. Then I asked it to set it in Texas, and it rewrote the script to take place in Austin. Then I got crazy and went "Give John Watson a love interest," and Mary Morstan suddenly appeared in the story. And it seemed like a fairly competent script. But I knew . . . I knew . . . this would be very controversial.
But my Sherlockian career has never been about playing it safe. So I decided to let the thing play our as a reader's theater and then have the discussion of how well the AI did after it was received with the thought it was human-produced. But that discussion never happened, as, like so much of modern life, the battle lines have already been drawn with respect to those softwares we group up under the name "AI."
My career working with medical software is a place with AI cannot be denied. Doctors are already cutting hours out of their workday as it helps streamline their note-taking, a usage that's valuable and actually helps them spend more time with patients. And like every other business in America, the upper management is pushing for more AI use. Denial is not an option in most workplaces. The beastie is here and we have to adapt and deal.
In the world of arts and literature, there's a thought that this beastie can be dealt with by just refusing to deal with it. Climb to the moral high ground and outlast the flood. But as much as some Sherlockians would like to remain in a Victorian mindset, be a happy Luddite, and leave it at that, the shifting technological world has already hit us, hard.
Publish on demand printing has yielded more books on Sherlock Holmes in the past few years than ever before. Anyone can publish a Holmes pastiche, regardless of quality. Anyone can publish a book of Canonical commentary, Sherlockian chronology, Holmes fandom memoirs . . . anything. And that was just people who can write.
Now we have a software imp that can let anybody write a book. All you have to do is have an idea and the proper wish given to the genie. All of the arguments against AI -- the somewhat dubious way it grabs its knowledge, the horrible drain on natural resources humans need to survive, that it will steal more jobs than an immigrant force ever imagined -- all of that falls away when the right person is offered the right wish by this new magic. We are, after all . . . human.
I did violate a certain trust in rolling an AI-created script out for a Sherlockian audience without advance warning, even if I did have full intentions of revealing after. Even as an experiment -- my subjects did not volunteer for this experiment. There's definitely some smut on my aura, to use a metaphor from a certain demonic novel series. But the monster is here.
Whether it's publish-on-demand, 3D printed creations, AI-generated video, or a simple reader's theater script, we're living in the future now, and are all going to have to figure out just how that's going to work for us. How we screen what we take in, where each thing can actually serve a useful purpose, and how we stem the flow of garbage that can come from any one of those innovations.
2026 is nigh, and a future none of us expected. Even here in the Sherlockian world.
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