Kathy Burke on AI fears as she talks about secrets of new book
Kathy Burke wrote her new autobiography because she was fearful that an AI version would be released filled with inaccuracies and lies.
The actor and comedian, releases her brilliant book A Mind Of My Own tomorrow charting her tough upbringing and life in theatre, TV and film.
And explaining how and why the book came about, Kathy said: “I never thought I would write one. Actually, I’ve written stuff that’s sort of a bit autobiographical for like the telly and stuff like that, but I never thought I’d write a memoir, but then the threat of AI was looming.
“That just meant some a**hole could just go into a microphone, ‘do me a biography of so and so’, and then it would just do it and so that frightened me a little bit. So I just thought, I’ll stop being lazy and get on with it.”
She added: “I thought, well am I going to enjoy this, because anytime I’ve done writing in the past, I’ve actually find it, found it quite lonely. It’s the only time I’ve sort of felt loneliness is writing, and so that’s why I don’t do it much.
“So I thought, well, I’ll do a couple of chapters and see if I like it, if I enjoy it, just as a little experiment before we sign any contract. And I did really enjoy it.
“I think it’s just being older and not writing dialog and just sort of thinking about yourself, which is one of my favourite hobbies!”
Kathy wrote the book entirely on her iPhone, writing a few chapters a month and then sending to her publishers and meeting them for lunch to discuss it. After a few months of writing she realised she had a lot to say so the book only goes up until she hits 40 and steps away from acting full time.
Speaking in a Q&A at the Adelphi Theatre, she explained: “I didn’t want to rush the last 25 years So then Holly (Kathy’s publisher) said, We’ll take it up to when I decided to sort of officially give up acting. Like, stop the acting being my first job. So it goes up to then really up to when I’m just reaching 40. And then there might be another book in a couple of years.
“We’ll see how I feel, it won’t be next year but maybe the year after, we will see how this goes down and if I can be arsed.”
The first book covers her appearance in award winning films like Nil By Mouth and comedy TV shows like Absolutely Fabulous, Gimme Gimme Gimme and Harry Enfield and Chums.
She also admits she eventually quit acting full time because she preferred directing theatre work, but still makes occasional appearance on screen, most recently in the Steve McQueen film Blitz which was released last year.
Other celebrities have also spoken of their concerns about AI, especially in Hollywood where there are now AI actors.
Emily Blunt, speaking on a podcast with Variety, said the creation was terrifying.
That’s an AI? Good Lord, we’re screwed,” The Oscar-nominated actress said when shown a video of AI creation Tilly Norwood. “That is really, really scary, Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection.”
A large number of biographies of celebrities created using AI tools like Chat GPT are also readily available for as little as 99p. But they are not checked in any way and contain huge factual inaccuracies.
Author Sir Philip Pullman has also called on the government this week to change copyright laws on “scraping”, where writers’ books are used to train artificial intelligence (AI) software to understand and generate human language.
Kathy Burke A Mind Of My Own is out Tomorrow published by Gallery Books.