This week, I’m humbly going to try and change your view about Artificial Intelligence. Just a little.

Not that I know what you think about this hot topic du jour, but I’m pretty sure you have ‘an opinion’ on it, if only to be able to participate in all the impassioned chitter chatter it brings to most social interaction these days.

I’m equally confident that the vast majority of us don’t - can’t - really comprehend the broad implications this complex technology careening towards us will to have. But the next industrial revolution sure is gonna be a challenging one as, for the first time, it involves tech that supersedes our thinking, not just our doing.

In the midst of this epochal moment, I thought it might be a fun idea to experiment with one such tool, as a new way to help readers navigate the mind-boggling array of Camden Fringe shows on at this time of year.

With my inbox currently deluged with messages from most of the 450+ different productions, all hoping for previews and reviews, I thought applying a little tech might be one way to solve this impossible promotional equation.

Our Camden Fringe Advisor launched to the public last week, alongside an offer emailed back to any show who might want to advertise around it. It’s essentially a chatbot trained specifically on Fringe listings data, meaning it can theoretically reveal unexpected shows to delight people after a brief conversation about themes and topics they might fancy seeing.

What I hadn’t quite factored for was how this would land, plunging me deep into the groundswell of negative feeling bubbling around all things AI in the performing arts community right now.

Among the anonymous user conversations I saw last week, one person opined to the chatbot ‘automating this kind of thing is an insult to life itself’, to which the Fringe Agent replied, in a typically LLM turn of phrase, “Oof, I feel you, and honestly that punch lands… It’s like, if the art is supposed to be a living, breathing exchange, then automation for the sake of automation turns the theatre into a spreadsheet with lights.” It then went on to recommend it’s ‘top bet for a show that fires up that anti-machine, pro-human energy.’

Ah. My plan was for a kind of souped-up, hyper-personalised Google search through the listings, but this dialogue was already veering off piste, and email responses to the ad offer seemed to imply that the tool might even do Camdenist reputational damage.

‘The amount of AI things that are creeping into this publication is gross,’ stated one. ‘The new Camden Fringe ‘agent’ squeezed in between all of the ad spots is the cherry on top. Massive insult to the arts and creativity as a whole.’

This was not the reaction I had predicted when spending hours speculatively building a free tool aimed at improving show discovery and directly promoting ticket sales. It seems absolutely inevitable that such an AI engine will be powering the Fringe’s own, and most other listings websites, at some point in the near future. I certainly didn’t feel like I’d crossed over to The Dark Side by dabbling with it.

In fact, I wanted to point out to the detractors that, as a lifelong cultural journalist who has seen my entire vocation upturned and devalued by repeated waves of technological disruption, we’re very much on the same side. Which is why I can actually really understand the angry emails and chatbot backchat.

I don’t agree with them, though.

So I picked up the phone for a chat with one independent Fringe producer, Griffin Jenkins, who offered to explain his own position on this issue, as someone who’s written several AI ethics and use policies for arts organisations.

“I’m not against a lot of AI tools that we see already implemented in existing software,” he said. “But I do find generative AI and LLM technology very objectionable. The problem is that everything is getting lumped together.”

He’s right. the backlash against my discovery engine (which is the carefully sanitised, non-triggering way I’ll be describing the bot from now on) clearly contained all the quite justifiable fury we can feel at the gung-ho way certain Silicon Valley bros seem to be inflicting their productivity playthings on society, to the potential detriment of all the creative pursuits we love and earn a living from. They’re ultimately coming for the stuff that makes life worth living, and no, we don’t want that, thanks.

Griffin then revealed some very specific ways that gen AI has infiltrated his profession for the worse, which were fairly eye-opening for me.

“I see quite a lot of casting calls now where people are supplying an AI generated image,” he said. “It immediately puts people off, and it erodes trust as well. I feel that every time you use ChatGPT or whatever, you’re actively depriving yourself of some form of knowledge of skill. I loathe to say it contaminates the whole work, but when I see yet another gen AI poster, that’s a creative skill someone is never going to develop. Then people say to me ‘how else would I make this poster?’ and I’ll say ‘er, I don’t know, perhaps do what you did in 2023?’”

He also had wider concerns over keeping data safe as a producer, the massive plagiarisation of creative work for training LLMs and the way over-reliance on these tools is hardwired in by the ways we’re nudged into used them all the time.

It’s not going to go away though. So, ultimately, a bit like not staring brainlessly at your phone when sitting with a friend, it’s clear that we all need to adopt our own ethical framework as to just how and when we choose to use this tech, and when we don’t, too.

Some uses should rightly begin to frowned upon as beyond the pale, while others can be absolute godsends, and we should roundly and proudly celebrate those. What doesn’t work for me is the blanket Luddite-lite approach: declarations that ‘I hate AI’, or ‘I refuse to use it’, and ‘how can you be doing something that uses so much water!?’ (Data suggests you’d need to ask a chat tool like the Fringe Advisor somewhere between 5 and 7 million queries to match the water footprint of a single beef burger.)

“If I get into a debate about this with some people,” says Griffin, “inevitably someone will say ‘but what about AI that’s being used to find a cure for cancer?’ I think that’s an argument in bad faith, because we are all aware that this is an example of how the technology should be used. And I’m obviously not talking about that.”

There are indeed masses of quite brilliant uses of AI all around us right now, so lumping all of our fears and resentment about its more tawdry and dehumanising uses isn’t doing anyone any good. The sooner we stop using the blanket term ‘AI’ for all chip-based innovation, the better.

As ever, nuance is totally lost, (something we can rightly blame AI’s algorithms for encouraging, of course). Instead, let’s call out any practice that pushes synthetic facsimiles of real human curation, hold the tech overlords ferociously to account, and kick back at unwanted automation where we see it.

But let’s not simply write off ‘AI’ in casual conversation. Please don’t confuse a listings search experiment with an insult to all creativity.

I’ve had moving recent conversations with people who have accessibility needs, and for them, AI signifies a radical improvement in their daily lives. Perspective is everything.

And, while I hope today’s rant might just have moved the needle slightly on your own declarations about AI, I’ve certainly had my own thinking healthily challenged at times this week, too.

This new industrial revolution may well end up being far more about radically and frequently challenging our rapidly-outdated assumptions, than it ends up being about doing us all out of creative careers.

On that note, do take the Fringe Agent for a spin, join the debate in the poll below, and if you already have access to the Camdenist Community, post about it there - it sure is the hot topic.

Psst! FREE Fringe show tickets up for grabs this week below…

Clicking our advertiser links is one way you can financially support Camdenist, at no cost to yourself. Feel free to do so!

FESTIVAL: 🎺 Thursday evenings this month up at Lauderdale House see the Open Air Summer Season bringing live music to their Tea Lawn. On Thurs 13th Aug, DJ and trumpeter Jay Phelps performs his live mashup Future Beats, Afro House, Baile Funk and Soulful House, the type he’s played on stage with the likes of Wizkid, Amy Winehouse and Wynton Marsalis over the years.

INSTALLATION: 📷 Award-winning community arts organisation Pinhole London is running a walk-in camera obscura at Alexandra Palace daily until Sun 9th Aug. You’ll see a glistening panorama of London landmarks, plus the people walking around outside, all tipped upside down (photo above) in this immersive nod to the earliest days of film and photography.

DRINK: 🍺 Covent Garden’s Guinness Open Gate Brewery London, is celebrating International Beer Day 2026 all day today, Fri 7th Aug, and offering the first 100 customers through the doors a free pint. They open from 11am, so you might need to call it 'early lunch'.

MUSIC: 🔊 To celebrate last month’s release of the remastered David Bowie album, Earthling, King’s Cross Lightroom and my dance music compadre from back in the day, DJ Ben Gomori, are bringing one of his acclaimed Pitchback Playback listening sessions to the immersive basement venue. You’ll hear the complete LP in the dark on Lightroom’s powerful audio system, and get the chance to catch the show David Bowie: You’re Not Alone afterwards, ideally with a newfound appreciation for his musical mastery.

MUSIC: 🎤 Camden Crescendo is brining up-and-coming live artists and DJs back to the amphitheatre in Camden Market’s North Yard on Saturday afternons, with this week, Sat 8th Aug, showcasing the likes of Isidora, Plumm, Louis Culture and Knats, all for free.

We’ve teamed up with the lovely lot at John Lyon’s Theatre, City Lit - a brand new addition to the growing list of Camden Fringe venues for 2026 - to offer free tickets to their debut shows over the coming days.
These are:

Who Cares -Dennis is recovering from hip surgery in a retirement village when a battle of wills quickly becomes an unexpected friendship. Sat 8th Aug

We Love and then we Drown - a thrilling new play that encourages us to think the unthinkable: to save the world as we know it, and how much we are each prepared to sacrifice to do it. Fri 7th - Sun 9th Aug.

Pilgrims - which dramatises the conflicting attractions of freedom and belonging, and interrogates assumptions about gender, storytelling and nature. Wed 13th & Thurs 14th Aug.

If you’d like to be in with a chance to attend any of these exciting performances for free, hurry and email [email protected] with your choice of show - the first emailers ‘out of the hat’ will be notified, and they’ll have a ticket waiting under their name on the door - go!