Frankly, I don’t know what women see in me. But I have got through more of them than King Henry VIII.
My first wife was “the actress Siân Phillips”. She and I had two daughters together – Kate and Patricia. I can’t remember whether it was during or after this marriage that I “also had a son, Lorcan Patrick O’Toole” with my “girlfriend Karen Brown”.
I was subsequently married to Eileen Flynn. And then (forgive me if the chronology is a bit off – it gets hard to keep track) to the excellent British writer and critic Maya Jaggi, with whom I also had two daughters. I then moved on to the late great travel writer Dervla Murphy. We had “one daughter together named Aoife”. And since I apparently liked my fourth wife’s first name, but got tired of the relationship, I dumped her and moved on to Dervla Chambers.
I am now married to “the author Aoife Moore”. But who knows for how long? As the Liz Taylor of Irish journalism I may look for the love of my life at least once more before they send me to the nursing home. I may even go back to Siân who still looks fabulous at 93. If you’re reading this darling, do give me a call for old time’s sake.
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I must confess I’ve been a terrible father to Kate, Patricia, Lorcan, Aoife and those other two daughters with Maya whose names, to my eternal shame, I can’t now recall.
But then, they’re been pretty neglectful too. On Father’s Day the other week not one of the brats sent me a card with a knowing double entendre or a pair of novelty socks. I am cutting them all out of my will, although admittedly after I’ve split my assets between all the ex-wives and girlfriends there won’t be much left.
Google’s AI Overviews also suggest that “Fintan O’Toole has one known sibling, a brother named Ryan and a sister named Jade”. Apart from the delightful doubling of my one known sibling (or did Ryan transition to Jade?), I do kind of understand why I never knew about either of them. Brendan Behan claimed that in Crumlin, Dublin, where I grew up, they “ate their young”. I can tell you that in the 1950s and 1960s any kids called Ryan or Jade would have been first on the menu.
The estimable journalist and podcaster Aoife Moore will be relieved to hear that all of the above (with the exception of my marriage to Dervla Murphy, which was on Wikipedia until last year) is from recent or current summaries provided by AI Overviews and OpenAI’s ChatGPT of “Fintan O’Toole, the well-known Irish journalist and literary critic”.
None of these, sadly, is true. Unless I am further advanced into amnesia than I can remember, I have only ever had one wife (the current one). I have two sons, but have been inexcusably negligent when it comes to the production of daughters.
Some of this gunk has crudely logical origins. Obviously, Siân Phillips was married to Peter O’Toole and they did have daughters Kate and Pat, both distinguished actors – as is Lorcan O’Toole whose mother is indeed Karen Brown. AI actually knows that all of these stellar people have nothing whatsoever to do with me – it warns that “Peter O’Toole the actor is not directly related to Fintan, despite the shared surname” – but it lumps us in together anyway, using the more famous of us (me) to “recognise” the more obscure Peter.
I can also see how the machine came up with me being married to Eileen Flynn. It trawled a column I wrote here last year about how my wife and I had to keep secret our marriage in a register office in 1983 because she was teaching in a Catholic school: “Less than six months before our wedding, another teacher in a convent school, Eileen Flynn, was fired from her job because she was living with, and had become pregnant by, a man to whom she was not married”. The proximity of “our wedding” with the name “Eileen Flynn” caused the algorithm to put one and one together and get #%&!!*???
With this category of AI vomit, you can see what is being puked up. A system that has (according to AI) a trillion parameters is still too small to distinguish fully between genuine connections and ones it knows to be false (like me and Peter O’Toole being the same person) but is programmed to make regardless.
Because it must come up with “facts”, AI is forced to spew out consciously absurd factoids.
You can, nonetheless, see how AI will eventually get much better at avoiding this variety of logical malfunction.
But there’s a whole other kind of bunkum in this account of my multiple marital adventures. My “relationships” to Maya Jaggi, the two Dervlas, Aoife Moore, my daughter Aoife, my brother Ryan and my sister Jade are entirely ChatGPT’s own work. It has babbled them out of its own accord.
Three of these “people” (Maya Jaggi, Aoife Moore and the late Dervla Murphy) are well known in their own right – but they enter my “life” in a way that has no kind of logic at all. They are actual persons turned into figments of a machine’s uneasy dreams.
But three others (young Aoife, Ryan and Jade) have a different kind of existential status – which is to say none at all. They are virtual detritus, digital debris disgorged by AI’s manic hallucinations.
This is the part I find scary: the system is capable of suspecting that maybe the process that gives me bits of Peter O’Toole’s life might be rubbish. But it does not seem to have the same capacity to apply this hesitant self-doubt to the nonsense it generates all by itself.
And, of course, since ChatGPT will also steal this column, everything I’ve written ironically in these opening paragraphs will now loop back into its ravenous maw as verified truth.
All my non-existent wives and children will be with me forever in the afterlife of fact.
