ON a recent holiday in Aviemore, I was struck by the volume of Highland cow AI-generated tat that was on sale. Of course, the hielan coo, shortbread tin image of Scotland is nothing new – rewind two years and there was still no end to the stereotypical tartan tat available in tourist shops – but the AI slop feels worse for a few reasons.
The first is the sheer indignity suffered by our other national animal at the hands of AI. Fair enough, we’re used to seeing hielan coos in unnaturally bright colours adorning cushions, tins, coasters, keyrings etc, but the unfortunate beasts now find themselves in all sorts of situations: getting married in the snaw in an Edinburgh-esque street, playing football in a distorted approximation of the strips of Scotland’s best kent teams, wearing tweeds and holding guns like they’re going hunting, and perhaps most alarmingly, playing the bagpipes thanks to the chilling addition of leathery-looking sausage fingers where the hooves should be.
Aside from the obvious question of “why are people buying this crap?”, there’s another couple bubbling just under the surface, that contribute to the feeling that AI-generated tat is a step too far. “If you want a souvenir, why not buy work from actual Scottish artists?” and “whose Scotland is this, really?”.
The first question, “why are people buying this crap?”, I suspect can be answered in the same way it could have been a few years ago: Scotland has an easily digestible external image that is lapped up by folk from elsewhere.
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Tartan, whisky, hielan coos, thistles, empty mountains with nothing but heather, couthy wee villages, the Brigadoon of it all.
Ever since wealthy Victorians sepia-tinted the windows of the trains that took folk up to Scotland to make it look like they were travelling through a postcard, we’ve been excellent at selling a nostalgic view of a country that never really was.
At least though, in the before times, a person designed and created the tat we see shilled to tourists wanting to take home a piece of their imagined Scotland.
Now, this view of Scotland is even further removed from reality. What we’re seeing is AI’s idea of what Scotland is based on a prompt fed to a machine detailing what the “creator” thinks will sell.
The more this stuff is generated, the more distorted Scotland’s image online becomes – each image a mechanical fever dream of a fantastic landscape where every stone circle is straight out of Outlander, every dog a Scottie or Westie, every flower a thistle – an aggregation of our nation’s biggest stereotypes, created from stolen work, made into landfill-core tat.
The second question, “if you want a souvenir, why not buy from actual Scottish artists?”, is key here. We are a country full of artists and designers and craftspeople who make beautiful work inspired by the land and our culture. It’s meaningful, skilled, and human.
Sales of this work directly benefit an actual artist who has honed their craft, and created something of the place, rather than a synthetic representation of it.
Our tourism industry is one of our biggest, our creativity one of our greatest assets, and it’s wild that shops in our tourist spots are stocking “art” that undermines the work and craft of Scottish artists. It has, unfortunately, always been thus, but the proliferation of AI “art” is a further slap in the face to our artists and craftspeople.
It’s not just our tourist tat shops doing this to make a quick buck – Facebook is full of groups where people are generating pictures of Scotland, churning out AI images of traditions and scenery, and worse still, mocking up intimate moments of real people – an uncanny likeness of Jeannie Robertson sitting being recorded at kitchen tables by Hamish Henderson, accompanied by AI-generated text full of saccharine sentiments designed to appeal to the broadest sense of what Scotland is/was/should be.
The folk on these pages tend to be the diaspora, and the irony of people who claim to love Scotland creating AI-generated images of our landscape that could be ruined by data centres on account of the demand for generative AI would be hilarious if it wasn’t so concerning for those of us who live here.
That said, I don’t doubt that these images are created with anything other than a love of Scotland, our landscape, and history; but there are other ways to celebrate your Scottishness than asking a machine to draw you a picture.
We have abundant resources detailing actual history and traditions, practitioners who can share our living traditions, engaging with and supporting them are actual ways to show appreciation for Scotland.
Our culture is much more fun and meaningful when you participate in it, rather than extract from and consume it.
That third question, “whose Scotland is this anyway?”, sits at the heart of our national conversation about AI, and the answer has little to do with tartan tat and hielan coo imagery, and more to do with our priorities as a nation, which are looking increasingly skewed.
The rash of data centres planned for Scotland, including the world’s largest at Chapelcross, has been met with anger, concerned that they will make the areas in which they are constructed unliveable- as these things emit a constant noise that makes living a happy life near them an impossibility for man and beast.
Our AI minister, Alyn Smith, has said that he wants Scotland to be the natural place to create and grow tech businesses, selling a vision of a nation rich in green renewable energy with abundant empty land (it’s never empty – nature exists there), and flowing crystal waters, lying ready and waiting for the construction of environment-destroying data centres that will, if Ireland’s experience is anything to go by, raise our energy bills and sook up our precious water.
All this at a time when we’re still feeling the financial pinch, our hotter summers mean the land is getting drier, and our forests and hillsides are literally burning.
No-one I know of wants data centres near their communities, or in our landscapes already suffering biodiversity loss, and we are rightfully sceptical about the number of jobs that will be created.
This gives rise to another question that only Holyrood can answer: “at what point does our government prioritise a healthy living environment for the people and biodiversity of Scotland over the spectral promise of job creation and growth in GDP?”
In a bout of pessimism, I’d suggest not any time soon, if the recent dropping of the right to a healthy environment from the Human Rights Bill has anything to go by.
I fear that as a country we are being walked into the acceleration of environmental decimation, and that our government risks exposing itself to be a mechanism that government peddling a technocrat’s dream vision of Scotland to the highest bidder that has as much grounding in the lived reality of the people of Scotland as a Highland cow with sausage fingers playing the bagpipes, chasing an economic dream that may very well turn into a nightmare for our pockets, our communities, and for the land we call home, surely leaves the rest of us wondering where the actual intelligence is.
Lynne Campbell is a Scots language singer, writer and podcast host
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