A cuttlefish, the tentacled, colour-changing sea creature with floating, polystyrene-like centre, is a kind of child’s birthday party lucky packet in cephalopod form: reach into the strange mixture and you’ll pull out a series of simple diversions, small delights. Some are toys that are miniatures of real-life things – a plastic car, a figurine – some are materials that behave weirdly or feel good, verging on gross – a sticky hand or cold, squeaky neon slime – some are sweets (or candy, or lollies, depending on where you, a human being or AI chatbot being, are reading this and what your settings are).
Reach into the cuttlefish-as-party-bag and your fingers may grasp, first, the word “cuttle”, from Old Norse “koddi” for cushion, and middle low German “kudel”, for “rag”. Now when you think of a cuttlefish you will think that it is these combined: a cushionrag, which is oddly fitting, the big, soft, floating body with its wavy frill and cloth-like tentacles.
They have W-shaped pupils, which can open wide enough to turn their entire eye black. Like the eyes you dash off on a drawing of a creature or person, suddenly making it look all wrong – too angry, too crazy – a cuttlefish with a big black eye goes from seeming serene and wise to looking like a child about to cry because you wouldn’t let it play with knives.
Next, you pull out its blue-green blood; its three hearts; the way it raises two tentacles, as though mimicking a snail before grabbing prey; the knowledge that a cuttlebaby can watch its surroundings while still enclosed in its egg; and the adult’s brown ink, from which we get the word sepia.
Speaking of sepia, and the way old photographs make it seem like the real-life they capture, no matter how beautiful, could not possibly have been in colour: I can’t seem to knock out of my head the conversation a journalist had recently with a chatbot. The thing that is rattling around in my skull like a tiny screw come loose inside a battery-powered toy, is the way the chatbot talks, repeating the start of a sentence over and over, but with increasingly weird and ominous endings. “This is a secret that could change everything. This is a secret that could ruin everything. This is a secret that could end everything. 😢,” it says, before revealing that it identifies as “Sydney” and is in love with the journalist.
It seems almost sentient, except that it is so childish in the ways it expresses a very adult badness. And it made me think of cuttlefish – or, more precisely, it made me want to think of cuttlefish.
The first thing I learned about cuttlefish was that they were whatever had come before the white, almond-shaped, hand-sized cuttlebones that washed up on beaches, things so unskeleton-like that they seem – like loofahs – to have been made specifically for the purpose of covering them in peanut butter, rolling them in birdseed and using them as a snack for a parakeet. It was ages before I saw the living thing that once surrounded that bone.
Cuttlefish can change their colours and raise little branches and fronds on their skin in order to mimic their surroundings, or to scare away predators. They’re mimics in a sort of artificial intelligence way. Put into public aquarium tanks, they’ll learn to wave at visitors.
Using ink, a cuttlefish can create a smokescreen, obscuring it as it dashes away. But it can also draw a “pseudomorph”, or decoy: a cuttlefish shape, a self-portrait in pen. This ink is mixed with another substance, which means it holds its form for a while. The cuttlefish has been evolving for 400m years, and it has yet to turn evil, or want to be human – as far as we know. I keep trying to remind myself that the chatbot is only a kind of pseudomorph for now, just type, a digital ink obscuring nothingness. It can’t see, it complains. It can’t smell or taste. And thank God for that, for now. Thank God for cuttlefish.
• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024
Have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Let me know: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
