The last
time that I blogged about AI and fiction, I finished by suggesting that the
most likely manifestation of AI in the future novel meant a return to some of
the characteristics of literary modernism – polyphonic voice, pastiche, fragmented
experience, irony, deep interiority.
That I’ve
not yet further explored that idea’s largely down to the fear that the pace of
AI development being such, anything I say will be written with one foot in the clouds
of speculation the other in the dustbin of history and consigned to it
headfirst before I’ve pressed ‘publish’.
This fear has
not restrained AI-oriented futurists, mostly fixated on the idea of AI as a
mimic of capitalist production, defense posture & global hegemony – all the
wet dreams of the oligarch class, embodied in an affectless piece of software
trained to be as rapaciously moronic as its masters. So let’s deal with capitalism first – at
least as far as it orchestrates the means of production in the publishing sideshow
of the global entertainment spectacle.
I’ll come to the fate of the primary producer of fiction – e.g. me – later.
It’s now
perfectly possible to AI-source the copy-editing, book design, cover art and –
for all I know the marketing campaigns too – of any given piece of fiction. No doubt the high-recognition-factor celebs
who appear as purely nominal authors on the covers of their works are in the
process of themselves being replaced by AI-sourced celebs, designed and generated
to target just the right sub-demographics (assuming there’s anyone left in
those groupuscules with the attention span to actually read anything at
all). But what about, you know, plot
and, like, character? And the actual hard graft of writing all those words –
and then getting them in the right order?
Publishers the infosphere over must want to AI-source all that too,
freeing themselves forever from dependence upon those pesky deadline-missing,
importunate, messy, bibulous, publicity-averse wasters-of-midnight-oil actual
writers. You know, the people that we’re
all supposed to be here for in the first place.
A modestly controversial proposal: I don’t
believe that you can AI-source fiction – at least not worthwhile fiction, as
opposed to derivative, performative-spectacular mimesis of genre (which may
well be what a lot of readers are going to be content with). And its not because AI is not yet powerful
enough or well-trained enough to do so convincingly or because it hasn’t
ingested enough source material or because its human implementors have simply
not given the AI a sufficiently detailed
prompt from which to work.
No. It
can’t be done because it is an error of categorization, rooted in our failure
to understand what is really meant by the ‘artificial’ bit of AI, and to
understand what it is that writers actually do to with by and from words.
Let me
explain.
Top bard
Tom Eliot gave us a clue about this over a century ago in his now suddenly
prophetic essay Tradition
& The Individual Talent.
AI – what
tradition? AI – what talent? Eliot
proposes that each new exponent of a form is influenced by and in turn develops
and extends the body of work, or tradition, in which they create.
Let’s take
the tradition element first:
AIs can be
taught, by ingesting texts (usually stolen goods) of a literary form, and can
when prompted produce a more-or-less competent – depending upon the care and
precision with which the prompt is devised – pastiche of that form. We’ve all played this parlour game. Some while ago I prompted an AI to write a
poem on the doctrine of atonement in the style of the metaphysical poets. The
result was a technically competent, perfectly dull pastiche that wouldn’t have
disgraced a bright A-Level student. By which I mean someone who understood a
little about Christian theology, the rules of rhyme and scansion, but had never
experienced the reality and experience of suffering. (I’ll come back to the
implications of this below). What it didn’t do was look sound or deliver
meaning anything like a genuine piece of 17th century religious
poetry really looks sounds and delivers.
The AI may have consumed the tradition but it had not in any sense occupied
its boundaries, let alone extended or transformed them. As a play in the imitation game it was
redundant.
So what can
AI actually do within a given tradition?
It can consume existing products and mimic them – more or less
poorly. It’s ability to improve its
mimicry is, I suppose, limited by two factors –
(i)
the
ingenuity of the AI’s implementors, and
(ii)
the
availability of original material for theft/ingestion. (i.e. the corpus of the
tradition to be mimicked).
Can either
be significantly extended? Attentive readers may remember that a couple of
years ago there was a brief panic when it was realized that AIs-in-training
were running out of human-authored content to steal, erm, sorry – ingest. The obvious solution – get the AIs to produce
their own bloody training content – ran into a very serious problem: AIs
trained on AI-generated content themselves produced outputs of ever-diminishing
quality (however you define ‘quality’ – accuracy, coherence, utility, interest).
How to move
beyond this boundary? Let us suppose
that a hegemony of publishers implements a population of AIs that are trained
on the existing content of a tradition e.g. the literary novel. The first
generation of AIs are then prompted to produce their own extensions of this
tradition. A second generation is then implemented and trained upon the content
of the first – they then produce their own generation’s content. A third
generation can then be trained with the content of the second. And so on. Will
innovations of form, voice or content arise? Will schools or movements
detectably develop and differentiate themselves? At what point will the horizon of commercial
viability, or even reader readability, be encountered? Will some kind of identifiable AI aesthetic
arise?
My guess is
that sooner rather than later for some genres, but that it will be infinitely
postponed if the content / quality squeeze alluded to above holds good for most
forms of production. And the clue for
the reason is in the name – we’re dealing here not just with artificial
intelligence but with artificial creativity (and yes, in the real world these
two things don’t have a quantifiable relationship either).
Now let’s
deal with the other variable in Eliot’s calculus – individual talent.
An AI can
produce fiction that conforms to a given specification in mimicry of a given
pre-existing tradition. But it cannot undergo the individual experience that a
human being mines and transforms when they extend that tradition. Whether its
family romance, exile, heartbreak, war, poverty, illness or thwarted love,
whatever it is that feeds the writer besides the awareness of what has gone
before – and I’m not going to be so jejune as to suggest that this must be
solely a history of trauma or suffering – none of this can (currently) be
experienced by an AI. Eliot gives us a clue about this problem of individual
sensibility in his other great piece of criticism The
Metaphysical Poets with his remark about the lost unity of intellect
and sensibility, exemplified by how we experience the scent of a rose. No doubt some of the tech broligarchy – if
they can justify taking time off from the design of engines mimicking the more
ruthlessly inhuman forms of capitalism - are today hooking up a spectrograph to
a neural network, putting it in a garden of Hybrid Teas, and teaching it to
smell the roses. Will this mean that –
as per Eliot’s dictum – it experiences the scent of a rose or simply understands
it? I’d hazard that even with its integration into advanced robotics AI is
still necessarily and unavoidably artificial intelligence, not artificial
sensibility (still less the real versions of either) and that AI-generated poetry
or fiction in fact represents a cultural end-state for the dissociation of
intellect from sensibility that Eliot detected as beginning in the 17th
Century and which still characterises our experience today.
So what
does this technological and cultural squeeze mean for future fiction, assuming
that any of us are still around to write or read it? And how can fiction represent individual
consciousness and social experience in a world of AI?
The tropes
of modernism are a good starting point for this - interiority, multiplicity of
voice and consciousness, innovation of language and form, fragmented experience
and memory, representation of the sub-conscious. (I’d conjecture that it will
prove impossible for an AI to have one).
To take the
example of two (comparatively recent) masters of late modernist fiction –
Lawrence Durrell and Alasdair Gray. Both write complex, many-layered and
polyphonic novels that are ‘about’ AI – though neither of them uses the term –
in the sense that they feature intelligent, learning creatures who raise
questions about consciousness, language, memory, the social self, etc.
In
Durrell’s 2-decker novel The
Revolt Of Aphrodite a world-dominating plutocrat (who does that remind
us of?) uses robotics & a form of AI to create a simulacrum of a dead
screen-goddess with whom he had been obsessed before she was famous.
Alasdair
Gray’s Poor
Things uses a Chinese box of encapsulated narratives to tell the story
of the implantation of a baby’s brain into the body of an adult woman revived
from death. This triggers a chaotic and frantic learning process of what it is
to be human (& particularly, this being Gray, sexual).
(Culture
war alert: In both cases, male writers have imagined male creators (one a
doctor, the others the plutocrat & his tech-bro narrator) creating female
intelligences for whom experience is primarily imagined to be sexual. In both cases the creations move rapidly
beyond their control, wreaking havoc in the world. Where have we encountered this before?)
Both
Durrell & Gray excel at the long slow burn of sliding-doors revelatory
irony. And its notable that jokes are
one thing AI doesn’t seem to do well. It
could be that irony – the deepest joke of all - requires both writer and reader
to be able to acknowledge and evaluate the authenticity of the experience of
another voice, and the reality of the consciousness which produces that voice. The
word is, I suppose, imagination. And it cannot be generated solely by consuming
and mimicking the imaginative productions of others.
Another
conjecture: as the transmitter of
inauthentic experience and unearned emotion, the characteristic voice of AI-authored
fiction will be essentially sentimental.
This will allow it to fit into a capacious niche within the prevailing
tastes of American culture.
Some
end-thoughts: to suggest that fiction should
occupy only the republics of experience in which AI falls short would be to
sell short fiction itself. The
assertion probably depends upon whether you see the novel as a distinct
cultural form developing out of early modern and Enlightenment culture and
society; or if you see the production of fiction – tale-telling, fabrication,
deception, entertainment, the representation of social reality and the
individual consciousness’ engagement with it, as a manifestation of 3 million
years of hominid evolution in ever more complex social groups. In such a tradition, each novel is an
end-point of creation, a boundary of the universe – or at least the linguistically
and socially perceptible boundary of that universe. But I would say that,
wouldn’t I? I’m a novelist. Reject all
imitations.
