Novelist uses artificial intelligence to write book – 05/05/2023 – Market

Siri, what was the romance?

“Since you asked, it was the most subtle form of expression known to humans. The first novel was probably Murasaki Shikibu’s ‘The Tale of Genji’, written in the 11th century. probably ‘White Teeth’ by Zadie Smith, published in 2000. What’s come since then is death rattle and remixes of that death rattle.”

Those weren’t, as you might have guessed, Siri’s words. This was her human correspondent, typing away on a laptop in a Manhattan apartment and making a plausible argument centuries ago: that literature is “dead.”

Literature obituaries are old. Samuel Richardson, in the 18th century, asked whether the novel had said what it had to say. Theodore Adorno argued that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. Jorge Luis Borges made a decisive career when recognizing, in his “fictions”, the almost impossibility of making original literary works.

These issues have come back to the fore thanks to the sudden arrival of sophisticated artificial intelligence chatbots, most notably ChatGPT. It provides autocomplete, or something like that, on a preternatural level. ChatGPT provoked terror in many authors. His presence crawled like a tumor down other freaks’ spines. Go hug a writer.

Now comes a new novel, “Death of an Author” [A morte de um autor], a murder plot published under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine. It is the work of novelist and journalist Stephen Marche, who extracted the story from three programs, ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere. The book’s language, he says, is 95 percent machine-generated — a bit like the food at Ruby Tuesday.

Well someone would do it. In fact, other scammers on Amazon already have. But “Death of an Author” is arguably the first partially readable AI novel, a glimpse of things to come. It was organized by a literate writer who pushed the robot in devious directions. He made him spit more than stock phrases a few times. If you squint, you can convince yourself that you are reading a real novel.

Scary? Perhaps. A big deal? When Jonathan Schell’s anti-nuclear manifesto “The Fate of the Earth” was published in 1982, critic Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that Knopf should cancel the rest of its spring releases out of respect for it. Let’s not empty the calendar for “The Death of an Author”.

The book has a metafictional force. It’s about a well-known Canadian writer named Peggy Firmin, who vaguely resembles Margaret Atwood. She is participating in an AI project in collaboration with a billionaire, the type who walks around in a hoodie, who once dated Meghan Markle. His name is Neil Gibson, named after, presumably, the cyberpunk writers Neil Stephenson and William Gibson, although he is an asshole and, as far as I know, Stephenson and Gibson are not.

After Firmin is shot dead on a deserted bridge, shocking the literary world, a small group of people are invited to his funeral. Firmin, in the form of an avatar made by the latest AI, delivers the speech at his own funeral. It’s the kind of speech that, in Agatha Christie style, leaves everyone on edge, wondering if the killer was in the room.

A detective, in the form of a Firmin scholar, is prowling around. The AI ​​program that the writer and Gibson were working on starts to incorporate the suspects. Who is real? Is Firmin seeking revenge from beyond the grave? Is the scholar being caught? Does anyone want to kill him? After all, what does it mean to be an “author”? And so on.

I’m not a big reader of crime books and I rarely care who wrote them. “Death of an Author” is clever, no doubt, but it left me feeling empty, as if I had eaten a meal of “red herrings” [pistas falsas].

The prose often has the halting pace of a Wikipedia entry. If this novel could exhale, your breath would surely smell, to use the words of Ian McEwan in his novel “Machines Like Me”, like the back of a hot television set.

What’s interesting are the moments when you feel Marche forcing the AI, like Wendy Carlos leaning over her Moog synthesizer, or a kid shaking a pinball machine, to be more profound. Firmin predicts, for example, where we could be in a few years with this technology:

“We’ll also see stories created specifically for individuals within their expertise, the ability to recreate dead relatives using AI technology. Stories where the audience doesn’t even know they’re stories. Characters that are felt so deeply that they’re not characters, but you becomes the character. It’s going to be a wonderful mess.”

“Wonderful” might not be the word I would choose.

It’s hard to tell when you’re reading Marche and when you’re reading AI, but it’s good to know that there might still be some kind of humor in the world of our spell-checked digital language overlords. There’s a joke about the horror of the metaverse, and one card has the sexy farewell “Desiring your algorithm.”

Figurative language is hit-and-miss. “The smell of coffee was like a mist from a burning field.” Bots must also feel lonely. That book declares, against all the dictates of common sense, that “even the most delicious cake is bad eaten alone.”

Marche makes a compelling case, in an afterword, that writers will manipulate AI the way hip-hop producers dig up and arrange “samples.” Those with the best taste and the most knowledge will do the best things, some with a particular talent.

I was being malicious, of course, when I declared that the novel is dead, although if I were cornered or shoved onto the stage in debate, I could probably craft a defense of “White Teeth” as some sort of academic project.

Fiction is more important today, in a world increasingly uprooted by technology. AI will never pose a threat to the real thing – to writing with convictions, honest doubts, enigmatic wit, a personal view of the world, rawness and originality.

Another word for these qualities is “soul”, which is exactly what ChatGPT lacks. Left stark naked in the face of AI’s onslaught may be the writers of certain stereotypical bestsellers, but that’s up to their agents.

There are smart people out there who want to press “pause” on the development of artificial intelligence, pull the plug for a while. About this I am ambivalent.

But late at night, when I’m wrestling with my own fears and imagining AI’s worst-case scenarios for the planet, I sometimes think of a quote that JM Coetzee attributed to Mark Twain and paraphrased it this way: “When an American writer doesn’t know how to end a story , he shoots everyone in sight”.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves