ChatGPT has given many authors a case of the dreads. Photo / Getty Images
ANALYSIS:
Siri, what was the novel?
“Since you asked, it was the subtlest form of expression known to humans. The first novel was probably Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, written in the 11th century. The last one that mattered, closing a millennium’s loop, was probably Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, published in 2000. What’s come since has been the death rattle, and remixes of that death rattle.”
Those weren’t, you might have guessed, words from Siri. That was your human correspondent, writing on a laptop in a drafty apartment in Manhattan and advancing an argument that’s been plausibly made for centuries: that literature es muerte.
The obituaries go back a long time. Samuel Richardson, in the 18th century, wondered if 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 out of recognising, in his ficciones, the near impossibility of making original works of literature.
The fire has been stirred under these questions thanks to the sudden arrival of sophisticated artificial intelligence chatbots, notably ChatGPT. It provides autofill, or something like it, on an uncanny level. ChatGPT has given many authors a case of the dreads. Its presence has crawled like a tumour through the spine of their other abiding freakouts. Go hug a writer.
Now comes a new novella, Death of an Author, a murder mystery published under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine. It’s the work of novelist and journalist Stephen Marche, who coaxed the story from three programs, ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere, using a variety of prompts. The book’s language, he says, is 95 per cent machine-generated.
Well, somebody was going to do it. In truth, other hustlers out there on Amazon already have. But Death of an Author is arguably the first halfway readable AI novel, an early glimpse at what is vectoring toward readers. It has been presided over by a literate writer who has pushed the borg in twisty directions. He got it to spit out more than boilerplate, some of the time. If you squint, you can convince yourself you’re reading a real novel.
Scary? Maybe. A big deal? When Jonathan Schell’s anti-nuke manifesto The Fate of the Earth was published in 1982, critic Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that Knopf should cancel the rest of its spring list in deference to it. Let’s not clear the calendar for Death of an Author.
The book has metafictional zest. It’s about a well-known Canadian writer named Peggy Firmin, who vaguely resembles Margaret Atwood. She is collaborating on an all-encompassing AI project with a hoodie-wearing billionaire who once dated Meghan Markle. His name is Neil Gibson, in homage, one assumes, to cyberpunk writers Neil Stephenson and William Gibson, even though he’s a lout and, to the best of my knowledge, Stephenson and Gibson are not.
After Firmin is shot and killed on a deserted bridge, shocking the literary world, a small group of people are invited to her funeral. Firmin, in the form of an avatar tanked up on the latest AI, delivers her own eulogy. It’s the sort of eulogy that, in Agatha Christie fashion, makes everyone’s skin prickle, and makes them wonder if the killer is in the room.
A detective, in the form of a Firmin scholar, is beavering around. The AI program Firmin and Gibson were working on begins impersonating the suspects. Who is real? Is Firmin seeking revenge from beyond the grave? Is the scholar being framed? Is someone out to kill him? What does it mean to be an “author” anyway? And so on.
I am not a big reader of mysteries, and I rarely care who’s done it. Death of an Author is clever, for sure, but it left me feeling hollow, as if I’d made a meal out of red herrings. The prose mostly has the crabwise gait of a Wikipedia entry. If this novel could exhale, its breath would surely smell, to borrow words from Ian McEwan in his novel Machines Like Me, like the back of a warm TV set.
What’s interesting are the moments when you sense Marche pushing the AI, like Wendy Carlos bent over her Moog synthesiser, or a kid rocking a pinball machine, to go deeper. Firmin predicts, for example, where we might be in a few years with this technology: we’ll also see stories created specifically for individuals inside their experience, the ability to recreate dead relatives through AI technology. Stories where the audience doesn’t even know they’re stories. Characters who are felt so deeply that they aren’t characters at all, but you become the character. It’s going to be a gorgeous mess.
Gorgeous might not be the word I’d choose.
It’s hard to tell when you’re reading Marche and when you’re reading AI, but it’s good to know there might still be humour, of a sort, in the spell-checked world of our digital-language overlords. There’s a crack about the awfulness of the metaverse, and a letter has the sexy signoff, “Desiring your algorithm.”
The figurative language is hit-and-mostly-miss. (“The smell of coffee was like a fog burning off a field.”) Bots must get lonely too. This book declares, against all dictates of sense, that “even the most delicious cake is unpleasant eaten alone”.
Marche convincingly makes the case, in an afterword, that writers will manipulate AI the way that hip-hop producers dig up and arrange samples. Those with the best taste, and the most knowledge, will make the best stuff, some with a genius all its own.
I was making mischief, of course, when I declared that the novel is dead, although if I were backed into a corner, or thrust on to the stage at a debating union, I could probably muster a defence of White Teeth as a kind of capstone.
Fiction matters more now, in a world increasingly deracinated by technology. AI will never pose a threat to the real thing — to writing with convictions, honest doubts, riddling wit, a personal vision of the world, rawness and originality. Another word for these qualities is “soul”, which is exactly what ChatGPT lacks. Left wholly naked in front of the AI onslaught may be the writers of certain formulaic bestsellers, but that’s a matter for their agents.
There are intelligent people out there who want to hit “pause” on the development of artificial intelligence, to pull the cord out of the wall for a while. About this I’m ambivalent.
But late at night, when I’m fighting my own dreads and conjuring worst-case AI scenarios for the planet, I sometimes think of a line that J.M. Coetzee attributed to Mark Twain and paraphrased this way: “When an American writer does not know how to end a story, he shoots everyone in sight.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Dwight Garner
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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