This is a thoughtful piece, but I disagree with the conclusion that "those working in this venerable tradition of the artform of the future should have nothing really to fear from it." I started playing around with AI fiction with Chat GPT in late 2022 to see what it could do. The result was wooden and unimpressive. In recent months I've tried out other, newer AI tools. It's getting better, and it's moving fast. Stylistically, AI is capable of much more now than it was just two years ago. The more it is trained on fiction--and the more publishers like HC get in bed with AI companies--the more capable AI will become at generating nuanced fiction (or what appears to be nuanced fiction), sidelining the writers of original works of fiction.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Michelle. It's definitely a concern for many writers. This is Simon Okotie's opinion, which he outlines in his new book, The Future of the Novel.
Thanks for your insightful comments Michelle. I make the distinction in the book between the novel and the anti-novel, with the latter having less to fear from generative AI than the former. So what I mean by 'this venerable tradition of the artform of the future' are the more explorative, experimental works like Les Faux-Monnayeurs or Don Quixote. I could perhaps have made that clearer!
Even in the short time I'm been playing around with AI using ChatGPT, I've seen it improve. It is starting to more accurately capture my 'voice'. I still don't use it for writing, but I do feel increasingly uneasy about the balance between writers, who already don't get paid much, and AI, which is virtually free to use, and what will happen in the future to writers and writing.
Yes, this is what concerns me: AI's ability to mimic voice. I've experimented with this quite a lot and the difference between what it can do now and what it could do even one year ago is significant.
Thank you for adding the links to your piece, Michelle. I've noticed how the AI I've subscribed to is 'learning' my voice. Helpful and worrying at the same time!
Very interesting, Simon, and the ensuing debate. I have had some small experience with AI by participation in a university course being taken by a friend, which involved writers sending in to her a full story plus a two-sentence synopsis to be fed into the AI platform, the two versions of each story then being collated and submitted as course work. The resulting AI version was simply another synopsis, barely longer than the original synopsis; no trace of nuance, character or even plot. A point of interest noted by the person taking the course was that all the endings of the AI versions were uniformly upbeat, uplifting - 'positive'.
I accept that there has been improvements since then, but I'm curious - and sceptical - as to how AI handles irony - a key component, as you say, in anti-novels; would it even recognize that gap, or slippage?
Another test.
Prompted by your coverage in your book of Calvino's essay (available, incidentally, in Picador's paperback essay collection entitled The Literature Machine 1989), I have just reread it after many years. His counter-example was what struck me in my original reading and still does. It hinges on puns, more specifically those which embody significance, as humour or unexpected insight. AI or any combinatorial system, can generate puns ad nauseam; could it spot the jokes?
Calvino thinks not - those hidden insights thrown up when 'things click into place' have significance only to 'the ghosts' - Ryle's 'ghosts in the machine', i.e. human consciousness.
By coincidence, the current issue of the TLS has a review of a biography of Roger Penrose. In it, the reviewer mentions Penrose's argument around consciousness, viz. that it cannot be computational. His argument/insight stems from Godel's Incompleteness Theorem: that in any consistent formal system, 'there is a sentence in the language of that system - one that says effectively "I am not provable" - that is true but not provable in the system. Since you and I can recognize the truth of such a sentence, Penrose argues, it follows that consciousness can't be computational...'
That same argument applies to AI.
So, AI as a diagnostic tool - exposing the cliches and conventionalities - fine. There are already too many humanly-authored novels published (and reviewed) that might just as well have been AI-generated. Maybe the use of AI to weed those out will allow more genuinely experimental, innovative works, more anti-novels even, to be published - and reviewed.
I enjoyed this piece, but I don't see how AI "adopts the ‘clothing’ of plot and character while standing up to their ‘tyranny’". It seems to me that it just turns everything – plot, character, style, etc. – into clothing. The author says himself that the only value he could see in the AI-generated text he played with was that it extracted everything conventional from the form.
This is a thoughtful piece, but I disagree with the conclusion that "those working in this venerable tradition of the artform of the future should have nothing really to fear from it." I started playing around with AI fiction with Chat GPT in late 2022 to see what it could do. The result was wooden and unimpressive. In recent months I've tried out other, newer AI tools. It's getting better, and it's moving fast. Stylistically, AI is capable of much more now than it was just two years ago. The more it is trained on fiction--and the more publishers like HC get in bed with AI companies--the more capable AI will become at generating nuanced fiction (or what appears to be nuanced fiction), sidelining the writers of original works of fiction.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Michelle. It's definitely a concern for many writers. This is Simon Okotie's opinion, which he outlines in his new book, The Future of the Novel.
I shared your post and a link to Okotie's book on The Caffeinated Writer. Interesting rabbit hole!
Yes, I'm looking forward to the book!
Thanks for your insightful comments Michelle. I make the distinction in the book between the novel and the anti-novel, with the latter having less to fear from generative AI than the former. So what I mean by 'this venerable tradition of the artform of the future' are the more explorative, experimental works like Les Faux-Monnayeurs or Don Quixote. I could perhaps have made that clearer!
I've written a piece for the RLF on the positive side of AI - essentially working as a virtual assistant.
https://royalliteraryfund.substack.com/p/10-ways-ai-can-help-writers
Even in the short time I'm been playing around with AI using ChatGPT, I've seen it improve. It is starting to more accurately capture my 'voice'. I still don't use it for writing, but I do feel increasingly uneasy about the balance between writers, who already don't get paid much, and AI, which is virtually free to use, and what will happen in the future to writers and writing.
Thanks for the link--just shared your post in a piece about AI on The Caffeinated Writer.
Yes, this is what concerns me: AI's ability to mimic voice. I've experimented with this quite a lot and the difference between what it can do now and what it could do even one year ago is significant.
Thank you for adding the links to your piece, Michelle. I've noticed how the AI I've subscribed to is 'learning' my voice. Helpful and worrying at the same time!
Very interesting, Simon, and the ensuing debate. I have had some small experience with AI by participation in a university course being taken by a friend, which involved writers sending in to her a full story plus a two-sentence synopsis to be fed into the AI platform, the two versions of each story then being collated and submitted as course work. The resulting AI version was simply another synopsis, barely longer than the original synopsis; no trace of nuance, character or even plot. A point of interest noted by the person taking the course was that all the endings of the AI versions were uniformly upbeat, uplifting - 'positive'.
I accept that there has been improvements since then, but I'm curious - and sceptical - as to how AI handles irony - a key component, as you say, in anti-novels; would it even recognize that gap, or slippage?
Another test.
Prompted by your coverage in your book of Calvino's essay (available, incidentally, in Picador's paperback essay collection entitled The Literature Machine 1989), I have just reread it after many years. His counter-example was what struck me in my original reading and still does. It hinges on puns, more specifically those which embody significance, as humour or unexpected insight. AI or any combinatorial system, can generate puns ad nauseam; could it spot the jokes?
Calvino thinks not - those hidden insights thrown up when 'things click into place' have significance only to 'the ghosts' - Ryle's 'ghosts in the machine', i.e. human consciousness.
By coincidence, the current issue of the TLS has a review of a biography of Roger Penrose. In it, the reviewer mentions Penrose's argument around consciousness, viz. that it cannot be computational. His argument/insight stems from Godel's Incompleteness Theorem: that in any consistent formal system, 'there is a sentence in the language of that system - one that says effectively "I am not provable" - that is true but not provable in the system. Since you and I can recognize the truth of such a sentence, Penrose argues, it follows that consciousness can't be computational...'
That same argument applies to AI.
So, AI as a diagnostic tool - exposing the cliches and conventionalities - fine. There are already too many humanly-authored novels published (and reviewed) that might just as well have been AI-generated. Maybe the use of AI to weed those out will allow more genuinely experimental, innovative works, more anti-novels even, to be published - and reviewed.
I enjoyed this piece, but I don't see how AI "adopts the ‘clothing’ of plot and character while standing up to their ‘tyranny’". It seems to me that it just turns everything – plot, character, style, etc. – into clothing. The author says himself that the only value he could see in the AI-generated text he played with was that it extracted everything conventional from the form.