When I signed a book contract, I was quite surprised to find a provision regarding AI content. I suppose this was naive on my part, but I can’t imagine using AI as a means of writing literary fiction (and I say that as someone who has expertise in the field of AI). Despite its impressive capabilities, generative AI’s imitative limitations often concern exactly those characteristics that make a story enduring, surviving centuries despite changes in culture and tastes among its readers.
AI can identify and reproduce an author’s habits in sentence construction, character interactions, setting, suspense, and even the likelihood of words being used in conjunction with one another. This is accomplished through various techniques of pattern detection (e.g. expectation and delay to create suspense) and probabilistic determinations. Unfortunately this same methodology means that AI does not actually understand a story. It can merely imitate its outward features. The greater the literary work, I suspect, the more difficult the imitation.
Consider Homer’s Iliad. The greatest warrior of this epic poem, Achilles, realizes the futility of war’s glory and honor despite these recognitions being prized by all around him. Achilles, the greatest fighter in Greek culture’s greatest story (ancient Greek culture itself being a warrior culture), rejects the romanticization of battle and exposes the lies ignored by it.
No, what lasting thanks in the long run for warring with our enemies, on and on, no end? One and the same lot for the man who hangs back and the man who battles hard. The same honor waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death, the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion. And what’s laid up for me, what pittance? Nothing–and after suffering hardships, year in, year out, staking my life on the mortal risks of war. Like a mother bird hurrying morsels back to unfledged young–whatever she can catch–but it’s all starvation wages for herself. (The Iliad, tr. Robert Fagles)
This rejection, if kept, would bring Achilles a long life, albeit absent the praise of men. His mother the goddess Thetis assured him, “If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies…true, but the life that’s left me will be long, the stroke of death will not come on me quickly.” (The Iliad, tr. Robert Fagles) Instead of this ending The Iliad, Achilles disenchantment with war becomes the background against which he is lured back into the heart of battle. Raging over the death of his dear friend Patroclus at the hands of man-killing Hektor, Achilles re-enters the Trojan plain knowing this choice will guarantee his death in battle some day soon in the future. Stripped of the illusions of glory and honor, his slaughter of countless Trojans and their champion Hektor still earns Achilles the highest accolade of any warrior in his age and the ages since. This pattern is not obvious in the text. In fact, many readers overlook it and I think AI would as well without human intervention. With that said, given the right prompts by a human who understands the Iliad, an AI system can imitate the Iliad’s narrative but I doubt it can display the ingenuity and creativity that would make the resulting story compelling three thousand years from today. Likewise, without understanding language outside of attention models affecting which semantic connotation is most appropriate, AI cannot understand why the word “etherized” changes the course of Modernist Poetry through Eliot’s line “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table” in a way that the word “diurnal” does not for Romantic Poetry when Wordsworth writes, “No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees; roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks, and stones, and trees.”
Whether or not AI has truly stirred apocalyptic fears within literary circles, I do think the technology will be a bane for lazy writers. If an author’s primary models for writing are contemporary Hollywood scripts repeating the same tired “hero’s journey” plot constructions and avoiding the same sacred cows, AI will eventually replace them. The technology can produce the same (low) quality at greater quantity and less cost. In other words, “easy writing is easily imitated.”
Is this something we should lament? I can’t say I’ll shed a tear when it happens.
