(2021-06-15) Hoel I Got An Artificial Intelligence To Write My Novel

Erik Hoel: I Got an Artificial Intelligence to Write My Novel. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, among writers “influence always proceeds by misinterpretation.” In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom argues that writers willfully ignore and misinterpret their predecessors in order to make their canvases as blank as possible.

Bloom’s specific stages of anxiety (outlined much like the stages of grief) are a bit too Freudian and peculiar to be truly universal, but he’s right that to create is to exist in a state of anxiety. Like construction in Rome, we writers are always building on top of something.

in the past year my anxiety of influence has shifted far and away to another source: an entity called GPT-3.

I think it represents the first warning shots of an impending man vs. machine agon of language.

This is not something anyone in the publishing industry appears to have noticed.

Confronting my anxiety head on (Bloom might deem this the “daemonization” stage), I decided to see if GPT-3 could have written my debut novel, The Revelations.

I fed GPT-3 the jacket copy of my novel—that description on the flaps of the hardcover that tells readers what they’re getting into

Then, trying not to bias the experiment, I flipped to a random section of The Revelations and selected a few paragraphs I thought ripe for comparison.

Now here’s GTP-3’s version, fed the above paragraph up to the word “creature” (as well as the jacket copy of the book). Where the bolded text starts below is where GPT-3 took over writing:

To get this I merely prompted GPT-3 a handful of times, threw out the first two results, and deleted a few clauses of GPT-3’s third try. It took about five minutes. I didn’t add a single thing, it’s all GPT-3. Damn machine had the gall to write my book.

Any writer worth their ink should start feeling some AI anxiety on reading that output

That particular phrase is so appropriate for the novel it felt reminiscent. After searching the text of the book I came upon a similar phrase describing a storm the characters find themselves caught in, on what becomes the night of the murder.

The city inhales and exhales in great whooping winds.

That’s from a section GPT-3 wasn’t shown.

it’s a fine first-draft writer in short bursts

Therein lies the heart of this new technological anxiety: its inevitable nature. Consider that when I was born, language, whenever I encountered it, was always generated by human consciousness. When I die, will most language come from a source separate from consciousness? Things that speak and things that feel are now entirely dissociable. I grew up in my mother’s independent bookstore, so to me this is anathema, a debasement of the holy. Why is no other writer in the world freaking out about this new Babel?

what if the AIs are better at making art too?

The words of an AI have no intentionality. Only conscious minds produce meaning. Or is it the reader's mind?

AI robs us of our very words by diluting their importance away

The situation for poets is already far worse. Oh, poor poets. All the things GPT-3 struggles with, like long-term coherency, causality, common sense knowledge, character development, etc, are all things that rarely matter in poems. Same for songwriters.

I will tell you a funny thing. A strange one as well, though perhaps it was always inevitable. Lately, if I look in the mirror too long, I see only an ape (primate) staring back.