Biblio-filed: From bards to bots: Literature under the spell of AI

AO SCOTT

The robots of literature and movies usually present either an existential danger or an erotic frisson. Those who don’t follow in the melancholy footsteps of Frankenstein’s misunderstood monster march in line with the murderous HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” unless they echo the siren songs of sexualised androids like the ones played by Sean Young in “Blade Runner” and Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina.”

We fantasise that A.I. programs will seduce us or wipe us out, enslave us or make us feel unsure of our own humanity. Trained by such narratives, whether we find them in “Terminator” movies or in novels by Nobel laureates, we brace ourselves for a future populated by all kinds of smart, possibly sentient machines that will disrupt our most cherished notions of what it means to be human. Right now, though, the most talked-about actual bots among us are neither lovers nor predators. They’re writers. The large language A.I. models that have dominated the news for the past 18 months or so represent impressive advances in syntactic agility and semantic range, and the main proof of concept for ChatGPT and other similar programs has been a flood of words. In a matter of seconds or minutes, untroubled by writer’s block or other neuroses, these spectral prodigies can cough up a cover letter, a detective novel, a sonnet or even a think piece on the literary implications of artificial intelligence.

Is this a gimmick or a mortal threat to literature as we know it? Possibly both. Last spring, the novelist and critic Stephen Marche published, under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine, a mostly chatbot-generated novella piquantly titled “Death of an Author.” My colleague Dwight Garner described it, perhaps generously, as “arguably the first halfway readable A.I. novel.”

Meanwhile, the Writers Guild of America was waging a strike against movie and television producers that would last nearly five months. Well-known authors and their representatives filed several copyright-infringement suits aimed at keeping their words out of the commercial A.I. algorithms. (On Dec. 27, The New York Times filed a similar suit against OpenAI and Microsoft.) Part of what sent those writers to court and out onto the picket lines was the fear that their livelihoods would be undermined by A.I. Bots don’t need health insurance, vacation days or back-end money. They’ll never get drunk or canceled. They won’t be demoralised by working on sequels, spin-offs or Netflix Christmas specials.

It’s possible that intellectual labor is on the brink of a transformation as sweeping as the Industrial Revolution. Advertising copy, instruction manuals and even news stories have already been outsourced, and more kinds of written content will surely follow. The members of the W.G.A. may be like the weavers of the English Midlands in the 19th century, early victims of automation who fought a bitter campaign against the spread of mechanised looms. Their struggle — which included the machine-smashing of the original Luddites — became both a symbol of anti-technological resistance and a touchstone in the emergence of modern working-class consciousness. Back then, the machines came for the textile workers; 200 years later, it’s text workers who find themselves on the front lines.