What if artificial intelligence could create literary texts with a face and eyes?
BarcelonaMaybe I'm naive, but I'm not too worried about the emergence of artificial intelligence in the literary world. In an article two years ago I argued that perhaps AI will free literature from certain servility.Things have happened since then. For example, I recently read that traces of the prompts intended for AI. In case anyone doesn't know yet, one prompt or, in Catalan, request, is the text that the user enters into an AI system to give it a command. Thus, for example, in the book Darkhollow Academy, Year 2 —what an unpromising title— by Lena McDonald, it read: "I've rewritten the excerpt to be more in the J. Bree style of writing, which is characterized by more tension, gritty touches, and a strong emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements." Another title by KC Crowne said: "Absolutely! Here's an improved version of the excerpt." Crowne's case is revealing: she has 173 titles available on Amazon, which makes one suspect (or downright certain) that this person doesn't write the books she self-publishes. The covers featuring muscled hunks sporting abs and stubble are so hideous and conventional that they seem like a parody.
In fact, the invasion of AI-generated content, especially that generated by AI bots, has become a problem for Amazon. Faced with the flood of AI-generated content, a couple of years ago its self-publishing platform was forced to limit the number of manuscripts an author could publish in a day to three. Oops, only three a day, now we're safe! Also two years ago Caitlyn Lynch reported that top 100 Of Amazon's Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance ebooks, only 19 were written by humans.
You might think this is far from us, that it's just an American thing and literature. mainstream. So we're going home. A few months ago, I listened to an episode of the podcast Pleasures of life, where Sergi PàmiesAnagrama Prize jury member said that this year it seemed to him that some manuscripts had been padded by AI. He had no proof of this, but he did have the feeling that this was the case. 80% of films will be made by AI, and it will make them better. Flesh and blood do nothing but rehash when it draws on tradition, etc. And yes, of course, writing is, in part, digesting what has been done.
Being willing to read garbage
Be that as it may, I told you at the beginning that all this doesn't worry me too much. I'm more worried about the fact that there are people willing to read this garbage than the garbage itself existing. And it's not like I want to destroy AI, which can always be a useful source for documentation or inspiration. I already know writers who, when looking for an image for a simile, ask AI for ideas. "Examples of smelly and slippery things": organic sludge, rotting fish, vomit.
I was thinking about all this yesterday when a friend told me that she had a woman she'd never met who, twenty years ago, told her, out of the blue, that her daughter had died at the age of three. No matter how many crimes we've read or seen on screen, no death will ever touch us as much as a real death recounted by someone looking us in the face. This made me think that perhaps a side effect of AI is that reality, non-fictional facts, will be revalued. Let's imagine the time when AI is truly capable of creating literary texts with a face and eyes, that it's even capable of inventing interesting and contradictory characters, that it's capable of being original and having a sense of humor. Even when all this is possible, there will still be one thing AI can't do: live. It will never be able to speak in the first person about what it has experienced or heard. Everything will always be secondhand. AI could bring about the triumph of truth and life. Even if sometimes these things are also bad and slippery.