Tag: death of the author

BUT WHAT IF I, the writer, don’t matter? I joined a Slack channel for people using Sudowrite and scrolled through the comments. One caught my eye, posted by a mother who didn’t like the bookstore options for stories to read to her little boy. She was using the product to compose her own adventure tale for him. Maybe, I realized, these products that are supposedly built for writers will actually be of more interest to readers.

I can imagine a world in which many of the people employed as authors, people like me, limit their use of AI or decline to use it altogether. I can also imagine a world—and maybe we’re already in it—in which a new generation of readers begins using AI to produce the stories they want. If this type of literature satisfies readers, the question of whether it can match human-produced writing might well be judged irrelevant.

When I told Sims about this mother, he mentioned Roland Barthes’ influential essay “The Death of the Author.” In it, Barthes lays out an argument for favoring readers’ interpretations of a piece of writing over whatever meaning the author might have intended. Sims proposed a sort of supercharged version of Barthes’ argument in which a reader, able to produce not only a text’s meaning but the text itself, takes on an even more powerful cultural role.

Sims thought AI would let any literature lover generate the narrative they want—specifying the plot, the characters, even the writing style—instead of hoping someone else will.

Sims’ prediction made sense to me on an intellectual level, but I wondered how many people would actually want to cocreate their own literature. Then, a week later, I opened WhatsApp and saw a message from my dad, who grows mangoes in his yard in the coastal Florida town of Merritt Island. It was a picture he’d taken of his computer screen, with these words:

Sweet golden mango,
Merritt Island’s delight,
Juice drips, pure delight.

Next to this was ChatGPT’s logo and, underneath, a note: “My Haiku poem!”

The poem belonged to my dad in two senses: He had brought it into existence and was in possession of it. I stared at it for a while, trying to assess whether it was a good haiku—whether the doubling of the word “delight” was ungainly or subversive. I couldn’t decide. But then, my opinion didn’t matter. The literary relationship was a closed loop between my dad and himself.

In the days after the Sudowrite pile-on, those who had been helping to test its novel generator—hobbyists, fan fiction writers, and a handful of published genre authors—huddled on the Sudowrite Slack, feeling attacked. The outrage by published authors struck them as classist and exclusionary, maybe even ableist. Elizabeth Ann West, an author on Sudowrite’s payroll at the time who also makes a living writing Pride and Prejudice spinoffs, wrote, “Well I am PROUD to be a criminal against the arts if it means now everyone, of all abilities, can write the book they’ve always dreamed of writing.”

It reminded me of something Sims had told me. “Storytelling is really important,” he’d said. “This is an opportunity for us all to become storytellers.” The words had stuck with me. They suggested a democratization of creative freedom. There was something genuinely exciting about that prospect. But this line of reasoning obscured something fundamental about AI’s creation.

As much as technologists might be driven by an intellectual and creative curiosity similar to that of writers—and I don’t doubt this of Sims and others—the difference between them and us is that their work is expensive. The existence of language-generating AI depends on huge amounts of computational power and special hardware that only the world’s wealthiest people and institutions can afford. Whatever the creative goals of technologists, their research depends on that funding.

The language of empowerment, in that context, starts to sound familiar. It’s not unlike Facebook’s mission to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” or Google’s vision of making the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.” If AI constitutes a dramatic technical leap—and I believe it does—then, judging from history, it will also constitute a dramatic leap in corporate capture of human existence. Big Tech has already transmuted some of the most ancient pillars of human relationships—friendship, community, influence—for its own profit. Now it’s coming after language itself.

…

A thought experiment occurred to me at some point, a way to disentangle AI’s creative potential from its commercial potential: What if a band of diverse, anti-capitalist writers and developers got together and created their own language model, trained only on words provided with the explicit consent of the authors for the sole purpose of using the model as a creative tool?

That is, what if you could build an AI model that elegantly sidestepped all the ethical problems that seem inherent to AI: the lack of consent in training, the reinforcement of bias, the poorly paid gig workforce supporting it, the cheapening of artists’ labor? I imagined how rich and beautiful a model like this could be. I fantasized about the emergence of new forms of communal creative expression through human interaction with this model.

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