For all of us who scribble for publication, at however low a level, all activities other than writing take on at most a secondary importance. Even meals, necessary as they no doubt are, can come to seem unwanted interruptions of the real business of life, which is writing. We are apt to forget that reading in general, and of our work in particular, is not of the same importance to 99.99 percent of the population, including that part of it that has great power over our lives, as it is to us. It is a humbling thought (humbling, that is, for scribblers) that in many small towns it is easier to find an electronic cigarette or have oneself tattooed than to buy a book.
And now comes another blow to our self-esteem, that mental characteristic that is the most fundamental of all modern human rights. My fellow scribbler in this august journal, Mr. Charles Norman, alerted me recently to a site that, through artificial intelligence, will produce a coherent and even cogent short essay on almost any subject. He illustrated the site’s powers by requesting of it a Marxist-Leninist critique of Winnie-the-Pooh, citing the work of the late Marxist historian and ferocious snob Eric Hobsbawm. The resulting paragraphs, generated in a matter of seconds, were better written than many a contemporary PhD student could manage, and in fact approximated what I myself would have written if I had been asked to produce something on the same subject.
I then tried a Marxist analysis of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” With true Marxist lack of humor, the answer came back almost instantaneously that, among other things, the oysters in the poem suffered from false consciousness, insofar as they were duped by the Walrus and the Carpenter to go for a walk with them in the belief that their exploiters meant well by them.
I could not resist asking the site for a critique of my own good self, and in a matter of seconds I had what I thought was a perfectly reasonable, though ultimately mistaken (of course), criticism of my work, namely that it was founded on impression and anecdote rather than on serious statistical research. I use stereotypes, and it is impossible to tell whether or not the stories that I tell are true. These are precisely the criticisms that I would make myself were I to criticize my work from the outside, so to speak. The fact that I can defend myself from these criticisms is neither here nor there: The astonishing, and slightly alarming, thing is that the AI site should be able to generate a perfectly reasonable criticism, expressed clearly, concisely, and coherently, in a matter of seconds. Elegance and wit are missing from it, but perhaps (no, almost certainly) they will be possible one day, added like salt or pepper to a dish, according to whether or not the framer of the question wants them added.
Being astonished is not the same as being pleased, however. Could it be that writers will one day be as redundant as, say, wheelwrights or town criers? And then, thinking about the question from the purely selfish point of view, what would I do instead? For the moment I can console myself that no mere computer can equal my style, but we are as yet in the infancy of artificial intelligence.
