Another ghost in the machine
‘Quite quickly, I’ – the author [he says] of this 95% AI generated novel – ‘figured out that, if you want an AI to imitate Raymond Chandler, the last thing you should ask it to do is tell it to write like Raymond Chandler. That produces only the most tepid, banal form of Raymond Chandler rip-off. Ask it to write a sentence in the style of Chandler on the death of Peggy Firmin and you get: “She lay there on the bridge, motionless as the traffic flowed by, and I knew that Peggy Firmin had taken her last breath in this city of lost souls.” Cheesy. What you need is to have it write something about a murder scene in the style of Chinese nature poetry, then make it active, then make it conversational, then Select All and put it in the style of Ernest Hemingway. That gets you something interesting. Raymond Chandler, after all, was not trying to write like Raymond Chandler.’
And this made me – the author of this review – think of ‘the ghost in the machine’[i] and specifically Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book of the same name: Koestler suggests that we are a species in which ancient and recent brain structures – or reason and emotion – are not fully co-ordinated: an inherent conflict which explains our self-destructiveness.
I read the whole short novel.
I’ll say, before uttering another word, that brevity is one of its greatest virtues. Stephen Marche or Aidan Marchine (the AI generated author’s name used on the front cover) says in his afterword that ‘the novel would be 95% computer generated; it would be short (around twenty-five thousand words); the goal would be excellence, and the technology would serve that end. That is to say, we would use AI as far as possible, but if the AI didn’t work we wouldn’t use it. But there was also a serious challenge: My previous experiments with AI, and those of other AI artists, had been mostly lyrical. This experiment would attempt to be compulsively readable, a page-turner.’
Well, has the author [whatever his name] succeeded?
I found, particularly as I twigged to the AI creation-ness, much to trouble me with this novel. Its resolution expresses its troubling character neatly. The idea that Firmin [the author whose death is of the title] kills herself in order to destroy her digitised eternity – as in Sybil, her AI avatar – sums up the AI dilemma in a few short paragraphs. This is the book’s key debate: is AI good or evil? [Or is that the key debate – I feel that good OR evil may be too simple a binary choice.] The book poses, a little too obviously, a meaning of life character introspection; I couldn’t help but think of Douglas Adams wonderful quirky take on that discourse with The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Don’t they know the answer is 42.
Like Gus, the novel’s protagonist, I felt like he/I was having a debate he/I had already had, but in somebody else’s story, with another version of myself/himself. I’m not at all certain that the novel fulfilled the project’s original terms of ‘compulsive readability’ and a ‘desire to turn the pages’. I found, with some regularity, the plot and storyline clunky (like walking across a nightingale floor with dead spots: an assassin’s wet dream) . Then there were odd syntax and word choices. And was it riddled with too many pop and high culture references. Maybe. So I definitely had a ‘stop turning the pages’ response when I read the narrative.
What I did enjoy – and this enabled a kind of nostalgic forgiveness for the novel itself – was the Afterword. I realised that this is not an AI generated book. It’s a human author moderated AI generated book. Managed AI, in short. It works at asking provocative questions of us: as authors, as people, as a society.
Marche says ‘I hate the knee-jerk fear surrounding creative AI. It buries the possibilities of the moment. The WGA [Writers’ Guild of America] statement [rejecting AI generation of ‘art’] didn’t bother me much; they just don’t know what they’re talking about.’ Marche is suggesting that AI is merely another tool – like typewriters were, or word processing programs – which can enable the creative artist. A tool, he’s saying, not a machine to replace the artist?
The human remains the ghost in this machine. Perhaps – I’ve decided it needs much more thought. ‘If you make bad art with a new tool, you just haven’t figured out how to use the tool yet, ’ Marche argues.
I’ll leave you with Marche’s summing up for the jury: ‘Generals are always fighting the last war, and tech prophets are always predicting the last disruption. In the shadow of the catastrophe of social media, the fear and contempt that AI writing has inspired are reflex responses to what this technology represents: the birth of a new art form. I get it. AI is alien, and its art feels alien. That alien has come from a universe of beauty.’
[i] The evocative phrase ghost in the machine was coined by a philosopher named Gilbert Ryle in his book “The Concept of Mind,” published in 1949. Ryle used it as a criticism of René Descartes’ mind-body dualism theory. He viewed it as a misleading way of understanding human consciousness and behavior.
Inkstained fingers 