Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

The clone wars come home

literary lint, plague journal, Publicity, ,

A couple of weeks ago I received a friendly email from a fellow who lavished me with praise for my one published book, a collection of stories called The Portable Son, published by a small press many moons ago. He wanted to present the book to his book club. 

I of course was thrilled to receive any positive commentary from a reader. That’s all I really ever want: unending praise from total strangers. This alone will finally make me feel whole. So I wrote him back and said thank you, but that I was a little confused as to what he needed me to do to effectuate him sharing the book with his book group. It was indeed published moons ago, but it is still purchasable, in handy paperback or ebook form, and if you have trouble with that, you can always email me and I will sell you a copy the old-fashioned way. (That is, PayPal.) He said that he needed my permission and a digital copy of the book, and if that went well, we could discuss further procedures.

And here is where my ears went to a point. I am ripe for random praise from strangers but I am also wary of scams. And I’ve reached the point in my life and in my experience with the internet where I think everything is a scam. The internet itself: one giant, networked scam. I two-factor authenticate my kids when they call, just to be sure they’re who they say they are, the little rascals. And so despite the enormous sinkhole of my own ego, this little email exchange seemed too good to be true. 

I’ll send it to my good friend Jim, I thought. He’s good at sniffing out scam behavior. But before I could forward the correspondence onto Jim, I received another email, from another extremely friendly stranger, extolling the virtues of my lonely little short story collection, and wondering if we could collaborate on further promotional ventures and sharing it with his group of readers. So this must be the new scam, I thought. 

Then a few days later I received another email from another would-be enthusiast. And this morning I received another. Is this what being famous feels like? Being approached by overly friendly scammers, or what’s more likely, scam robots? The prose in these emails seems real; it has the Sabrina Carpenter effect: it’s almost convincingly lifelike. Is my ego being exploited by artificial intelligence? Well, sure, but see above re: the internet. Isn’t that essentially what has always been happening since I logged on sometime in the late 90s? 

I would quote from the emails, but I feel queasy quoting from private correspondence without permission, even correspondence with robots. Yes, I am that old-fashioned. By this point in revising this post, I’ve received nearly ten solicitations from the bots. They’re all remarkably lifelike. They are all just this side of scammy. After the first I have refrained from responding. Apparently I’m on some list, the sucker list. 

I am old enough and cynical enough to be unimpressed by artificial intelligence talk. Remember when virtual reality was going to change the world? All world-ending or world-revolutionizing talk seems to spring from some existential insecurity, a longing for the apocalypse. The internet rewards exaggeration. What’s more, I’m embarrassed by my peers who use it for little tasks. I’m not against using technology to save time and effort. I am after all typing this on a laptop. I revere Excel. But asking ChatGPT therapy-adjacent questions feels embarrassing. Using AI to remix old songs for you with new, robot-played instruments is a waste of computing power and your one theoretically precious life. It’s playing in the funhouse mirror. Look how weird my face gets, etc. We must move past the mirror, move through the mirror. Tools must become mundane to become useful.

The internet is a factory of cliches. What are memes but the congealing of a culture’s sensibility. Turns of phrase quickly become commodified. It’s difficult to be online and think for oneself, articulate for oneself. Let’s briefly table whether or not this is ever possible. Being too online makes it well-nigh impossible. What are you asking ChatGPT when you ask it a question? “Give me the average response for everything.” Not the best of what has been thought and said but the normal distribution of what has been thought and said. We came for Orson Welles, and we went home with Mr. Beast. 

Anyway, I’ve just decided to let the robot spam sales pitches wash over me. If you are a real live breathing person and want to read my book, you can find it here. Or you can email me and I will sell it to you the old-fashioned way (PayPal). Or even if you are a non-human who wants to read my book. I am capitalist enough to not be completely prejudiced against the robots. But I’m not comping them a copy either. And I’m not going to send $89.99 to some robot to theoretically persuade some invisible robot readership out there to read my delicate little story collection. There’s something that only AI could invent, an audience for my short stories. 

I may be desperate for attention, but I’m still redneck enough to fundamentally distrust too much loose praise. 

Writing is a form of thinking

literary lint,

No, I don’t want help writing that email.

An artificial intelligence bot has come alive within my Gmail, and I am not inclined to use it. I might be inclined to use the summary function if it’s an email I don’t want to read, that is a text created by an institution rather than a friend. But then, if it’s not an email I want to read, then I just don’t read it. For example, did you know that you don’t have to read all the emails that your child’s school sends you? I learned this just last year when my forever partner told me. (“Duh.”) And while I still feel the slight effervescent breeze of guilt, instant deletion feels even better.

But to actually get help with writing the emails? But I actually like writing — even the tedious stuff. I enjoy writing sentences, and then fitting them together. Even if the revision turns into a kind of endless mental Tetris, and even if the end result has all the charm of re-translated stereo instructions, it’s still me in there, thinking.

And really that’s my main beef, and my main belief: writing is a form of thinking. Are there other forms? Sure. But writing is one of them. What I mean is that when I write, I don’t simply get my thoughts down as a transference mechanism. There is some of that, sure. But what’s more is that in the process of transferring those already thought-through thoughts, I discover more thoughts, or figure out what I really think through the actual process of finding the words and the order they should go in. It’s weird, alchemical, seems tautological, or slightly voodoo-y. By writing down what I think, I actually discover what I think. And then when the act is accomplished, I can go back later and re(a)discover what I thought at that moment.* Have I changed my mind since then? Most likely. But there, however impermanently, is a little word sculpture of my thought process for that day on that subject.

But then also there are the unseen thoughts, the unknown unknowns that one discovers when reading, where you find meaning perhaps where the author didn’t intend. Or you see their gaps, their mistakes, their blind spots, their noise within their signal. This too is part of writing and is part of your own writing. No one writes absolutely cleanly with no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation, except for maybe lawyers, but even lawyers make mistakes, which is why we have so many of them. Lawyering is a type of weaponized literary criticism. They are busily arguing over the latent ambiguities that their colleagues have created, recently or historically. It’s a great racket.

What happens when you reread yourself is that you see what you thought back then but also what you were wrong about. You’re able, however slightly, to see yourself as a stranger might, to see your own bald spot, your own exhausted presumptions, and that too is a kind of thought, thought’s echo, thought’s reverb, a reconsideration, perhaps even a regret. So writing becomes thought in stereo, moving through time, a moment generated into being that can be reviewed skeptically for as long as the page lasts or the wifi stays strong.

Why would I want to give that up? Sure, I need help with my spelling and my typing, which seems only to get worse. But the little corrective squiggles is one layer of robot intrusion. When you let the robot take over the structure of the syntax, then you have forfeited the chance to figure out what you really thought about something, and to be reminded of it later. You’ve robbed yourself of the pleasure of thinking for yourself.

*Sorry! Grad school trick.

Does the short story live in disguise?

literary lint, short stories, ,

The Republic of Letters published two pieces this week about the short story. In the first, Clancy Steadwell argues that Substack is the perfect environment for the short story to thrive and even grow in popularity. I appreciate his optimism but I found it naive. Writers have been arguing my whole life that “now” is the true moment for the short story because of shorter attention spans. This seems to be wishful thinking.

In the second, Naomi Kanakia argues that the short story is a dead form, and if you see any leftover zombie tales wandering around the internet or your bookshelf, you should promptly kill them. Her essay bothered me so much I spat out a little contradictory Substack note:

Everyone’s worried about AI, but this right here is actual artificial intelligence: trolling in place of argument, “vibes” instead of thinking. At least B.R. Myers, in his Atlantic screeds of yesteryear, had the decency to quote from the writing he was disparaging. The corrosive populist spite on display here is stunning. It seeps into the argumentative gears, and the whole engine of coherence breaks down.

It’s essentially arguing that the only art forms that should exist are the ones that are currently popular and can fund themselves. In effect, there should be no more ballet classes for the kiddos out there, because ballet isn’t a popular activity anymore and I don’t like it. And it shouldn’t be included in university education anymore either because that’s a waste of good old taxpayer money. God forbid the institutions that were built to study and preserve all the valuable stuff that the dead people made actually devote one little basement office somewhere to let the currently alive students make art themselves.

There’s an interesting idea in here — that the short story lives in disguise, that we are surrounded by short narratives but they are presented without the costuming of the traditional short story, whatever that actually is. But along the way Kanakia walks around the block to kick the shins of The Missouri Review. What? Yeah, Speer Morgan was just cackling to himself on his way to the bank for all those years. Fleecing the American people with short fiction! Those rubes, who thought they were supporting art. And those chump kids, who believed in it.

There’s more to say here, but in a calmer register. Kanakia recommends the advice letters in Slate as more rewarding literature than the “literary short story.” Her argument is that these letters are most likely actually fictional, and that we are surrounded by short narratives that are truly popular and are not shackled by the chains of tradition and obsolescent gesture.

I agree with her that we are surrounded by short narratives, but it’s much more complicated than she lets on. I take her point that many of them are likely fictional or at least highly embellished. I think there’s an important distinction between writing that is presented to be rigorously factual, writing that is presented to be completely fictional, and a sort of gray area, a demilitarized zone of Tall Tales, which all the adults can admit that there’s a perhaps a little bit of editorial fibbing occurring. I’m not totally naive. Also, it’s worth noting that Slate, as a going concern, seems to survive on this chum-like content, faux-confession exploitation. At some point it turned into a site that primarily consists of advice letters and sex tips.

I would argue that the reader approaches a non-fictional piece differently than a fictional piece. For instance, you watch a movie to empathize with the characters; you watch a reality show in order to judge the characters. Even if you understand that a reality show is highly edited and manipulated, there is something about the people presenting themselves as themselves that invites judgment rather than empathy. I don’t know why that is. Phoebe Maltz Bovy has written eloquently on this question.

So while the advice letters in Slate or the AITA posts on Reddit are shaped as first-person narratives, they are presented as real, not as fictional, even though their veracity is unprovable and highly suspect. Since they are presented as factual, readers don’t approach them as art as Kanakia claims to do. They approach them as entertainment. This is not a bad thing. It’s just a different mode. Perhaps, decades hence, Houghton Mifflin will publish a Best American collection of AITA posts. Perhaps their artistic merit will be discovered by the scholars of the future.

So if the short story lives in disguise, it’s disguised so well that it’s become something entirely different. And perhaps that’s the way it should be. Perhaps it’s impossible to know what will be worth preserving in the future, so writing to some old masterwork criteria is a lost cause. What we call literature is a library of exceptions, the texts that persisted.

Kanakia ends her post making a point about Chekhov and how he published some 300 humorous pieces before he wrote his famous short stories. It’s a useful reminder, but still, we don’t read those. We read his short stories.