I am reading Ulysses right now (please clap). Among the many things it has afforded me – a public sense of superiority, a private feeling that maybe I am a bit thick (brow furrowed as I parse the same paragraph in chapter three for the 14th time) – one has surprised me more than the rest. I have decided that all this fretting over the nastiness of artificial intelligence, particularly its impact on art, is frivolous moral panic.
How did I get here? As with most of my opinions, it began with an eye-roll: in the summer of 2023, nearly 8,000 authors – too many, for a start – signed an open letter calling for artificial intelligence (AI) companies to stop using writers’ words to train their models. At the moment, companies such as Chat GPT appear to use the language of copyright works – poems, novels, pop songs – and teach their bot how to replicate and build on it. The signatories of the open letter were cross that they were not compensated for this; more secretly, I suspect they were worried that they are providing AI with the tools to put them out of a job. Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen and several other people I otherwise admire were among those stamping their feet in protest.
Maya Shanbhag Lang, president of the Authors Guild, said: “The output of AI will always be derivative in nature. AI regurgitates what it takes in, which is the work of human writers. It’s only fair that authors be compensated for having ‘fed’ AI and continuing to inform its evolution.” Snooze!
Has no one noticed that art for as long as it has existed is entirely derivative? That humans are as mimetic as machines? That we pay conscious or unconscious fealty to our influences all of the time? I have never compensated AA Gill or Martin Amis a dime (their estates, maybe), and yet I suspect there are no two greater influences on me as a columnist than the pair. Novelists angry that a machine is learning from their work should be thankful – it is better to influence something than no one at all. AI art is just a new vernacular for an old idea: people copy people.
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Which takes me back to Ulysses. (I audibly gasped when I first opened the tome and realised just how tiny the font is.) My dad, I think sceptical about the likelihood of me finishing the endeavour, offered one salve: thanks to a degree in Classics, at least I know the original story. It is perhaps the most celebrated novel of all time, and obviously a work of glittering oddness and originality – a “campaign against cliche”, as Amis says. It also follows the contours of an old and famous poem, so much so that modern interpretations of the text even name the chapters after characters and episodes in the Odyssey. To say that without Homer there is no Joyce is a statement so banal and obvious it would make both sneer.
And it’s not always so conspicuous, nor is it limited to the literary realm. The 4/4 time signature of contemporary pop music is a formula; without Taylor Swift’s 1989 we would never have Dua Lipa or Charli XCX; without Bruce Springsteen we would never have Taylor Swift. Sentences themselves, by the way, follow inherited rules and rubrics. Not to mention homage, parody, satire and translation. And what of the relationship between artist and student? Raphael was the pupil of the master Pietro Perugino. Most of Plato’s writing is just him openly ventriloquising his tutor, Socrates.
So I think this open letter and these novelists are wrong in their doctrinal self-confidence and demands to be paid for an exercise that long predates their existence. And I think they will feel rather foolish in a few years’ time for throwing sand in technology’s face and pretending that their writing is of such special importance that it should not be sullied with the simple act of derivation (shall we list all of the influences on Margaret Atwood’s writing, while we’re here?). Call it arrogant, short-sighted, self-important. I reckon it’s more prosaic: tedious and ahistorical conservatism. And given all of this, it’s not machines I’m worried about, it’s people.
We can note all the ways AI is an antagonist: I do not want to consume novels made by a bot over novels written by a person. There is something ineffable about preferring language and stories produced by something with a soul than without one. Call me old-fashioned. And yes, we shouldn’t cede the role of artistic production to the computer. But no one sensible is arguing for that. I will make a bland prediction: humans will keep writing novels, most of them will be worthless as has always been the case, some will be life-changing and transcendent and earn their place in the canon. AI will copy all of them, and it won’t matter that much.
I’m bullish about the filtering effect of the universe: the good stuff will always reveal itself, and no one is forcing you to consume the internet slop.
