AI and the future of literature.

A debate with Sam Khan.

Paid subscribers can join this chat thread about Pride and Prejudice. The book club meets on 16th February. The next Shakespeare book club is 23rd February. We are discussing The Comedy of Errors. I strongly recommend watching this version from the Globe.

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When

Sam Kahn

asked if I wanted to have a written debate about AI and literature (after my recent piece ‘Literary Culture Can’t Just Dismiss AI’) I immediately agreed. What a good idea! We conducted the discussion over email for the last couple of weeks. As you’ll see, we don’t agree at all (though we do have some overlap), and so it was a very stimulating discussion. My thanks to Sam for suggesting this!

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Sam

Hi Henry,

Nice to have this exchange!

We can start with AI, and start with the exchange we’ve already had, and branch out from there. I imagine the terrain we'll really want to get to is the sort of moral obligation of literature to keep pace with the times (which is something that I certainly have mixed feelings about).

So — for readers joining us — the jumping off point for this is this fiery manifesto that the editors wrote up for

The Metropolitan Review

, in which we denounced AI (in addition to denouncing many other things). You wrote on your Substack that you liked the general idea of the publication but that something struck you as wilfully atavistic about our stance here. “But the most significant thing happening to writing and culture right now is Artificial Intelligence,” you wrote. “It is changing everything. Suddenly [by rejecting AI], they [The Metropolitan Review] are not racing to the future anymore.”

So, first of all, I think of you as such a classicist that I was surprised to see you leap to AI's defense! Do you want to lay out how you think the literary community should view AI and where there can be some sort of harmonious interaction between literature and whatever is coming out of AI?

All best!

- Sam

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Henry

Hello Sam,

Many thanks for suggesting this! I am always interested to have these discussions. Let me start by reiterating my enthusiasm for your attitude at The Metropolitan Review, which is not only one of opposition to the dreariness of much modern culture, but a willingness to do something new in response.

I will try and answer your question, but I want to fill in a few relevant points that come prior to what you asked.

I am a classicist in the sense that I promote the value of old books, but not, alas, in the sense that I can read Latin and Greek. So in the longer view, I am a modern. (Obviously, I venerate the ancients.) The old debates, from the time of Shakespeare and running through Swift and Johnson, were about the ancient classics versus the modern classics. It's a debate we still have: traditional literature or modernism and its inheritors? Like Swift, I want to take an ambivalent position. I like both. I want both. I choose abundance. I love Shakespeare and Helen DeWitt.

One reason why we are able to have the luxury of this discussion is technology. Without the printing press, there would be no First Folio, no Paradise Lost. As John Pistelli so lucidly discussed (I would give my fingernails to be able to write like that), many other technologies, such as the typewriter, have been instrumental to the production of literature. Of course, yes, there would still be literature without these technologies, but not the same sort of literature.

Art is often the result of technology: Shakespeare and the indoor theatre, Hollywood and celluloid. The essence of poetry, said Samuel Johnon, is invention. He was describing the way poets found new ways to say old things, but he knew full well that in the modern world (the world of innovation in technology) that has meant new ways of saying new things as well. He saw the rise of the novel, which is still shifting and changing as a form.

The biggest change technology has inflicted upon literature was the invention of the radio. That produced a break with the past unlike anything else. Voices in the air! From there on, entertainment technology became an alternative to print: film, television, videogames, computers, the internet, social media, and smartphones. AI is the latest in that line.

Television was clearly the worst of these inventions. I cannot request anything from television: no Shakespeare, no Mozart, no Rembrandt. Not on demand. But now? I am listening to Mitsuko Uchida as I type this! When I write about Shakespeare, I can summon up the texts, in various formats and editions. I have been released from the grim mono-cultural dross of the 1990s into a world of art. I saw Uchida play live last night. And why? Because I saw the details on Twitter. No social media, no Metropolitan Review, in form or in ideology.

AI is a much broader, more general technology than any of these, but one of its most important functions is to re-organise the internet. I asked GPT o1 recently (not pro, alas, I am too poor) whether the 1980s were an especially good time for Mozart recordings. In my follow up question, I told it two of my favorite recordings from that period and asked for others. Both answers were splendid. With other models (including o3, Perplexity, and r1, though I have stopped using that for now), I can get links to supporting sites. Rather than thinking of AI as some glib predictive word-arranger, I see it as a super-Google, a much more advanced means of calling up information from the internet. I listened to several excellent Mozart recordings as a result of that one query. Ask it about Bakhtin: you get a decent result.

Now, this is just one example. AI is going to do (is already doing) so much more. It is being used to help scientists understand how animals communicate with each other. It is helping historians read old documents. It is increasingly able to mark homework accurately and give helpful feedback. (Daisy Christodoulou is changing her mind.) It makes management consultants more productive. It is being used to make medical research quicker, too. We are going to see the development of more drugs that save and improve our lives. The quicker we get those drugs, the more people we help. AI is also an excellent coder, and it helps us repair potholes. Students can learn twice as much with an AI tutor than in some classes.

Now, AI is not all good news. As I wrote, every technology is a Faustian pact. The printing press unleashed all sorts of disorder onto the world! But when I see people say that AI is all nonsense, I assume they are not reading the right sources. If you read opinion columnists, including here on Substack, you'll see a lot about their opinions on what the media are saying about what the tech companies are saying, but a bit less on whether AI will help us cure dementia. The idea that the primary use is "scams" is obtuse. Read Rohit instead!

So what I want is to see literary people take AI seriously. Writing it off, ignoring it, assuming it is a slop machine and little more, being a lot of Cassandras about it, is a narrow, badly informed, and false view of what is going on. Many people still don't like the internet, but the world is what it is. We can only live in the times we have. Why is it that when I see pieces like this one (recommended: George Eliot and tech) they are not often coming from the literati?

The world is going to change. The way we work will change. The way we manage our health will change. Education, politics, war: everything. How can literature ignore this?

I have been a teaching assistant, law-firm blogger, Parliamentary research (bag carrier), and marketing consultant with large corporate clients. In any of those jobs, I would find AI hugely useful, interesting, and unignorable. One of the first things I tested it on when GPT3.5 came out were the sorts of questions I would have used in my old consulting role, and, you know, it gave good answers!

In the literary world, AI is not so obviously applicable. There is understandable hostility to the idea of an AI novel. (Though I think people are quite confused about those issues.) But we still have to think about it! I will say again: it's going to be part of everything. Hollis Robbins has just written an excellent piece about how we ought to re-think the way we teach literature in an AI world. Hollis has been thinking about this for a while, as have I. I had been interested in AI for several years before GPT 3.5 arrived. People back then would say, “oh but chatbots are useless”. They were right. I would tell them that car insurance claims were processed by AI, or that half of the work for Goldman Sachs to bring a company to IPO was done by AI. They were reluctant to follow the implications. But here we are. (I have previously written about AI and criticism, though even in this short while it has improved,

So my piece was simply trying to say that ignoring AI, as you plan to do at The Metropolitan Review, isn't just misguided — I suspect it isn’t possible. It reminds me of people telling me chatbots were useless. AI might produce new art, or it might simply become so pervasive that for literature to ignore it would be like trying to write novels without trains, cars, or electric lights.

As for how AI and literature can interact... well, I feel like I have already gone on for long enough!

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Sam

Nice points Henry. As stylish as I would expect from you!

So it’s a little interesting for me to be cast as the atavist in one of these conversations (and this against someone who can fluently quote Samuel Johnson!) since, in other skirmishes elsewhere on the platform, I get accused more often of being a techno-optimist (which mostly has to do with my being so irritatingly bullish about Substack).

I fundamentally agree with you that literature has some obligation to keep pace with the times, and for its borders to be permeable enough to allow in both the cutting-edge technology of the moment and (more crucially) to take into account how that technology is reshaping the culture. No argument there.

There are two ways in which this gets more complicated.

One way is that sometimes technologies come along that are of no particular use to literature. You named radio and television, which are both perfect examples of that. Both would seem to be conducive to good writing, but the market realities of radio and television at their peak (the need for near-constant ad breaks, control by corporations endlessly looking for profits, the low attention-span of most consumers, who were, after all, driving or cooking or in the middle of doing something else) combined to make their value for writers close to nil. There were people who could adapt to the form — Larry David figured out how to make network television work for him, for instance — and there were the moments when the form adapted to let talented writers operate with freedom, as with Garrison Keillor or Jean Shepherd’s radio shows for instance, or as happened in a big way once streaming came in and effectively replaced the old commercial-driven television model. But for close to a full century, in which radio and television utterly dominated mass media, serious writers were nonetheless well-advised to give the new forms a wide berth, to stick to mediums that allowed them creative control and artistic freedom. For writers who went the other way and tried to wholeheartedly embrace the new forms under the principle that new had to be good, they very often ended up as cautionary tales. That’s, for instance, what happened to Clifford Odets, who dropped his career as America’s leading playwright to be buried alive in a Hollywood studio. That story is memorialized in the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, but the real-life version of it is even more macabre with Odets shouting from his deathbed that he might still write some play that would “redeem the last sixteen wasted years.”

The other way this gets more complicated is that there are some technologies that — I believe — represent existential threats to a discipline. AI may well be one of these. Photography is a perfect example of a technology that represented an existential threat to figurative painting — and, in a very real sense, painting has never recovered from photography’s advent (certainly, painting, and visual art in general, have nowhere close to the cultural centrality that they did before the camera’s invention). Faced with an existential threat like photography, the art world — I’m talking about figures like Van Gogh and Picasso — did the intelligent thing. They figured out how to draw a line in the sand, to cede to photography everything that photography was capable of doing (for a long time it was passé for painters to engage in representational art at all) and to identify the real core of their activity, which was self-expression, which was something that no camera, however advanced, could replicate. Theater (and to some extent the traditional novel) faced a similar existential threat with the arrival of film, and theater responded in the best way it could — by emphasizing the live-ness of the performance, by moving away from the kind of garish spectacles that were very popular in the 19th century and that were soon transported over to the new medium. Writing was less affected by the invention of the camera, but, now, a new machine is showing up that can put together words with intelligence, that can replicate most of the core functions of a writer. When a beast like that appears, the intelligent thing, usually, is to RUN — to draw the line in the sand, to concede various kinds of technical writing to the machine, but to really try to delineate what the core vital qualities of writing are (e.g. soulful expression, mementoes of lived experience) and to keep the machine as far away from them as possible.

The next question is (as we watch warily from the shrubbery) what the nature of the new beast is. I think you’re right that ultimately — or at least in its current incarnation — it’s basically a super-google, just presenting web searches in more easily digestible format. That’s not so dangerous, and writers may find themselves using it as we currently use google — as an assistant, as a way of quickly looking up relevant information. But, as I think we all know, AI’s impact is soon going to be greater than that. I think the real disruption is going to occur in film, where there are so many barriers to entry, and AI will slash through many of them. AI will eliminate most of the costs associated with making films and give complete outsiders, intelligently using prompts, the ability to make fully functional films that can compete with what the studios are putting out. From a democratic perspective, it’s hard to argue with that — since it allows people who otherwise wouldn’t have the capacity to express themselves to find an outlet for their expression. The case is different, however, with writing. There, the only barrier to entry is a paper and pencil (or word processor), so it’s difficult to think of AI in writing as anything other than cheating, i.e. as moving away from self-expression and letting the automatic pilot fly the plane.

Now if we think about where AI is likely to enter into writing, the obvious place, I suppose, is to help writers through difficult patches. Like you, I’m an Eisenhower man. I was writing a novel about Eisenhower and that meant that I had to write out a bunch of battle scenes, and that meant that I had to spend months doing a lot of pretty technical research to feel like I was able to inhabit Eisenhower’s world. I could easily imagine — this may be possible already — that I could have spared myself all of that by telling the AI to write the battle scenes for me and then to concentrate on the rest of the narrative, which was in any case more important. I imagine that that sort of temptation will soon be overwhelming for writers, but I think it’s very important that we draw the line in the sand somewhere around here. I wasn’t writing about Eisenhower because I wanted to accurately render Eisenhower’s life or even to write a great novel about Eisenhower, it was because there was something about Eisenhower that, strange as it sounds, was important for me and I wanted to explore that. To let AI directly into the process would be to, fundamentally, corrode what the process is about, which is self-exploration. In other activities – activities that are directly affected by AI –- we are able to draw the line in the sand without too much trouble. Chess players, for instance, can play against computers or study with computers to their heart’s content (and, on the whole, it makes them better chess players), but access to computers is strictly banned in live play — for the perfectly good reason that chess is, ultimately, a game, a test of skill and will against an opponent, and the second a computer shows up with its answer key of the best move in a particular position, the game stops being fun. Writing doesn’t have rules in the same way that chess does, but I think that we in the literary community (you should picture me sniffing haughtily as I say this) are able to agree on some parameters, and that AI actually helps to think us about what writing really is, in the way that the camera helped early 20th century painters to think about art. Writing isn’t just putting words together, and it isn’t just some high-quality technical achievement. It’s a mainline to the soul. Since AI doesn’t have a soul (unless DeepSeek, or whatever the fuck, is working on that), AI, however good it gets, isn’t capable of the crucial work of writing, and it falls to writers and (sniff, sniff) the literary community to draw the line in the sand here, to rule AI out of bounds and to focus on what is really important, which is our own passion and our own enrichment.

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Henry

I don't know how you could possibly justify this statement: “Writing isn’t just putting words together, and it isn’t just some high-quality technical achievement. It’s a mainline to the soul.” Since when was writing a mainline to the soul? What does that even mean?

You are not describing what writing is; you are describing how writing makes you feel. One swallow does not a summer make! Remember the Turing Test is dead. We don’t always know what is AI and what is human. However good we are at telling the difference now, we will be worse in the future.

Shakespeare said, “The truest art is the most feigning.” We know nothing of Shakespeare's soul. His writing is not a mainline to anything. These declarations about writing are never as universal as they sound. The temptations of aphorism are to be avoided. Unless they are written by Oscar Wilde: “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”

As for your proposal to draw a line in the sand. Impossible! The fact that you offered this dialogue, despite the policy of The Metropolitan Review, is an example of that. If literature is going to deal with the world as it is, AI is unavoidable. Cinema changed how the modernists wrote novels. Radio very much did affect writers. Think of how different dialogue is in post-radio novels! Think of the stories by Kipling and Cheever with radios in! Larkin wrote a poem with a radio in, too. Maybe they hated the radio. But they did not ignore it. Fictional characters watched TV. Think of the boy in Equus always singing and advertising jingle.

Plenty of writers worked in radio and television and had good careers. They might not otherwise have been "literary" writers, but so what? The few examples of literati being defeated by the system are merely that: a few examples. The Mousetrap was a radio play before it was a stage play. Helene Hanff wrote scripts for TV dramas. Was that so wrong?

You are muddling the literary and the non-literary and reasoning from too small a set of examples. Even if it is true that no serious writer will produce anything with AI (and I simply don't believe it, but we cannot predict), there is no serious future for literature that doesn't involve AI.

First, it will become inevitable for the bureaucracy and administration of The Metropolitan Review, it will be an essential research tool (have you seen the recent announcements from OpenAI....), it will be able to proof-read, offer robust editorial feedback, provide new lines of thought, give you a reading list... I say will be, it already can. Writers who cannot use AI will be left behind in more ways than the purely literary.

Second, AI is going to be part of everything. A novel without the internet already feels stale. This will get worse. How will realistic novels remain appealing if they keep feeling like they are set, technologically, in my childhood or earlier? Yes, that's what Middlemarch was, and War & Peace, but it's not what Pride and Prejudice was, or Jane Eyre, or The Way We Live Now. The novel incorporates. Dickens loved writing about the 1830s. Still, the train arrives in Dombey and Son. Ronald Firbank incorporated radio, telephone, cinema ... Waugh took that influence and used it well. Fiction made such splendid use of the telegram!

Third, I don't agree, at all, with what you say about technology destroying art forms. Figurative art was exhausted. Watercolour landscapes were still being painted in the late nineteenth century, well after photography was invented. They were dull. Turner made abstract paintings in the 1840s! Impressionism wasn't a mere tactic against technology: it was a clearer vision of a changing world. Art is not so crabbed or defensive as you think. It is a constant struggle for excellence. After a period of great discovery, modes and mediums become tired and repetitive. Shakespeare's sonnets are largely anti-sonnets: he is trying to do something original in a form that had been worked to death in the 1590s. Figurative painting peaked in the Dutch golden age. The longer your view, the more you can see this. Art is always working with innovation.

AI may or may not produce something great. It might be a new radio or a new Hollywood. We don't know. I can well imagine someone producing an entirely new sort of book, one which integrates writing, images, videos, commentaries, footnotes, live search, voice recognition, audio narration ... someone will surely produce a digital novel that blends and merges several mediums. It will be a whole new experience, akin to the time when photographs began to move and voices came out of the air. We are so inured to these great changes, we forget. We forget that before Edison, hearing voices was a sign of ghosts and madness. Seeing pictures move was a hallucination before celluloid. Remember the moving portraits in Harry Potter? AI will make that for us now. Imagine an edition of Harry Potter that is like the book combined with the film in some new VR experience. You might recoil from this. You might say this is not reading. This is not a mainline to the soul. Join the leagues of people who hated impressionism, hated the novel, hated the theatre. On and on they go.

Imagine if you can use the AI to create the world of the book as you imagined it. Won’t writers use it for world-building? Won't they want to see their words live? I am just as attached to the book as you, but this is the world we live in now.

Someone is going to try and use this new technology in a process of discovery. They are going to do what artists have always done. When we discovered perspective, we got the Renaissance. The financial crash of 1825 started us on the periodical novel. Who knows what's coming now? If the current writers don't do it, they might not be so current ...

Your view of art is a kind of degraded Romanticism. It is a particular thing from a particular time. It might not be true anymore. I doubt it was ever really true, not quite as true as we wanted it to be. And I say this as an individualist. You are sceptical of the market forces that gave us television. Market forces also gave us Mozart! It's true, there is no FirstFolio of HBO. I am a Netflix sceptic. (Yes, I watch, I just don't admire.) Still, the people who wrote those shows had good careers as writers. not my sort of writer, but who cares? We never get given that many geniuses. When was the Golden Age for writers? They complain in every generation.

Whether AI produces great art or not depends on many other factors. Art relies on the innovation of ideas as well as technology. It needs a receptive and demanding audience, maybe a fastidious one. It requires a market, maybe a flourishing polis, or at least a lively one. It often does well in times of moral rearrangement. Because it is a response to the past, it is made in the crucible of present change. (I wrote about this here.)

AI is that change for us. It might be terrible, it might not be to our taste, it might not benefit us or people like us. It still might produce great art. It certainly will have to be incorporated into many, many aspects of literature.

I am only a critic, a self-proclaimed critic at that. It doesn't matter what I believe or what I want. What I shall do is pay attention. Jane Austen (1775-1817) lived through wars, revolutions, the first era of fast fashion, and a time of new ideas in moral philosophy and economics. She was part of a society that looked different, dressed differently, had more wealth, new machines, new shops, more social mobility, new ideas about economics and virtue. She could have stuck to the old ways. She was, after all, a conservative. But she read Adam Smith. She knew about the social upheavals of the war. She was interested in abolition. Her letters show a fascination with the new textiles. Her novels are all about how social life changes as the world changes.

She watched and she wrote. That’s what we need to do with our own stirring world.

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Sam

We’re a bit talking past each other – it’s a surprise to me how much we disagree! – so I’ll try to be a little more down-to-earth in my last post and to be clearer with my terms.

We seem to be talking about three different components of the AI revolution and it’s important to distinguish between them. There’s 1) the content of a story and whether or not it includes whatever the cutting-edge technology of the moment happens to be. At least from my point of view, this is a fairly uncontroversial subject. Insofar as artists have any kind of ethical obligation, it’s to render whatever the emotional content is of their time – and that can be ‘timeless’ themes (e.g. how does love play out at our moment in time) or can be specific to the technology they come across. That’s really up to the artist. If somebody writes something interesting about AI, in the way that Patricia Lockwood wrote something interesting about Twitter, then we’re happy to cover it and give it its due, but we (or I) don’t particularly think there’s any obligation among artists to be, like, technological early adopters and to zero in on whatever the current gizmo happens to be. If the dirty word you throw at me is “degraded Romanticism” (why ‘degraded’ by the way, maybe it’s just “Romanticism?”), the dirty word I’d throw back at you is “technodeterminist”! Were the best books of the ‘90s about AOL Instant Messenger? The best books of the ‘60s about fax machines? Artists can engage with whatever they find interesting. The technology of the time may make inroads into our emotional lives, but I don’t think it’s necessarily inevitable that we are shaped by it. We do have say, and choice, in the degree to which we allow technology to dominate our lives.

Then there’s 2) the use of AI as a research tool. This is also fairly uncontroversial. If it works for you, it works for you – and AI can be seen as just being part of a succession of other tools (Google or the microfilm library, or whatever). I don’t have any particular objection to employing AI as an assistant. (I myself have, in the time between my last post and this one, been talked into using some sort of AI tool to catch typos for The Metropolitan Review.) At a personal level, I’m just wary of it because, in my lifetime, I’ve seen what smartphones did to the society – the way they captured everybody’s attention spans – and I’m acutely aware of how a “tool” can go on to manipulate its user.

But the real point here is 3) the use of AI to actually generate the “main body” of written content. And this is, I believe, categorically different from any other use of AI or anything else that has ever existed in writing. The only real analogy is that AI may soon be to writing as the 19th century camera was to figurative imagery – with a machine taking over the core function of an activity (doing it with greater technical proficiency than a human being could possibly manage) and in so doing profoundly reshaping our understanding of that activity. If we allow AI to write for us – not help us in our research, not suggest directions but actually write (which is what all sorts of trade publications are in the process of doing, laying off their staff and “welcoming in” AI to generate the content) – then we are giving over our agency to a machine and in the most profound way we ourselves are no longer engaged in the activity, we become a spectator and consumer and no longer derive the deep meaning and satisfaction that the activity can offer us. I regard the advent of AI in this sense to be an existential threat to the activity of writing, and I believe that it’s fairly easy to draw the line in the sand here. It’s the difference between somebody playing the game and watching the game. The person playing that game might not be the world’s greatest at it, but at least they get to play. Turning that agency over to AI – and there’s about to be abundant pressure to do so in all walks of life – is to actively participate in our own obsolescence.

As for what I mean about the “mainline to the soul,” I guess we first have to agree on what we mean by the word “soul.” I don’t mean anything explicitly “religious” or “mystical.” I just mean the interior domain of a person’s being that acts as an analogue to the external impressions they receive throughout their lives – their “inner life,” to put it more simply. When it comes to Shakespeare, we may not know that much about his biography, but we know an enormous amount about his soul (or the soul of whoever wrote the plays …. I’m very slightly a Baconian but we can have that mud fight some other time). We know his meditations on love, death, power, friendship, you name it, and know it – because he had a unique ability to put words to his reflections – better than we do the soul of just about anybody else. (Let’s not be hung up here, by the way, on questions of literalism – speaking imaginatively or fantastically is just as much, if not more, a reflection of the workings of the soul than the lived “realistic” experiences of one’s external life.)

When I sit down to read something, what I am interested in is the honest truth (however fantastical or whimsical or distorted) of that person’s experience of the world. Since AI has no experience of the world, and no individuality, I am categorically uninterested in what the AI has to say, however artful its magic trick of feigning individuality and experience. Where it gets more complicated, I suppose, is if we think about the AI not as a machine but as a collective intelligence - as the entirety of the Internet (all those pixels) combining together to speak in a single Frankensteinian voice. Is that interesting? Maybe at some level (DeLillo's "the future belongs to crowds" comes to mind) but we very much get a choice in who we extend a hearing to, and in whether we opt in to our own agency or surrender it. If we're listening to (or reading) AI, that means that we're at that given moment choosing not to listen to the experience of an individual human. If we turn over our own creative functions to AI, that means we're surrendering our own agency - and, from the perspective of the soul (i.e. from the perspective of our lifelong endeavor to express and to understand ourselves), that self-surrender is indefensible.

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Henry

I think you are right about a lot of this, and we probably disagree less than it appears. I am not, for example, a techno-determinist. Merely a pragmatist.

Let me put it like this. If, say, Catherine Lacey decides that she will never touch an AI and that it would be detrimental to her art, I think that is a fine and sensible decision that may well work-out very well for her. If the entire group of people who currently constitute the literati make that decision, it will not be so smart. One day soon, you will read something that moves you, and you will not know, or be able to know, if a human wrote it.

I was playing with an LLM recently trying to make it write a half decent poem. It gave me one line, in a poem set in the American Civil War, describing a letter box at the end of a lawn as a "sentinel of hope", which, honestly, is a good image. If you saw it out of context, you'd likely fall for it. That model is now out of date.

What we disagree on is this:

When I sit down to read something, what I am interested in is the honest truth (however fantastical or whimsical or distorted) of that person's experience of the world.

Who ever said this before AI was invented? It became a meme in the last year or two. But it's not true, or not entirely true. When you read, you want your sympathies excited and your mind engaged. You want beauty, truth, wit, excitement, character, learning, feeling, plot, trope, inventive imagery, and so on. It is often the case that writers transmogrify their own experiences, and often the case that they do not. You often cannot tell. (This is one of the great lessons of literary biography.)

Great writing can be engaged in saying the same thing again and again in different ways (as I quoted Johnson saying earlier). Maybe we are going to witness a return of this form of writing, that prizes tradition? You do not read Agatha Christie for her "experience of the world" but for her ingenious plotting. You cannot know Shakespeare's experience of the world: he seems to have written about almost every experience of the world. Literature is a much higher art than this: it is a means of thinking, not just a means of reporting. It is an act of imagination, not just of experience. A novel like The Fountain Overflows does very much give you Rebecca West’s experience of the world, but in a transformed way, so that she also gives you the experiences (or sympathies with those experiences) of other people. One does not read Proust merely to know what it was like to be Proust, and irrespective of his style.

This idea which is, I think, a defence against the possible problems of AI (which I am not as uncomprehending of as I perhaps appear) would be totally inadequate to explain the nineteenth century novel. The theories of Bakhtin would have to be thrown out if it were true! This is what I mean by a degraded Romanticism, (which was not intended as an insult!). To degrade is to put out of office (de-grade), and I think what has happened is that the core ideal of Romanticism has been put out of office in the current discourse that is looking to find a defence against AI ever being able to write a great poem or novel. It was never really the Romantic ideal only to make a self-expression. Indeed, the great Romantic image of the Aeolian harp might give you pause about the idea of “surrendering agency”.

I happen to agree that AI's lack of experience of the world — a lack of personality — may be what is currently stopping it from writing great literature, but this is only speculation. The models are improving so much...

I have said more than enough, again, so let me end by thanking you for this discussion. It has been stimulating! I hope we can talk more as the models change and the reality we are discussing has become new again.

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Sam

Enjoyed it Henry. Thanks for doing this!