Literary culture can't just dismiss AI.
The Metropolitan Review and the new sensibility
Here on Substack, a new literary journal has launched, . My congratulations! I hope they flourish! I especially liked what and wrote (he about Bruce Wagner, she about James).
It promises to be a stimulating publication. They write: “We believe in ambition and experimentation, and we stand against dull language.” This sort of experiment is exactly what literary culture needs. I couldn’t agree more that, “There’s a great and growing hunger for literature and culture that enlivens, not slackens.” More power to them!
I hope you will all subscribe. My prediction that criticism would flourish on Substack this year is holding up well so far!
There was one part of their statement of intent that I didn’t feel enthusiastic about. From the opening paragraph. (My bolding.)
We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack. It’s as if the great publishers, film producers, and record labels can no longer provide us the artistic nourishment that we took for granted in the twentieth century. So much mainstream art can feel like a pale imitation of yesterday, marketers at the top chasing specters of what was successful a generation ago. “Artificial intelligence” is no longer an insult—wasn’t artifice to be avoided at all costs, plastic a much-deserved insult?—and tech behemoths long to jam us so full of cultural slop that we won’t be able to think coherently again.
This is familiar. (Inevitably they complain about “conglomeration among the major publishers”, too.) Of course, I agree that there is a philistine supremacy in many literary institutions. Everyone on Substack is reading Middlemarch, and maybe the editor of the New York Times Book Review should join them!
The problem is in what they say about AI. We cannot simply be against AI like this. “We will happily race into the future, together” they say of Substack. Good! But the most significant thing happening to writing and culture right now is Artificial Intelligence. It is changing everything. Suddenly they are not racing to the future anymore.
If we want to take the future of high culture seriously, we will have to take AI seriously. We may not (yet?) expect AI to write a great novel, but it is an inevitable part of the new culture. Literature needs to concern itself with that culture.
One reason for Sally Rooney’s popularity is that she can write about phones and the internet in a way that doesn’t sound false and hollow. Plenty of literary people hate Rooney’s work, but she got that right, which most of the other novelists writing today have failed to do. Too many modern novels are a continuation of Twitter by other means.
And regardless, AI is part of the competition now! Perhaps the most interesting thing I have seen recently was this Note by , a writer who worked at Substack until recently. Jasmine gave DeepSeek some prompts and it produced something she would have been happy with as a first draft.
Notice that AI is a collaborator here, not a replacement. Used well, it is going to be a complementary technology, at least for the short term, perhaps for longer. The human sensibility will always be of interest to us!
Maybe your first instinct is to quibble. Really? Is it actually as good as a first draft? OK maybe, but it’s still not going to be the full draft. And this isn’t how people will use AI. All they will make is slop.
And so on. Just as it has been with all innovations.
They said all this about television, radio, but they also said it about the novel and the indoor theatre. Were the Puritans right about Shakespeare? The printing press seems tame to us, but it was the technology that created a world of discord and war in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were right about television, but ChatGPT has the conversation about Shakespeare that I want to have. Television never did that.
Everything is a Faustian pact. All technology cuts both ways. Literary culture can't just dismiss AI.
It is easy to look back at the settled history of high culture and see how well it all works, now that we have a canon and a tradition to pass on. Less easy to look at TikTok and DeepSeek and not feel a sense that everything is going to be bad now, whereas it will be what we make of it.
That might be mostly outside of our control as individuals or as literary people, but still: if we want a new sort of literary culture for a new age, we need a new attitude to AI.
There are already people who write with the AI as their first audience in mind, and the rest of us second. Maybe you will feel a sense of revulsion at that, but if you want to understand the world, to see clear-eyed what things are, you need to take this seriously.
The release of DeepSeek was a major event. Who cared among the literati? I have got good answers from it about Tolstoy, Kant, Jauss and Bakhtin, and The Merchant of Venice. I’ll soon be writing again about AI and literary criticism!
To dismiss AI, as the Metropolitan Review does,—“tech behemoths long to jam us so full of cultural slop that we won’t be able to think coherently again”,—is to think in memes.
It’s the same as when people used to say “Wikipedia is full of errors!” Yes, so is everything, but now we have a free encyclopedia for everyone in the world that can be updated with new information.
What Jasmine posted isn’t slop. The answers I was getting weren’t slop. Maybe a lot of people are going to fill the internet with AI generated slop, but isn’t that exactly the point? The Metropolitan Review exists as a counterpoint to all the human generated slop that has already taken over.
Reviews like The Metropolitan Review exist to help us manage the slop of culture, human or otherwise.
In ‘One culture and the new sensibility’, written about another sort of culture change in the 1960s, Susan Sontag wrote,
What gives literature its preeminence is its heavy burden of “content,” both reportage and moral judgment. (This makes it possible for most English and American literary critics to use literary works mainly as texts, or even pretexts, for social and cultural diagnosis—rather than concentrating on the properties of, say, a given novel or a play, as an art work.) But the model arts of our time are actually those with much less content, and a much cooler mode of moral judgement—like music, film, dance, architecture, painting, sculpture. The practice of these arts—all of which draw profusely, naturally, and without embarrassment, upon science and technology—are the locus of the new sensibility.
Soon this will be true of AI. There is already a new sensibility of online culture. As wrote: “Culture isn’t stagnating; it’s evolving in ways that we’re struggling to recognize and appreciate. The challenge lies not in reviving what’s dead, but in developing the language to understand what already exists.” Literature must find its place against and among all of this. Otherwise, the new sensibility will continue to overwhelm the old one.
The next new sensibility will draw profusely on AI. The history of art is the history of such profusions. It’s good to make the case for reading old books. I do it all the time. And one thing AI will never be able to do for you is read Anna Karenina.
But new literary reviews have to exist within the new context. There is no going back.
I hope thrives, but I suspect it needs to have more of ’s attitude to do so. The problem for modern literature is not that it is beleaguered by conglomerates and tech behemoths. The problem is that it too often refuses to have anything to do with the new sensibility.
AI is already baked into most every platform we use on the net—maps, search, translation, rideshare, etc. It’s an unavoidable part of present-day life. And LLMs have countless uses beyond generating unimpressive text: I watched in November, for instance, as the audio version of ChatGTP live translated a conversation between a group of English speakers and a Spanish speaker. It went on for 20 min. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel fish is “probably the oddest thing in the Universe,” but there it is, in everyone’s back pocket—right now. And it’s worth saying: We’re always interacting with the worst version of these models that exists; they will only get better from here—as the DeepSeek reveal shows. These tools are part of life today, and we might as well figure out how to use them wisely and talk about them sensibly.
I take your point about not living in denial about AI - have found it already very useful myself in helping with research, I'm with you on that.
What I'm unclear on is why anyone would want to read AI. Or at least, why the sort of people who are interested in reading Faulkner or Woolf would be interested in reading anything by a machine. We keep going back to the argument of, "yes of COURSE it's not great now, but imagine the masterpieces it'll be able to create in 5/10/50 years' time!", and I do have to keep asking, what does anyone even mean by 'masterpiece' in this context? What would that look like? If Hamlet had never been written and tomorrow a machine wrote it for us, it'd be completely meaningless. Wouldn't it?
(Schrodinger's Hamlet - both dead and alive until observed!)