Ted Gioia’s recent Substack piece, “ AI Is Defeated in Hollywood—But What About Music?”, is an accurate assessment of AI’s sorry talents and lame ability in music. The same goes for what AI will offer us in the area of written fiction. No doubt there will be all sorts of “tinkly generic improvisations” (Ted’s fine phrase for the “music” that AI can produce.) It will be the same for novels and short stories. The finest in these genres have always come traditionally from the frayed, engaged, beating human heart and its difficulties…the emotions, in other words, expressed in great tragedy and fine comedy, always with gorgeous language. AI is not capable of such forms of expression. Especially when the language used is an AI amalgam intended to sound like a particular human writer’s style, it will be tinkly and poorly improvised, a bad imitation, laughable in the extreme, and worthy of lawsuits from the authors being imitated.
What makes great fiction so individualistic is its very unique language, which can be made up and expressed only from a particular writer’s soul. A human writer, in other words. Machine learning’s efforts at William Faulkner will result in the reader’s laughter, at Herman Melville in derision, at Edith Wharton in sad chuckles, at Edna O’Brien in the reader’s effort to throw the laptop on which he/she is reading at the wall.
And original fiction? Get outta here! There will no doubt be plenty of such “writing.” But it will always be dunderheaded. Those who read it will deserve what they get.
Copyright ©2023 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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