I’m reaching the end of writing a book and familiar feelings kick in. I pop into the beautiful bookshop that is Daunt’s on Marylebone High Street. Custom-built for an antiquarian bookseller in the early 1900s, with its elegant shelving and galleries, it’s the site, nowadays, for most of the book launches I go to. In the front, tables with piles of the latest books, fiction and nonfiction. Not just piles, but piles and piles. Piles and piles and piles. And I think, am I really going to add to this profusion with my own irrepressible logorrhoea?
It’s the same vertiginous feeling I used to get when I was working on my doctoral thesis in the Bodleian Library way back when. So many books. So, so many. Our house is jampacked with them and, every so often, I have a Japanese-inflected decluttering moment and take some of them down to the Amnesty Bookshop on the Kentish Town Road. The idea is that, with fewer books, I might actually be able to find the one I want. The last time I did it, I threw out an undergraduate relic, WL Warren’s fat and definitive biography of Henry II. A few weeks later, I was watching that classic movie The Lion in Winter and wanted to know a bit more about the said lion, one Henry II (Peter O’Toole in the film). Lo and behold, the book I wanted had gone.
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Another issue that starts to rear its head as you’re finishing up is also related to this tsunami of texts. How did my own text emerge? In relation, of course, to others, in a dialogue with them, conscious and unconscious, explicit and non-explicit. And this issue has a technical, even a legal, side. Since I last wrote this sort of book— a freewheeling look at Schubert’s Winterreise back in 2015—anxieties about intellectual property, about plagiarism, about proper citation of copyright sources, have strangely intensified. The concept of what is known as “fair use” of other people’s words has shifted and tightened.
When we human beings make art, of course we make use of the creations of the past; but we do not simply stitch them together
It’s strange because it’s an anxiety operating in a world where, thanks to the encroachment of the digital, we are swimming in, maybe even drowning in, unacknowledged creative material and many, if not most, of us are endlessly creating “content” for which we receive no material compensation. Of course, if you think about it for a moment, it’s not so strange, because what it reflects is a world in which we don’t really know what belongs to whom. We try desperately to cling on to some sense of creative property and to the individualism that it underpins.
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This takes me back to the whole business of artificial intelligence and our worries about that. Not so much the economic worries—mass unemployment or a new cycle of boom and bust. Not so much the political ones—tech overlords bestriding the world, terrorists killing us all with new minted microbes. Not even the philosophical ones—can a machine think? Rather, the notion which occurs nowadays to most people doing creative work: could an AI do this? I did—I promise—write this column myself without any assistance from AI. But if I asked Claude or ChatGPT to write 900 words in the style of yours truly, could I get away with it? Would you notice? Would you care?
Since I wrote my last book, large language models have been gobbling up texts galore, of all sorts, hungry for material which they can absorb in order better to predict how and which word should follow another. And this successively refined predictive capacity is the basis for the astonishing ability of these systems to mimic human writing and, perhaps, write this column for me (given the right prompt). The companies, it has to be said, have not always been paying for these ingestible words. And that has, in turn, become a matter for legal challenge, a class action to which a large number of authors have signed up.
But can one of these machines be truly creative? I think we sometimes imagine it can because we’ve been hung up on postmodern notions of textuality propagated by the likes of Jacques Derrida, which percolated through to the culture at large in the 1980s and 1990s. If the relativism as to truth associated with Michel Foucault has had its vulgar consummation in the bizarre politics of our era, the Derridean notion that texts are simply made out of texts has made us confused about what AI can do.
When we human beings make art, or when we write fiction or nonfiction, of course we make use of the creations of the past; but we do not simply stitch them together in a different pattern or shake the kaleidoscope. What we make as human beings we make new through our encounters with and experience of the world outside. As materialists, we have to accept that one day it may be possible to create machines that think and feel and interact. We are, after all, machines ourselves. But a computer shut in on itself and juggling the cultural riches of the past is a long way off.
