And to the former question — whether the judges were just wrong to think the novel good — we can say: surely we’re past all that.
I’m not past that. If they thought The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy was flawless, then by their own lights — and if they’re decent critics we can expect readers to agree — it was.
If all interpretations are equally valid, what distinguishes a “decent critic” from an indecent one? Good press? Didn’t we all learn at GCSE that the reader’s interpretation of the poem is much more important than trying to figure out what the author meant by it? Didn’t Roland Barthes pronounce The Death of the Author as long ago as 1967?
Any interpretation of a literary work must be based on evidence found within the work itself. I cannot claim that the Epic of Gilgamesh is about Eamon de Valera’s Ireland, because it’s not. Contra Barthes, some interpretations are more valid than others, because they have more evidence from within the text supporting them. Logically, that implies that quite often one interpretation will be superior to all others, and usually–but not always–that interpretation will be the author’s, since he’s the one who includes the evidence in the first place. Texts are communication; they are one person trying to communicate something to another. What that something is matters. Claims to the contrary baffle me. Barthes and Foucault and the rest of them were trying to elevate the critic at the expense of the author, a natural impulse given they themselves were critics, but that anyone ever took them seriously is a black mark on the escutcheon of literary criticism.
You’re correct that you cannot claim that the Epic of Gilgamesh is about Eamon de Valera’s Ireland; but in fact, Eamon de Valera’s Ireland is about the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Yeah, if the whole poststructuralist experiment taught us anything, it’s that ideas matter in a way that words don’t.
Sure, you can mix a bag of words up; most of the sentences will be syntactically invalid, and semantically void.
Isn’t art about a meeting of minds? I think we care that those minds haven’t met on false premises. That meeting of minds expectation was undermined by poststructuralism for, as far as I can tell, no reason at all.
There was a feeling that authorship and authority had to be dismantled in order to bring forth some egalitarian ideal, I guess. But it didn’t work.
Authority still exists, only now it’s held by people who have no ideas worth hearing, like Claudine Gay.
Perhaps that was the whole point.
RP
RM Parker
3 months ago
Since LLMs such as ChatGPT aren’t truly generative, but instead assemble passingly acceptable simulacra of script by probability-based verbal associations, maybe this issue is saying more about our increasingly shallow and jejune common discourse. Maybe.
You are wrong. LLMs prefict entire sentences and paragraphs but they do this by essentially reprogramming themselves until tbey reach the right answers given by reinforcement learning. This reprogramming starts the evolution of understanding and a cognitive architecture devoted to applying this understanding to prediction.
Your second sentence contradicts the first, because it confirms the argument of RM Parker. And the third sentence is simply gibberish. AI has no cognitive ability, nor understanding; it is a robot.
I would tend to frame this in a more positive light – and did so at length just today, in arguing that Perhaps AI Will Prompt People To Be More Dynamic.
In general, I’m just getting more and more tired of everything being framed so negatively; every new thing being looked at as a problem, rather than an opportunity.
In that light – I think we should stop worrying about being replaced, or XYZ being “killed off”, and start making ourselves less easy to replace.
Right, and I think that is also what the Luddites said. And here we are, now.
PK
Prashant Kotak
3 months ago
“…There are, no question, literary-ethical problems with ChatGPT. If the algorithm has been “trained”, as some hefty lawsuits are currently complaining it has been, on vast screeds of copyright text without permission or compensation for the authors, that’s a violation deserving of redress…”
The sheer contentiousness of this sentence is breathtaking – and I wonder if the author is in fact aware, but stated it anyway. The silent, elephantine, underlying assumption being, that the seat of human creativity is *not* in fact algorithmic, and that every single “human” creative is somehow any different, i.e. not “trained” on vast screeds of copyright text without permission or compensation for the authors – a difficult thing to prove, I venture to suggest. Or, if he can in fact prove it, I imagine there’s a Nobel Prize, and a Turing Award in the post on it’s way to the author.
The “compensation” point is also interesting, as is the “permission” point. The production of this article entailed, for the author, having “trained” on vast screeds of books, articles, idle conversations with friends in restaurants etc, over the decades of his life; and assuming he paid for a single copy of each of the books he has imbibed, I imagine he would have a hard time proving that the books fed into the Large Language Models were not fact paid for, by for example a bulk order of a single copy of every book in the Waterstones catalogue. The books he has borrowed from his local library over the years, and has therefore not in fact paid for, is of course a grey area, and assuming the author did not go to the trouble of carefully discounting the percolated effects of such material from the production of this article (I’m not seeing, for example, partially starred out words or random gaps in sentences as proof), the matter can be settled in the courts when the array of authors he has borrowed from the library bring a personal class action for copyright infringement against the author. And although I don’t see a huge long list of publishers he has contacted at the bottom of the article, I equally assume good faith on the part of the author in the matter of “permission”, otherwise I imagine yet more lawyers are about to become richer still.
This whole issue of the creative industries complaining about copyright in the context of the Large Language Models is of course, um, cake, in this particular case, the fairy cake that Zaphod Beeblebrox consumed on Frogstar B.
“It is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation—every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake”.
TD
Tyler Durden
3 months ago
It would definitely be rational to write certain texts using AI: TV and movie scripts; theatre spectacles; children’s books; some crime, thriller, romance and mystery fiction; and newspaper comment pieces.
The success of these texts should then be dependent (and judged) on the skill of the editor. The Japanese novelist in question would presumably be aware of this; the issue is that she has been transgressive.
GB
Gordon Black
3 months ago
The great poet William Topaz McGonagall was not the least bit touchy about the distinction between contemporary large language models and his human creativity.
DM
Duane M
3 months ago
It would be better for Mr. Leith to assert that his own essay was drawn in large part from a ChatGPT text. That would excuse his word-salad for its lack of originality and utter dependence on the alleged authority of prior postmodern pseudointellectuals.
As an antidote to such mindless, derivative trash, I recommend the book Fashionable Nonsense, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
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OR
maybe just the romantic ungenius.
And to the former question — whether the judges were just wrong to think the novel good — we can say: surely we’re past all that.
I’m not past that.
If they thought The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy was flawless, then by their own lights — and if they’re decent critics we can expect readers to agree — it was.
If all interpretations are equally valid, what distinguishes a “decent critic” from an indecent one? Good press?
Didn’t we all learn at GCSE that the reader’s interpretation of the poem is much more important than trying to figure out what the author meant by it? Didn’t Roland Barthes pronounce The Death of the Author as long ago as 1967?
Any interpretation of a literary work must be based on evidence found within the work itself. I cannot claim that the Epic of Gilgamesh is about Eamon de Valera’s Ireland, because it’s not. Contra Barthes, some interpretations are more valid than others, because they have more evidence from within the text supporting them. Logically, that implies that quite often one interpretation will be superior to all others, and usually–but not always–that interpretation will be the author’s, since he’s the one who includes the evidence in the first place. Texts are communication; they are one person trying to communicate something to another. What that something is matters. Claims to the contrary baffle me. Barthes and Foucault and the rest of them were trying to elevate the critic at the expense of the author, a natural impulse given they themselves were critics, but that anyone ever took them seriously is a black mark on the escutcheon of literary criticism.
You’re correct that you cannot claim that the Epic of Gilgamesh is about Eamon de Valera’s Ireland; but in fact, Eamon de Valera’s Ireland is about the Epic of Gilgamesh.
This fall, Michael Collins is Enkidu.
I would watch it.
Yeah, if the whole poststructuralist experiment taught us anything, it’s that ideas matter in a way that words don’t.
Sure, you can mix a bag of words up; most of the sentences will be syntactically invalid, and semantically void.
Isn’t art about a meeting of minds? I think we care that those minds haven’t met on false premises. That meeting of minds expectation was undermined by poststructuralism for, as far as I can tell, no reason at all.
There was a feeling that authorship and authority had to be dismantled in order to bring forth some egalitarian ideal, I guess. But it didn’t work.
Authority still exists, only now it’s held by people who have no ideas worth hearing, like Claudine Gay.
Perhaps that was the whole point.
Since LLMs such as ChatGPT aren’t truly generative, but instead assemble passingly acceptable simulacra of script by probability-based verbal associations, maybe this issue is saying more about our increasingly shallow and jejune common discourse. Maybe.
You are wrong. LLMs prefict entire sentences and paragraphs but they do this by essentially reprogramming themselves until tbey reach the right answers given by reinforcement learning. This reprogramming starts the evolution of understanding and a cognitive architecture devoted to applying this understanding to prediction.
Your second sentence contradicts the first, because it confirms the argument of RM Parker. And the third sentence is simply gibberish. AI has no cognitive ability, nor understanding; it is a robot.
You are not wrong.
I would tend to frame this in a more positive light – and did so at length just today, in arguing that Perhaps AI Will Prompt People To Be More Dynamic.
In general, I’m just getting more and more tired of everything being framed so negatively; every new thing being looked at as a problem, rather than an opportunity.
In that light – I think we should stop worrying about being replaced, or XYZ being “killed off”, and start making ourselves less easy to replace.
Right, and I think that is also what the Luddites said. And here we are, now.
“…There are, no question, literary-ethical problems with ChatGPT. If the algorithm has been “trained”, as some hefty lawsuits are currently complaining it has been, on vast screeds of copyright text without permission or compensation for the authors, that’s a violation deserving of redress…”
The sheer contentiousness of this sentence is breathtaking – and I wonder if the author is in fact aware, but stated it anyway. The silent, elephantine, underlying assumption being, that the seat of human creativity is *not* in fact algorithmic, and that every single “human” creative is somehow any different, i.e. not “trained” on vast screeds of copyright text without permission or compensation for the authors – a difficult thing to prove, I venture to suggest. Or, if he can in fact prove it, I imagine there’s a Nobel Prize, and a Turing Award in the post on it’s way to the author.
The “compensation” point is also interesting, as is the “permission” point. The production of this article entailed, for the author, having “trained” on vast screeds of books, articles, idle conversations with friends in restaurants etc, over the decades of his life; and assuming he paid for a single copy of each of the books he has imbibed, I imagine he would have a hard time proving that the books fed into the Large Language Models were not fact paid for, by for example a bulk order of a single copy of every book in the Waterstones catalogue. The books he has borrowed from his local library over the years, and has therefore not in fact paid for, is of course a grey area, and assuming the author did not go to the trouble of carefully discounting the percolated effects of such material from the production of this article (I’m not seeing, for example, partially starred out words or random gaps in sentences as proof), the matter can be settled in the courts when the array of authors he has borrowed from the library bring a personal class action for copyright infringement against the author. And although I don’t see a huge long list of publishers he has contacted at the bottom of the article, I equally assume good faith on the part of the author in the matter of “permission”, otherwise I imagine yet more lawyers are about to become richer still.
This whole issue of the creative industries complaining about copyright in the context of the Large Language Models is of course, um, cake, in this particular case, the fairy cake that Zaphod Beeblebrox consumed on Frogstar B.
“It is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation—every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake”.
It would definitely be rational to write certain texts using AI: TV and movie scripts; theatre spectacles; children’s books; some crime, thriller, romance and mystery fiction; and newspaper comment pieces.
The success of these texts should then be dependent (and judged) on the skill of the editor. The Japanese novelist in question would presumably be aware of this; the issue is that she has been transgressive.
The great poet William Topaz McGonagall was not the least bit touchy about the distinction between contemporary large language models and his human creativity.
It would be better for Mr. Leith to assert that his own essay was drawn in large part from a ChatGPT text. That would excuse his word-salad for its lack of originality and utter dependence on the alleged authority of prior postmodern pseudointellectuals.
As an antidote to such mindless, derivative trash, I recommend the book Fashionable Nonsense, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.