AI and Literature (2)

The Anxiety of Irrelevance

Way back — in 1973 — Harold Bloom introduced his theory of “the anxiety of influence” which posits that poets and writers are deeply influenced by the works of their predecessors, leading to a complex and often tense relationship between the new generation and the established literary canon. According to Bloom, aspiring writers experience an inherent anxiety caused by the overwhelming presence of influential precursors, which drives them to establish their own unique voice and style. 

Bloom’s theory is a “citation classic” insofar as one can’t pass through literature or writing courses without at least hearing about it. When I started writing, in 1996, I was rather dubious about the theory. It felt like an idea situated in time, and doomed to stay there, because it was anchored on a set of practices — and a structure of the world — that didn’t feel relevant to me anymore. Back then, so to speak, literature was a bigger deal. You couldn’t get laid after a cocktail party unless you’d read certain books. By the 1990s, it was more about whether you’d seen The West Wing, Twin Peaks or The Sopranos. The anxiety was less about describing a moonlit night in a new way than getting published at all, and the battle was more lateral than historical; it was less about being in competition with Fitzgerald and Hemingway than deciding which direction into literature might result in getting published and surviving as an author in a dying industry. Was it wiser (and better) to write commercially viable books about gay vampires or was it better to swing for the fences and go for literary fiction and the off-chance of glory, money, and fame?

That was then. 

Now comes AI. With it, Bloom’s anxieties seem quaint and — at least on this subject — he feels like a character from the past; a kind of comet spotter with a telescope in the backward who wants to beat NASA to the punch. 

My seventh novel is now forthcoming from Avid Reader Press at Simon & Schuster in the U.S. and Transworld at Penguin Random House in the UK. It is called THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI and I’m wondering if it’ll be last novel I write without AI as a competitor — assuming that moment isn’t already behind me.

I don’t suffer from an anxiety of influence. Honestly, which writer today would be mortified if the New York Times or the The Times Literary Supplement suggested we leaned a bit too heavily on Cervantes for absurdity, Shakespeare for emotional arc, or Calvin and Hobbes for wisdom? 

Please.

No. Today we suffer the Anxiety of Irrelevance.

What is the nature of this anxiety?

Writers know for a fact that they are under attack by wily and parsimonious industry and corporate types who want something from nothing. We know this because of the writers’ strike in the United States and the documented discussion of how they are turning to AI to possibly replace writers. 

What we don’t know – because who is really an expert on AI and creative writing yet? — is what it all means. That is, we’re facing a kind of existential threat to both our art and our well-being but like the proverbial little 2D guy in Flatland, we don’t know how to look up into a 3D world and see it. So we’re generally just a bit shaky like a whippet near traffic.

It isn’t merely the statements, it’s the facts. According to the Washington Post, AI is already writing technical and non-fiction books (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/05/ai-spam-websites-books-chatgpt/) and Google has explained “it allows AI-generated content in search results, as long as the AI isn’t being used to manipulate a site’s search rankings.”

On the fiction side, we see it too and in this case the plural of anecdote is absolutely “data” in the way that one raindrop means rain. According to Verge, “AI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines” in particular science fiction and fantasy magazines like Asimov’s. According to Verge, “Asimov’s received around 900 stories for consideration in January and is on track to get 1,000 this month. Williams says nearly all of the increase can be attributed to pieces that appear to be AI-generated, and she’s read so many that she can now often tell from the first few words whether something might not be written by a human.” (https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/25/23613752/ai-generated-short-stories-literary-magazines-clarkesworld-science-fiction)

So the writing is terrible and easy to spot with a bit of practice and we’re safe, right?

Um … have you not seen Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog? (

)

No. We’re not !@#$%^ safe.

So the anxiety is about being replaced, about being crowded out, about being submerged and drowned in a sea of writing — and a quality of writing — that we can't understand or anticipate because there’s no data and we don’t understand the mechanics of the machine. Likewise, we have no longitudinal data, few anecdotes, no conceptual framework or lexicon for navigating all this, and obviously no policies or laws to help. There is no think tank, as of yet, on this.

Even in the best of cases, where the work is superior and floats to the top (to beat this metaphor into the ground) we face the message-in-a-bottle problem that The Police presented in the song of the same name. The traditional problem was the bottle being found at all in a mighty sea. But in the song, Sting subverted the metaphor and hid the message among "a hundred billion bottles, washed up on my shore."

Whose shore will AI-written novels wash up on?

Agents, scouts, editors, publishers, booksellers, readers.

You know … everyone’s.

The challenge of being noticed in the attention economy is about to explode for writers (as I suspect it will for musicians, illustrators and others). How is anyone going to find a great novel when it is being aggressively sublimated — not by dime-store or pulp fiction — but by computers than can overwhelm those looking for them? How can the human machinery that sifts through the slush pile of submissions even spot a great novel among the sea of imitators now on the march, let alone know what to do with those great novels to bring them to market and save civilization as we used to know it?

The Anxiety of Irrelevance is a driving concern throughout the vertical supply chain — from writing to reader.

In my next piece, I talk about what it means to engage that anxiety and consider what it now means to live in a world where AI is here and it is not going away.

— Dr. Derek B. Miller, 30 May, 2023.