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Friday
I’ve just learned of a 1947 essay by George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” which predicts that authoritarian societies will increasingly use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to produce prose. Orwell doesn’t use the phrase AI, of course, and he’s talking more about assembly-line production of writing than anything as powerful as our modern cyber systems. Still, he proves prescient about what we are seeing today.
When he talks of literature and the threats to literature, Orwell means all kinds of writing, not just Literature. “The destruction of intellectual liberty,” he writes, “cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order.” He predicts that “if the liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.”
The sequence he sets up indicates that the more explicit a piece of writing is, the more likely it is to suffer censorship. That’s why journalism is first and poetry as last. And indeed, poets have generally been escaping wrath of our current book banners, with the exception of Amanda Gorman. Novels, on the other hand, are as much under attack as works of history.
Orwell imagines that, in the future, novels will be written by “a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.” In fact, he saw the process already underway in his time with regard to “the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines”:
Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically.
He then examines how such processes could be operationalized by an authoritarian government:
It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
The rewriting would be necessitated because of Literature’s commitment to truth. In the past I’ve described Literature as a “no bullshit zone,” an idea that was inspired by a powerful Salman Rushdie essay. In it, the Anglo-Indian author declares that great novels and poems are necessary because they push against the authoritarian urge to create its own self-serving reality:
[A]s far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most.
AI, despite the growing sophistication of ChatGPT and Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms, will never be able duplicate what Literature does. Kazuo Ishiguro arrives at a parallel conclusion in his novel Klara and the Sun.
Klara, the narrator, is an AF or Artificial Friend, which is say a solar-powered care robot assigned to the sick girl Josie. When the girl’s mother, fearful of losing this child as she has lost her first, turns to an robotics engineer to start grooming the AF to take her place, the question arises whether this is in fact possible. Can something artificial become indistinguishable from the genuine article?
Dr. Capaldi, who has been creating a mock-up of Josie which Klara is to “inhabit” when the girl dies, believes that it’s possible. “You see what’s being asked of you, Klara,” he says. “You’re not being required simply to mimic Josie’s outward behavior. You’re being asked to continue her for Chrissie [the mother]. And for everyone who loves Josie.”
Addressing Chrissie, he then goes on to argue against her generation’s old-fashioned belief that
there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now….There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of the world to continue. The second Josie won’t be a copy. She’ll be the exact same and you’ll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now. It’s not faith you need. Only rationality. I had to do it, it was tough but now it works for me just fine. And it will for you.
At first Klara thinks she will be able to succeed. Even learning the complexities of Josie’s heart will not be beyond her, she believes. But by the end of her life—which is to say, when her batteries start to die—she thinks differently.
It so happens that the experiment never happens as Josie, thanks to Klara’s efforts, gets well and Klara is jettisoned. But from her position in the graveyard where old AFS are stashed, she concludes that it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Her explanation to the store manager who sold her—and who is looking up her former products—is akin the Rushdie’s argument for the necessity of Literature:
I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don’t think it would have worked out so well. Not because I wouldn’t have achieved accuracy. But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts. I’m now sure of this, Manager.
And:
Mr. Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr. Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.
In short, the growing pervasiveness of AI-generated texts, and its usefulness to authoritarians, makes Literature more essential than ever. Because of its insistence on truth, those who crave dictatorial power will invariably attack it, along with the libraries that house it and the teachers that teach it. As I point out in my book Better Living through Literature, in the end no great author is safe, including Shakespeare himself and certainly not figures like Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood. Even 1984 has appeared on recent American banned book lists. And Rushdie, of course, had a fatwa issued for his assassination.
