Really interesting thoughts here! Really agree with what you're saying. I wonder if it will replace extremely commercial writing. Why pay for a ghostwriter if you could get an A.I. to do it, for instance?
"how about the book version of an open world or procedurally generated video game? I’m sure there are many readers who would love to choose-their-own-adventure style text romp through Westeros or Middle-Earth (or better yet a new fantasy world designed for this purpose)."
I played around with it a couple years ago, and what I enjoyed about AI Dungeon was its total inability to remember basic details about the world and characters it was creating. This sounds like an insult but it really isn't! I loved how the AI would change settings and genres on a whim, and how it would try its damnedest to elude my attempts to wrest the narrative back on track. This is actively irritating to the kind of person looking for a computer to spit out narration for a neverending D&D game, but I remember thinking that this was a totally unique gaming experience without obvious precedent - more "Stranger than Fiction" than "Highlander."
I've got to say I don't love that you're dismissing the Marche novella based on its free sample pages and its *number* of goodreads reviews (?!). If I used Goodreads as an arbiter of what fiction was worth producing, I would probably no longer be alive. However, if you're looking for an explanation in this particular case, that book is not and has not been available on Netgalley -- typically large publisher releases are available on Netgalley months in advance (I've already read the next Jonathan Lethem book on there and it doesn't drop until October).
You also point out that the prose seems like it was written by a machine... Well, yeah, that's the point. When we think of AI producing a new art form, a la photography vs painting, one way it can succeed in doing that is by creating an uncanny surface texture in the language. Marche has noted in interviews, and I would agree, that at this point it's almost impossible to use AI to create a plot, so that was the value add he brought to the table in his project. The robot wrote the sentences in a way he wouldn't have on his own.
I haven't had a chance to read his book yet either, but I'm waiting to form an opinion about it until after I do. Meanwhile, in my own current project, I've had to cut a lot of what I produced with AI because it didn't work with the book's overall structure. But what I've tried to retain, generate more of, and even imitate is the weird flatness it produces at the language level. I think at this point we are at the 80s synthesizer stage of AI writing -- If what you want is something that sounds like a real acoustic guitar, play an acoustic guitar for at least the next several years. But if you want to sound like you came out of this era rather than any one before... it's a neat new tool.
You're absolutely right. I've been saying that what we've already seen with AI is infinite fan-fic. Seen all the Harry Potter mashups? Or Wes Anderson remixes? It's taking already existing IP and remixing it, and it's possible to put yourself in there. eg, there were pictures of a Harry Potter rave that looked like it was taken on a cellphone. Put yourself in there. Another variation I've seen is popular media mashed up with localisations: eg, MCU but Bollywood. Or Star Wars, but South African. etc. That's new, and what it is, essentially, is then a entertainment product. This technology is a dream come true for existing, popular IP. It will make big things bigger as a result.
There will be two trends, I see:
1) Mass fan-fic as entertainment. It doesn't have to be good.
2) Niche content where other writers don't participate. eg, the high school kids creating a weird mashup that only they like. With inside jokes and weird remixes. This would also be very meaningful in parts of the world where 1st languge is NOT English.
Okay, coming back here to say that I finally read Death of an Author. Lots of thoughts about it, but it absolutely has a glassy, repetitious tranquility that I recognize from SudoWrite. Marche deliberately draws attention to the AI's tendency to obsessively restate earlier prose in slightly different language via a big structural choice, playing through the same sequence of events in the story's reality first and then in a nested fiction. I thought that was super smart. He also leaves in a lot of the off-kilter, immersion-jostling figurative language ("He knew that the more he spoke, the less he was making sense. It was like he was brushing his teeth with dirt") and blunt, clunky statements of theme that *don't* quite rise to the level of metaphor ("Gus felt like he was having a debate he had already had, but in somebody else’s story, with another version of himself") that I associate with the tech. Maybe my favorite thing is when it shifts into an omniscient mode that would probably be flagged in a writing workshop as a POV shift ("It’s no surprise that Toronto was the birthplace of artificial intelligence. AI reduces everything human to numerical landscapes, and in the North, only landscapes matter. Frozen beauty grows into a world of its own.") This is not an AI specific thing necessarily, since it's a technique I first consciously noticed reading Kelly Link, but it is a little bit unusual in the context of a murder mystery.
Speaking of which... honestly, I feel like the way it falls short is mostly the murder mystery. I don't want to give anything away if you end up reading it, but there aren't a lot of suspects and I don't think it's truly delivering on genre expectations. As noted by other critics, it also has a lot of Murakami-esque food descriptions that I don't think are doing a ton of work or revealing anything notable about the AI's tendencies -- in my experience, which albeit is almost all with SudoWrite, it isn't any more likely to describe food than it is other frequently written about topics. So I feel like this must have been something that either came up a lot by chance, or that Marche requested in hopes he could borrow some of Murakami's philosophical and enigmatic charm in lieu of his more extensive narrative convolutions.
One last part I'll mention: there's an epistolary section where both writers sound almost comically alike and inhuman. It's very easy when reading to assume that this is because of the use of AI in producing the book as a whole, but it turns out there is an in-world explanation. I think that's the kind of misdirection that could be put to even better use in service of a twistier, or at least more complex story, especially if readers come to think of AI-written passages as invisible or skimmable.
I listened to his podcast episode with Joanna Penn, from the Creative Pen, where he explained the writing/ai process and it sounded beyond miserable. But I think I’m going to buy the book and read it just to see, and maybe to review.
Also, props to him for being the first person to do it and to get SO much PR. Like how? Rarely see any author of any book getting so much mainstream earned media.
Really interesting thoughts here! Really agree with what you're saying. I wonder if it will replace extremely commercial writing. Why pay for a ghostwriter if you could get an A.I. to do it, for instance?
I couldn't work out if Boucher was serious or not.I read it with a smile and,like you,I'm happy with the state of literature as we know it.
"how about the book version of an open world or procedurally generated video game? I’m sure there are many readers who would love to choose-their-own-adventure style text romp through Westeros or Middle-Earth (or better yet a new fantasy world designed for this purpose)."
This exists, actually! https://play.aidungeon.io
I played around with it a couple years ago, and what I enjoyed about AI Dungeon was its total inability to remember basic details about the world and characters it was creating. This sounds like an insult but it really isn't! I loved how the AI would change settings and genres on a whim, and how it would try its damnedest to elude my attempts to wrest the narrative back on track. This is actively irritating to the kind of person looking for a computer to spit out narration for a neverending D&D game, but I remember thinking that this was a totally unique gaming experience without obvious precedent - more "Stranger than Fiction" than "Highlander."
I've got to say I don't love that you're dismissing the Marche novella based on its free sample pages and its *number* of goodreads reviews (?!). If I used Goodreads as an arbiter of what fiction was worth producing, I would probably no longer be alive. However, if you're looking for an explanation in this particular case, that book is not and has not been available on Netgalley -- typically large publisher releases are available on Netgalley months in advance (I've already read the next Jonathan Lethem book on there and it doesn't drop until October).
You also point out that the prose seems like it was written by a machine... Well, yeah, that's the point. When we think of AI producing a new art form, a la photography vs painting, one way it can succeed in doing that is by creating an uncanny surface texture in the language. Marche has noted in interviews, and I would agree, that at this point it's almost impossible to use AI to create a plot, so that was the value add he brought to the table in his project. The robot wrote the sentences in a way he wouldn't have on his own.
I haven't had a chance to read his book yet either, but I'm waiting to form an opinion about it until after I do. Meanwhile, in my own current project, I've had to cut a lot of what I produced with AI because it didn't work with the book's overall structure. But what I've tried to retain, generate more of, and even imitate is the weird flatness it produces at the language level. I think at this point we are at the 80s synthesizer stage of AI writing -- If what you want is something that sounds like a real acoustic guitar, play an acoustic guitar for at least the next several years. But if you want to sound like you came out of this era rather than any one before... it's a neat new tool.
You're absolutely right. I've been saying that what we've already seen with AI is infinite fan-fic. Seen all the Harry Potter mashups? Or Wes Anderson remixes? It's taking already existing IP and remixing it, and it's possible to put yourself in there. eg, there were pictures of a Harry Potter rave that looked like it was taken on a cellphone. Put yourself in there. Another variation I've seen is popular media mashed up with localisations: eg, MCU but Bollywood. Or Star Wars, but South African. etc. That's new, and what it is, essentially, is then a entertainment product. This technology is a dream come true for existing, popular IP. It will make big things bigger as a result.
There will be two trends, I see:
1) Mass fan-fic as entertainment. It doesn't have to be good.
2) Niche content where other writers don't participate. eg, the high school kids creating a weird mashup that only they like. With inside jokes and weird remixes. This would also be very meaningful in parts of the world where 1st languge is NOT English.
Okay, coming back here to say that I finally read Death of an Author. Lots of thoughts about it, but it absolutely has a glassy, repetitious tranquility that I recognize from SudoWrite. Marche deliberately draws attention to the AI's tendency to obsessively restate earlier prose in slightly different language via a big structural choice, playing through the same sequence of events in the story's reality first and then in a nested fiction. I thought that was super smart. He also leaves in a lot of the off-kilter, immersion-jostling figurative language ("He knew that the more he spoke, the less he was making sense. It was like he was brushing his teeth with dirt") and blunt, clunky statements of theme that *don't* quite rise to the level of metaphor ("Gus felt like he was having a debate he had already had, but in somebody else’s story, with another version of himself") that I associate with the tech. Maybe my favorite thing is when it shifts into an omniscient mode that would probably be flagged in a writing workshop as a POV shift ("It’s no surprise that Toronto was the birthplace of artificial intelligence. AI reduces everything human to numerical landscapes, and in the North, only landscapes matter. Frozen beauty grows into a world of its own.") This is not an AI specific thing necessarily, since it's a technique I first consciously noticed reading Kelly Link, but it is a little bit unusual in the context of a murder mystery.
Speaking of which... honestly, I feel like the way it falls short is mostly the murder mystery. I don't want to give anything away if you end up reading it, but there aren't a lot of suspects and I don't think it's truly delivering on genre expectations. As noted by other critics, it also has a lot of Murakami-esque food descriptions that I don't think are doing a ton of work or revealing anything notable about the AI's tendencies -- in my experience, which albeit is almost all with SudoWrite, it isn't any more likely to describe food than it is other frequently written about topics. So I feel like this must have been something that either came up a lot by chance, or that Marche requested in hopes he could borrow some of Murakami's philosophical and enigmatic charm in lieu of his more extensive narrative convolutions.
One last part I'll mention: there's an epistolary section where both writers sound almost comically alike and inhuman. It's very easy when reading to assume that this is because of the use of AI in producing the book as a whole, but it turns out there is an in-world explanation. I think that's the kind of misdirection that could be put to even better use in service of a twistier, or at least more complex story, especially if readers come to think of AI-written passages as invisible or skimmable.
Imagining the scenario fills me with dread
I too have a piece that I am sharing, do have a look.. in your spare time.
Something different, something magical, something that expresses visually and caligraphically.
https://kallolpoetry.substack.com/p/rootless-existence-a-dissection-through
I listened to his podcast episode with Joanna Penn, from the Creative Pen, where he explained the writing/ai process and it sounded beyond miserable. But I think I’m going to buy the book and read it just to see, and maybe to review.
Also, props to him for being the first person to do it and to get SO much PR. Like how? Rarely see any author of any book getting so much mainstream earned media.