Pushkin (ebook and audiobook only)
How do we put the “art” into artificial intelligence? Does the generative power of the mighty tools now at our disposal threaten human creativity? The breakneck evolution of AI large language models, with GPT-4 in the vanguard, has stirred the passionate curiosity of humanists as much as scientists.
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Canadian writer and journalist Stephen Marche, working with audio production company Pushkin Industries, aims to move beyond the “contempt and dread” felt by many literary observers of the natural-language AI boom. Marche enlisted ChatGPT and two other writing instruments, Sudowrite and Cohere, to create a novella-length murder mystery with 95 per cent of its content generated by machine. His experiment seeks not only to show that an AI-crafted tale may make narrative sense, but that it can be – as he claims in his afterword – “compulsively readable, a page-turner”.
AI tools even came up with Marche’s pseudonym: “Aidan Marchine”. His/Its story concerns the mysterious shooting on Toronto’s ragged edge of a star author, Peggy Firmin – who has herself explored the literary uses of AI. Firmin, a collaborator of a disruptive, Elon Musk-like tech guru called Neil Gibson, began as a sceptic. Her classic novel God, Inc featured an AI system called Sibyl that shut itself down when it reached a high enough level, for Sibyl “treats consciousness as a curse”. Later, Firmin joined Gibson at his trail-blazing “AI-maginarium”: a multi-disciplinary “kind of paradise”, where creative AI generates not just facsimiles of existing artworks, but “truly unique” innovations.
Divorced, disgruntled Firmin scholar Gus Dupin – a name borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneer detective – is anonymously summoned from his lakeside retreat to investigate the writer’s cause of death. After Peggy, in hologram form, gives her own eulogy at her funeral, Gus’s sleuthing leads him to Gibson’s futuristic campus. Then Gus, a murder suspect himself, receives Firmin’s final story. It seems, uncannily, to foreshadow his own quest. Who, or what, is ghosting whom? Completist fans of Sherlock Holmes stories will have a head start…
Death of an Author does an efficient, involving job, in a style predictably prone to prefab phrases – like much boilerplate genre fiction written by humans. Marche’s afterword explains that his AI help knocked off sophisticated pastiches of ready-made language – news reports, academic jargon, techno-blather – without missing a beat. “Basic narrative” gave it more trouble: “hard problems are easy for AI, while easy problems are hard”, he writes. Cleverly, however, Marche (if it is him) makes the plodding redundancy and repetition of the chatbot style into the motor of a plot that pivots on dogged re-interpretation of the same events. Still, it is Holmes’s creator who holds the final key.
Marche affirms that “the traditional values of creative composition were entirely alive during this process”. He compares his method to a DJ using sampling or a turntable artist: a “literary curator” who oversees the tech-enhanced remix of old tunes to make something new. “Linguistic AI”, as Marche insists, “is no messiah” but “no anti-Christ”. Although the experiment let him glimpse its “wondrous capabilities”, these results will hardly make the shade of Arthur Conan Doyle tremble. Yet.
