There's No "Art" in Artificial
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 158
REPULSIVE AND REREADABLE DEP'T.
IN OUR ONGOING effort to keep you, the readers of Indignity, abreast of developments in machine-generated writing, and also not to let any human-generated writing miss its audience, we are republishing today a piece that ran earlier this week on Flaming Hydra. As we have mentioned, Flaming Hydra is a publication from a 60-writer publishing collective—including Indignity's own editor, Tom Scocca, and creative director, Joe MacLeod—delivered every weekday to the email inboxes of paid subscribers, for a very modest fee. In this installment, Maria Bustillos, the editor of Flaming Hydra, discussed with Tom the proliferation of text produced by Artificial Intelligence and the implications of trying to turn literary aesthetics into a contest between human and machine.
Maria Bustillos: I got in this deranged conversation on a listserv I’m on with these tech dudes who were all nonsensically wrangling over whether or not AI can make art, and it’s so striking how tech people never seem to consider AI “art” from the POV of the reader or listener, or anyone who’d have to endure the crap machine-derived end product; invariably they’re arguing in favor of the dignity of the person “making” said product. And I honestly…I don’t care about any of that at all.
My thing is just, I don’t want to waste what little time I have left on anything a machine burped up.
Tom Scocca: Did you see this?
Opinion | An Experiment in Lust, Regret and Kissing [A purported “contest” in the New York Times between the writer Curtis Sittenfeld and an AI Large Language Model, to see if the reader could tell which of two "beach read" stories, based on crowdsourced prompts, was written by the human and which was generated by the machine.]
MB: Yes.
TS: It was stupid easy to do.
MB: Oh yeah? How come?
TS: It wasn’t obvious to you?
MB: I just glanced at it and scampered off, didn’t try. But everyone I saw talking about it agreed with you. Hrmmm let’s see. “Eyes that seemed to dance with mischief” ???!!!!!!!!!!!??
Yikes, n.b. they are both terrible.
TS: Well I assume that the task made Sittenfeld write in an extra-antic mode to show off how very human she was, which made her piece read as very uncanny.
But the AI piece is so fucking dead.
MB: Yeah.
TS: I struggle to find the right way to talk about this because it sounds self-congratulatory and vague but AI writing is immediately repulsive and unreadable to me.
MB: I would rather read BAD fiction written by a real person than “good” anything made by an AI, is what I want to say. But even if it could fool me into thinking a real, and bad, writer wrote something, I wouldn’t feel caught out, I would feel I’d been swindled, by a disgraceful person. The machine doesn't try to fool you by itself; a person tries to fool you. (Or fool Spotify. I can't wait to see what happens with that.)
You and I read a lot of terrible nonsense! But offered in either good faith or bad, by a human being with real reasons.
TS: Like everyone who says this sort of thing ends up jabbering about the presence of the soul or whatever.
MB: HEY. lol Well. Yes. My husband and I were talking about this and he said, What if the AI made a really great thing? and I’m like, I’d know! and he’s like, How?
TS: From reading a lot of terrible nonsense I’ve developed an intuitive feel for how a person is trying and failing to accomplish something on the page. And I automatically try to look through the AI writing to see the mind at work, and I can't find anything there. It's not just an empty cage, the bars are trompe l'oeil and the space that looked like a cage is flat.
MB: Plus, just out of habit, I don’t read anything now—a book, a draft, whatever—without trying to understand a little bit first about where it came from and why. I’ll have to know some rudimentary amount about the author.
I’m not even claiming to have have a sixth sense about it, even if that’s maybe true after so long; it’s because I’m actively trying to get a sense of the writer’s intention before I start, so I can understand better. Which is where it gets embarrassing, obviously; having to admit you believe there is an objective “reality” there. (But I do.)
TS: The AI writing really is dead, like my brain can’t process it. Consumer Reports has automated its product ranking writeups and even within those very narrow and formulaic constraints my eye still slides off the text.
MB: People can produce dead writing, too, though. The earliest “Turing experiment” conversations are extremely wooden compared to this AI / Sittenfeld smackdown, without question it’s gotten “better,” but the thing is, again, I could fucking care less if the machine can fool me, any more than I care that a machine can win at chess.
Yay machine, you go, machine, who cares?
The reason I read a book is, specifically, that a person wrote it; I want to know who the writer is, why they are writing this, is it for an interesting reason, are they any kind of a communicator at all? Can they increase my awareness in any way, with a perspective, a lie, a joke??? None of that counts unless they’re human, like me, like my readers...
TS: But “counts” how?
MB: People like oneself, who were born and will die, are sharing this rare, crazy, terrifying experience, and I am interested in what they’re making of it in so many ways. Like on just the John Donne level of “No man is an island,” also the shared consciousness of history, culture…also the feeling of camaraderie, humor??
TS: To me it’s like food, lots of people are bad cooks, who make disgusting or even unsafe food, but all of it exists in one category totally apart from the unholy experience of biting into a chunk of styrofoam.
MB: EXACTLY. Even the fanciest styrofoam would be inferior to a gross cookie.
TS: See I reject even the comparison. It’s not inferior, it’s not on the same scale.
MB: This is true but it would ALSO be inferior in the sense of, given a choice.
TS: The answer to “Would you like to eat some styrofoam?” isn’t “Maybe, what else you got, and what’s the price?” It’s “No.”
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 10, 2024
★★★★ The breeze kept new air flowing along without ever stirring up the dirt to go with it. Green acorns had landed point-up on the sidewalk along Broadway. It wasn't time for shorts again yet, but once again the warmth made itself felt on the trip home with groceries. The heat couldn't work its way indoors, though; what came into the cool interiors was the sound of people taking work or conversations outside. A dog waited tied up in the post office vestibule, while another one walked sniffing in arcs on its leash in the line in the lobby. The sunlight was so precise that the edges of brickwork window arches cast sawtoothed curves on the fanlights within. The cross-street shade held the floating tint from the buildings in the sun on the corner of the avenue.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast, now with transcript.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from The Swedish, French, American Cook Book, by Mrs. Maria Mathilda Ericsson Hammond, published in 1918, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Tomato Sandwiches (Sandwiches à la Tomate)
Eight slices bread and butter, three tomatoes, pepper and salt to taste, one bunch cress or lettuce.
How to Make It. Cut some slices of bread and butter; season well with pepper and salt; put a slice of tomato on the bread and another slice of bread on top. Cut into oblongs. Serve on a napkin, with cress or lettuce in the centre.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the crushing heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
LESS THAN 5 COPIES LEFT: HMM WEEKLY MINI-ZINE, Subject: GAME SHOW, Joe MacLeod’s account of his Total Experience of a Journey Into Television, expanded from the original published account found here at Hmm Daily. The special MINI ZINE features other viewpoints related to an appearance on, at, and inside the teevee game show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, and is available for purchase at SHOPULA.
