Slop [5]

May I share something with you?

As I type these exact words that I am typing, I am sometimes quite conscious of thinking, not “how shall I express in the mortal tongue the very deepest thoughts of my heart” but “what word, or group of words, most naturally follow the word, or group of words, I have just typed.”

Why did I type “typed” at the end of that sentence, when I could just as well have written “written”?

I think I typed “typed” because it was not the word that most naturally came next. There is a tiny, homeopathic quantity of humour in a sentence which ends in a slightly unexpected way. I was probably remembering, or hoping that you would remember, Truman Capote’s remark about the Beat Poets. “That isn’t writing, it’s just typing”. And also Harrison Ford’s famous bonne motte: “George, you can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.” 

And as a matter of fact, my kind of writing is a lot closer to Keroac’s than it is to Capote, so I arguably am typing rather than writing. But the word came first, as St John said: the possible meanings occurred to me after I had put it down. That’s what John Lennon told the obsessive drifter in the footage in the Imagine movie. “You just take words, and you stick them together, and you see if they have any meaning. Some of them do, and some of them don’t. 

“What comes next” is very often “What sounds as if it should come next”, particularly if you are the kind of writer who likes to quote other writers and falls into their rhythms and cadences. I noticed quite recently how much of my style comes straight out of Stan Lee—specifically the Stan Lee of  Origins of Marvel Comics. There is some Basil Brush and some CS Lewis in there as well, of course, but its mostly Stan. But then the Stan Lee voice descended fairly directly from Groucho Marx. So, in point of fact, did Basil Brush’s. 

I type what sounds right: but it makes sense anyway. That's the funny part  [1]

We are talking about influence, something that writers are notoriously anxious about. But I wonder to what extent “influence” and “creativity” are two sides of the same golden doubloon? [2]

TS Eliot believed in a “great tradition” where every previous writer exerts influence on every subsequent one; and that the great artists were not the ones who expressed their individuality, but rather, the ones who most perfectly allowed the tradition to speak through them.  

In Murder in the Cathedral, he said that the martyr was the most perfect Christian because he no longer desired anything for himself, not even to be a perfect Christian. (Groucho Marx knew TS Eliot: he read McTavity the Mystery Cat at his funeral.)

Indeed, Eliot’s thought that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”. The folk-process has turned this one-liner into “good writers borrow; great writers steal.”

So if generative AI is, as is sometimes alleged, nothing more than a “gigantic plagiarism engine”, in what way is it not potentially the greatest writer and the most mature poet that the world has yet seen?

I don’t think that I have found the answer: but I am pretty sure that I have now worked out what the question is. [3] 

Some people say that there are no original books: there is only the intersection of multiple influences. This essay and Paradise Lost and the Hallmarked Man are simply the accumulation of the writers’ expectations about what a long-form essay, a religious epic, and a cosy crime whodunnit ought to sound like. 

And some people would go further to say that the are no authors: Andrew Rilstone and John Milton and JK Rowling are convenient labels to apply to bundles of influences. 

We falsely imagine “Minds” and “Egos” and “Selves” as lumps of plasticine that are moulded by family and education—and media and politics and religion and the class struggle. Or else we imagine that there is a little puppet living inside our brains, the strings of which are yanked by forces outside us. But the awful truth is that there is no puppet to manipulate and no clay to mould. Take away all the things which influence me, and what you are left with is absolute zero. 

Richard Dawkins and Ellon Musk speak in terms of minds that can become infected with memes or viruses. In principle, those minds could be inoculated against harmful invasive ideas like religion and empathy. But on this view there is no “mind” to be infected. It’s memes all the way down.  [4]

And so it turns out that is what we have been talking about. Not terrible posters for sea shanty gigs, but the very existence of the soul. 

Christian apologists sometimes argue that God must exist, because if he didn’t we’d be stuck in a mechanistic, amoral universe without ultimate meaning or purpose. Some atheists have responded that since a mechanistic, amoral, meaningless universe is quite plainly what we do live in, there obviously isn’t a God. 

CS Lewis argues that since we live in a universe where right and wrong exist independently of any individual’s beliefs and any society’s moral norms, there must be a supernatural force from which those standards derive. It would be trivial to respond that since we live in a universe which plainly doesn’t care one way or the other about human morality, there is no evidence for any such higher power.

Aren’t we in danger of falling into the same loop?

If neither humans nor AIs have “souls” there would in principle be no difference between a work of art produced by a great artist, and a work of art generated by a sophisticated algorithm. But since there plainly is a difference--since what the machine produces is Slop and what the human produces is Art, it follows that humans have “souls” and machines do not. 

But the counter-argument works equally well: if Generative AI could produce art which is indistinguishable from that of a great artist, either algorithms have souls, or else you and me and JK Rowling and everyone else who has ever existed has only ever been a soulless algorithm. [5]

1: Alan Moore’s remark about clairvoyance in From Hell. "I made it all up, and it all came true anyway. That's the funny part."

2: Harold Bloom wrote a book about poetry called The Anxiety of Influence. Some day I intend to read it.. (cf Groucho Marx "From the moment I picked up your book to the moment I put it down, I couldn't stop laughing. Some day I intend to read it.)

3: Douglas Adams shaggy dog story about the question to the ultimate answer, obviously; but also the joke about the cure to which there is no known illness; Churchill’s remark about El Alamein not being the beginning of the end but possibly being the end of the beginning; and perhaps Terry Pratchett’s remark about not having found God but perhaps having found the place where gods come from.

4: The story sometimes attributed to Bertrand Russell: "If the world rests on the back of a turtle, what does the turtle rest on" "Another turtle" "And that turtle?" "It's turtles all the way down.

5: CS Lewis, talking about the afterlife after his bereavement: "If Joy is not, then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren't, and never were, any people."

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