Someone wrote a thoughtful reply to my long essay on AI!
It is worth getting up in the morning after all!!
We make a mistake if we regard a piece of writing primarily as an artifact and talk about its meaning and value as though they are intrinsic to it as a thing.
Reading ERB I form a human contact with him. The activity of reading gives me a possibly illusory insight into his mind. He wanted readers and, despite his demise, I am doing something for him by reading him as he has done something for me by writing.
It's the value of the activity that is what reading and writing is all about.
As far as I know, AI doesn't want me to read it's output, and in reading AI work I am in a pathetic relationship with a rubber doll, rather than in a minor but real relationship with a human.
Response
1: "Reading and writing is a human activity in which we participate even if only as readers."
Agreed
2: We make a mistake if we regard a piece of writing primarily as an artefact and talk about its meaning and value as though they are intrinsic to it as a thing.
Partly agreed. There are certainly literary critics who very much think we should concentrate on the thing itself and try not to think about who made it and when and why. But there are other literary critics who think that actual poems barely exist outside of the conversations readers have about them. (Stanley Fish, who spent his life reading Paradise Lost, claimed not to know what "Paradise Lost" actually is.) Objects do have intrinsic qualities: we can agree that the statue is big and white and made of marble, and we can probably agree it represents a male figure. But it may be that it only represents King David because Michelangelo intended it to represent King David. And we need to know stuff about the Bible, and Michelangelo's patrons before we can say why he thought a big marble statue of King David was worth making. And once we know all that, "how does the statue makes you feel" is a question only I can answer.
I don't know if you are reading my series of essays on CS Lewis. He found a school text book which (allegedly) said that when we say "That waterfall is sublime" or "That sunset is beautiful" we are not talking about waterfalls and sunsets but only about our own feelings. He said that that kind of thinking would literally lead to the end of civilisation as we know it. But maybe thnigs that human artists make work differently from things which God made?
3.1 Reading [Edgar Rice Burroughs] I form a human contact with him.
I am not sure if I do. I have complained about all those Facebook Memes, which allege that reading Willard Price as a kid "took them to Africa" or that Anna Karenina and Jean Grey are more real to them than any of their friends. I don't quite believe that, either. When you are reading, you certainly form an impression of the person who is telling the story from his words; and those words can't help giving you some impression of what the person who is telling the story is like. "The person who is telling the story" maybe very much like the writer who is actually typing the words, or the story teller may be another fictional character. (But, granted, it tells me something about the author that he created that fictional story teller.)
All this is fine, but if you are not careful, you get caught up in a feedback loop: "By reading McBeth, I can tell that Shakespeare was a socialist, or a conservative, or straight, or gay. Therefore, McBeth can only mean what a socialist, or a conservative, or a gay guy, or a straight guy, would mean by it."
Which is why I would rather concentrate on the words he definitely wrote. At any rate, I don't think that many readers of Gods of Mars spend a lot of effort working down the chain from Captain John Carter to Edgar Rice Burroughs the story teller to Edgar Rice Burroughs the actual typist. What they are enjoying is the sword-fights.
3.2 The activity of reading gives me a possibly illusory insight into his mind.
It kind of does. I can definitely infer things about him from what he say -- he approves of honour, doesn't think slavery was too bad, idealises women but thinks they are mainly decorative, had romantic ideas about primitivism and noble savages, believes in Lamarkian evolution, has a thing about naked people, etc etc etc. But those are really comments about his books, not his mind. I think this even applies to much more autobiographical writers. I don't think I would particularly want to meet Proust or Knausgaard. What is interesting is the texts they have created out of their very ordinary lives. (A bit like the visual arts: people sometimes ask 'Why on earth is anyone interested in that particular bowl of fruit'. The answer is 'We aren't, we are interested in the skill and technique with which the painter has represented it on a canvass.')
This is quite an important difference, isn't it? Do you regard a work of art as a thing which someone has made or a medium for communion with other minds? (The answer is almost bound to be "A little from column A and a little from column B.)
It reminds me a little of the discourse around an old Doctor Who story we had a while ago. One faction said "This story is racist; therefore, the script writer was racist; and you obviously shouldn't watch TV shows written by racists." The other faction said "I actually met the script writer, and he definitely wasn't racist, so the script can't be racist, so any racism you see in the story is coming from your own mind." I was kind of like "It's a TV show, with qualities, and one of those qualities is certainly racism, but that doesn't exhaust what there is to say about it." For many years the only music I loved was written by a proto-Nazi, so I have practice in this area.
3.3 He wanted readers and, despite his demise, I am doing something for him by reading him as he has done something for me by writing.
Now, that's more in tune with my way of thinking. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a craftsman, and what he built was stories. What he wanted to do for me was to thrill and excite me, and possibly titillate me: to help me pass the time without wasting it. Granted some people -- like Ray Bradbury, I think -- have said that he also makes you think that there could be other worlds where things are done differently, and that's a political act. I don't entirely disagree. But mostly, I read him for the sword-fights.
I picked Edgar Rice Burroughs as my precisely because he was a pulp writer. Perhaps to make the point work I needed to go further down the literary ladder: Enid Blyton and genre westerns and Saturday morning cartoons and soft pornography. Things that you read but wouldn't re-read: things that (to quote Prof Lewis again) you use rather than receive. You might say that if a book doesn't have meaning and significance beyond the bare thrill of finding out what happens next (or imagining yourself having lashings of ginger beer or sexytimes with a lady) it would be better not to read them at all.
Who said that literature is worth some effort, but trash has to grab you from the first sentence?
The Guardian Art Critic thought he could tell by reading a single sentence that Terry Pratchett wasn't Great Literature and therefore wasn't worth reading. FR Leavis said given George Eliot existed, there was no point in reading Dickens more than once or Thomas Hardy at all. I am not sure that is any way to live: I would rather say "The Birdie Song is not Beethoven's fifth symphony but then Beethoven's fifth symphony is not the Birdie Song."
4: It's the value of the activity that is what reading and writing is all about.
Do you mean “That activity — making mental contact with the author — is the point of reading and writing?”
If so, I agree that it is one of the points, but not the only possible point. Did I read Jerusalem (a mere 1,500 pages) because I wanted a quasi-relationship with Alan Moore? Or because I have enjoyed the ways he puts words and pictures together in the past? Or just because I wanted to say that I had read the complete works of Alan Moore? (Or are they all the same thing?)
The idea of the author makes a difference. "The book was written by an elderly comic book geek who believes himself to be a magus" is a fact about Jerusalem. I thought about this a bit when Neil Gaiman did whatever it was that Neil Gaiman has done. That nice chap with the shades who looks a bit like Dream and thinks we should make good art is certainly a component of Coraline and American Gods and now that nice chap doesn't or might not exist. It would have been much worse if (gods forbid) something bad had come out about Terry Pratchett. It didn't matter one way or the other about David Eddings. JK Rowling is a special case. (All discussions about books end with "JK Rowling is a special case.")
5: As far as I know, AI doesn't want me to read its output, and in reading AI work I am in a pathetic relationship with a rubber doll, rather than in a minor but real relationship with a human.
Well, there have been times in my life when I have had close relationships with objects made of synthetic fur and stuffed with sawdust. And with pieces of plastic with five points of articulation. And I am pretty sure that the point of Star Trek is my imaginary relationship with Captain Kirk, not with Gene Roddenbury.
I am not even completely sure that the man who purchases a rubber sex doll is pathetic. If he thinks it is a real person, that is pathological; and if he plays with the doll rather than going to the bar to meet actual women, that will probably reduce his long term happiness. Its worse than some things but better than others.
I remember reading something on a problem page somewhere some time ago, in which someone recounted a very sad story about a woman who had lost a child, either to still-birth or else to SIDS, and was lavishing disproportionate attention on an elaborate figurine of a science fiction character. (Presumably Grogu!) The agony aunt said that, so far as she could see, this was as good and helathy a way of working through a terrible and complicated grief as any other.
I admit that I have a bee in my bonnet about the "books are brilliant" memes on facebook. I think that they are probably typing the kinds of things that they think that people who like books ought to type about books that they like. But let’s assume they are talking about something real: it follows that (hold the front pages!) different people read books for different reasons." For some people, at least, "reading" means "experiencing a state of mind somewhere between an hallucination and a day dream." While the text is in front of their noses, they somehow feel they are actually on Mars or on the deck of the Hispaniola. They don't particularly feel they are in contact with the soul of Jilly Cooper or Dan Brown or that guy who writes the Reacher books.
Now, suppose you gave that kind of reader a book. And suppose he looked up from it and said "By Crom! I have been utterly transported to Mars! I could utterly see the Therns riding Oliphaunts to Mordor, and felt that I myself was chastely stoking Deja' Thoris's incomparable buttocks." And suppose you then revealed that the book was not written by a human, but generated by a computer. I think he would say that it didn't matter. And you might say that it ought to matter. And he might say that it didn't matter that you thought it ought to matter.
My Dad used to tell me that I couldn't possibly really be enjoying Blakes Seven: I was just pretending that I liked it to vex him.
Actually, I think that the computer generated day-dream generation device would simply fail: the reader would read the words but not be transported to Jane Austen's England by them. Writers, however low-brow, have a skill in creating mental illusions that computers can't achieve. Or can't achieve yet.
My question was "If an AI could convincingly emulate the work of a human author (which I don't think it can) would it matter?" I am not sure that we have got beyond "It would matter because it would not have a human author."
