Only as a counterculture can literature become truly important
Another debater, this time a Norwegian, means that we writers should embrace large-scale AI language models as a tool in writing. But what would it mean to “become one’s own language model”, which Jan Kjærstad urges i The Swedish Daily?
The technologies of literature come with inherent poetics, and according to AI it follows: Words are numbers. Each input is broken down into tokens, small pieces of text, which are then converted into strings of numbers, statistically computable. The Tower of Babel is built by number sequences.
What Jan Kjærstad means by becoming “his own language model” is probably not that I should brain implant a digital intermediate step that tokenizes everything that is said to me, calculates it statistically and responds with a string of numbers that is translated into sounds from my mouth. But what he advocates is still a life as a cyborg, where the author writes closely to one or more AI agents. This is to meet the risk of being creatively “overrun” by AI.
Another conceivable future scenario for Jan Kjærstad is a world without either authors or publishers, with a “gigantic text warehouse where readers, via a chatbot, can retrieve stories whenever they want. […] Literature is, in a certain sense, back in a time when a bard steps forward and tells, pouring out of humanity’s common treasure of myths and stories.”
AI couldn’t have said it better myself: Yum, a “gigantic text layer”! Of course an anachronistic construction, because Sappho neither had access to the Mahabharata nor the New Testament. What she had was her language, her song, her body in its place in the world and cultural history. An AI literature on-demand as Kjaerstad describes it has no resemblance to oral storytelling cultures. Poetics according to AI: Language has no context. All that exists is data.
Add the fact that AI lacks a body and thus also the concept that the origin of language is sound – air formed from flesh. As far as poetics is concerned, I have more in common with both Pol Pot and Elon Musk than with a large-scale language model, however fair it may be. Body means emotions. An AI can spit out all sorts of combinations of tokens, but a human risks something when she speaks – not least the burning embarrassment of making herself disappear.
Finally, AI poetics implies a complete overturning of literature as a product. You put your prompt into the black box of the language model and it spits out a text. What is the use of human translators, as long as the text is “correct”?
Jan Kjærstad’s future scenarios all start from one and the same AI poetics, and therefore need to be set against an alternative guided by an anti-machine opposite – a cluster of peculiar poetics, subjectively grounded in specific bodies operating in specific spaces. Large-scale language models homogenize cultures and threatens the distinctiveness of different languages, especially the smaller ones. The counter movement is literature as verb, reading, translating and writing as process. Affirming what language is and will be for me as a fleshly being, with my flaws and limitations, my fear of breaking norms and being excluded from a social context, my impulse to kick back against dogmas and platitudes. To strengthen distinctiveness at all levels and revitalize literatures through translation between small languages. To re-learn how to deep read, not scan like a machine. These seemingly solitary literary practices are part of a global movement against the AI imperialism of tech giants, perhaps best represented by the journalist Karen Haos with several initiatives “AI Resist List”.
Readers stand ready to join – an overwhelming majority do not want AI booksand young people are stronger and more conscious in their distancing. As part of the peculiarities of the periphery, Jan Kjærstad and others will certainly carry out form experiments that shine a light on AI poetics in all its otherness. But it is only as counterculture that literature becomes truly relevant in the twenty-first century.
Nino Mick is a train driver, poet and writer.
