After Cybernetics and Ghosts

A book review of sorts...

by Jay DeFeo

A lot happened in late August, which derailed me, in all honesty. I promise, though, that before October, paid subscribers will get two hefty newsletters from me as an apology of sorts for being late this month.

Some news: I am moderating a panel called “Tech Tales” at the Brooklyn Book Festival on October 1 at 4 p.m. I’ll be in conversation with authors Colin Winnette (Users), Gina Chung (Sea Change), and Daniel Hornsby (Sucker). Here’s some more details about the panel. Come by, say hi, buy books!

Below is an essay I spent the last week working on for [redacted], which I’ve tentatively titled “Birth of the Reader” (thanks Calvino!). I talk about three novels published this year that contain machine-generated text: Sean Michaels’ Do You Remember Being Born (Astra Books); Stephen Marche’s Death of an Author (Pushkin Industries, published under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine); and K Allado-McDowell’s Air Age Blueprint (Ignota Books). TLDR/DCETS (Don’t Care Enough To Subscribe); I cannot recommend DYRBB enough. I will briefly insert a section to rave about it here:

In Do You Remember Being Born?, an aging poet decides to “sell out” to a tech company in the sunset of her career, after decades of making very little money (“I wondered if the book I was writing was mean: for money, with an amoral computer program”). A compassionate and lyrical portrait of an artist, whose craft is “threatened” by emerging technology, the novel is an artfully constructed story about the sacrifices of making art, artistic collaboration, and the nature of motherhood. Marian Ffarmer, who is modeled after the modernist poet Marianne Moore, has spent most of her life writing poems in solitude while living at her mother’s beck and call. She herself, however, was largely an absent mother to her only son. An opportunity from the Tech Company to write a collaborative poem with AI could define Marian’s career, but it could also allow her, for once, to do something for her son.

The piece also addresses some past writing I’ve done in Dirt on “artificial intelligence”-powered large language models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. ICYMI: The first essay is about reframing LLMs as a tool rather than a threat, an opinion that I am… revising… as the tech corporations behind these generative AI models prove themselves to be profit-driven, immoral idiots. The second piece is more in line with my forthcoming essay about how AI will affect how we read. Since we are fast approaching spooky season, I figured I’d link Dirt contributor Michelle Santiago Cortés’s recent piece on AI and abjection. Julia Kristeva is the philosopher of the season!

Pure idiocy!

Birth of the Reader, or The True Literature Machine

The Italian novelist Italo Calvino was unusually optimistic about the invention of a “literature machine.” In his 1967 essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” Calvino imagines a computer that would be “capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels,” bringing to the page what humans “are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes in our psychological depths.” When read today, Calvino’s predictions seem eerily prescient and his stance, as he admitted, “provocative and … profane” — that literature is “a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality” of the writer. His conviction that the process of art-making is analogous to mathematical permutations is convincing as it is chilling, then and especially now. Calvino equated the mind to a machine. Writers, he believed, “are already writing machines, or at least they are when things are going well.”