I recently watched a video from an organization I belong to, and it quite frankly shocked me. It was a recorded presentation from a tech sponsor of one of our latest international gatherings explaining their latest editing AI software. Here’s the catch: The demonstration was analyzing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The presenter highlighted, then clicked a few icons, and the AI “decoded” and then charted out the scenes, the amount of dialogue, the length of sentences, paragraphs, descriptive narrative, exposition, etc… you get the point. This was then juxtaposed to books from mainstream, bestselling authors: “It will show you what you need to do to hone your craft, so that you can improve and really write like the pros.”
The history of art and artists clearly demonstrates the power and abilities of humans analyzing their world, their culture, push back and say, “I think I need to express it this way. The old way is flat. The old way has exhausted the symbols, the language, the way we look at the world.” It makes me queasy inside to have to even restate this claim, like I have entered an idiot dream world, a world where the kid who hates reading and writing is suddenly telling us how to be writers. Oh, it was amazing to watch – this video presentation – watch as the presenter explained how he had never read Frankenstein before (well, he read it on the plane ride over!), how he was not sure if anyone wrote in this way before (you mean an epistolary novel, pal?), how it was filled with all these words like thee and thou and wilt. Good god! I was back before my intro to lit class! But this was not an English Class where that is expected. This was a presentation to a huge organization, a prestigious organization, one with thousands of famous and ordinary writers publishing their novels!
I do not have the space or the time… or frankly, the will… to explain innovation in art/writing. All one need do is read several works from the now diseased literary icon Cormac McCarthy to demonstrate how absurd such an AI Editor actually would be. “Cormac, I’m sorry, but there is really not enough narrative exposition, too much narrative exposition, where is the narrative exposition… and have you ever heard of quotation marks….” Good heavens, what would it do with Melville or Joyce or Angelou…. You get the point.
Writing a novel is an intimate, learned craft, instinctive, intuit, a microcosmic event which becomes with an editor a conversation (a dialogue of trust and explanation, a dance of friends who both take over the lead). It is not a fact sheet of big data reduced to charts and graphs. It never has been. It never will be.
Art is alive, dangerous, powerful enough to change a life, and that’s why it changes the world.
Greg Belliveau 