Home » About our relationship to text and author after the AI ​​revolution

About our relationship to text and author after the AI ​​revolution

by admin

A few days ago, OpenAI presented its latest Large Language Model: GPT4 can do more and better, faster, wider and larger than its predecessors. At the same time, the German AI booth Anthropic presented its competitor’s product Claude — a somewhat unfortunate release date that was almost completely lost in the frenzy of the GPT hype. Meanwhile, thanks to the open APIs of the AI ​​models, the first completely automated news portals are starting up, while Google is building its artificial intelligence into dev tools and GoogleDocs and Microsoft is integrating theirs as a copilot for Office. The AI ​​revolution is in full swing and already today nobody can make precise statements about the authenticity of the origin of a text.

Therefore, apart from the hype, I would like to refer to this clever text by literary scholar Hannes Bajohr, in which he deals in detail with our relationship between text and author during and especially after this revolution in synthetic text creation: How does the potentially unclear and artificial source of text and literature our perception of the same? Is there a poetic quality in synthetic literature beyond its relation to machine production?

Based on the essay “On natural and artificial poetry” by the philosopher Max Bense, Bajohr examines these questions regarding the reader’s expectations of unknown texts, which have always assumed that text in any form is of natural, human origin, not least because grammatical language Systems themselves are a deeply human phenomenon. According to Bajohr, the AI ​​revolution breaks this expectation and Roland Barthes’ famous death of the author turns into a total irrelevance of origin thanks to writing robots.

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Bajohr certifies that the AI ​​models have an inherent intention to deceive, as evidenced by the hundreds of online texts in recent months that compare AI with bullshit artists, which we tend to forget in view of the often astonishing results in a new form of suspension of disbelief. Just like in the cinema, where we put aside our doubts about superheroes and demonic powers for two hours, during the “communication” with the machine we give in to the illusion of being able to recognize a real person behind the screen: the humanization of the machine by a anachronistic expectations of text.

Another interesting aspect of this newly forming relationship between reader and text origin is the already learned and internalized irrelevance of the author in our communication with an organic form of the machine: When we as readers deal with PR texts and corporate advertising, or with forms and brochures, the author of the text is completely irrelevant. Even in news journalism, as a reader, I very rarely have the urge to thank the author of a conventional report for his elaborate formulation. When was the last time you thought about the authors of the weather report?

In literature, too, we find a rather egalitarian relationship with trivial literature: in almost all series of the pulp, the author is completely secondary and many authors often write under the same pseudonym. Something similar can also be seen for the serial machinery of the Hollywood blockbuster, in which Marvel buys well-known names whose handwriting is no longer really recognizable in the published cultural assets. The author in a post-artificial world becomes the mere label of a product variation whose true origin is the marketing department.

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All the advertising brochures from companies and organizations, but often also the cultural products of trivial literature and pop culture, are comparable in origin to the syntheses of AI systems: Organizations are also networks with nodes that have a function within a capitalist and/or bureaucratic machine reduced, and many people are unaware that, for example, behind their favorite song by K-pop sensation BTS is a whole conglomerate of “songwriters” and “authors”.

The new quality of GPT4 may herald a new age of artificiality, but we, as consumers of cultural goods, have long lived in a post-artificial relationship to the origin of the text, in which the author is all too often completely irrelevant. With any luck, the AI ​​revolution will make that ratio conscious.

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