There is perhaps no better day than April 25, Liberation Day, to tell you about the story I’m about to tell. Because it has a protagonist Primo Levi, anti-fascist partisan, survivor of Auschwitz and then author of If this is a man and of Truce and other beautiful novels.
But he was also a chemist and if he hadn’t been through the Holocaust, he might have been into science and technology. One proves it short story collection first published in 1966. Is called Natural Stories, but in reality they are science fiction stories, stories “about a futuristic future”. The editor was so surprised to read these stories by the same author of If this is a man to obtain that, as a precaution, they were signed with a pseudonym: Damiano Malabaila, a surname inspired by the sign of an auto electrician that Primo Levi saw every day on his way to the office.
Why do we talk about it? Because among these stories there is one in which it seems to be dealing with ChatGPT and generative AI. Is titled The Versifier and it is the machine that a poet buys to make the rhymes that his customers ask for more quickly. The Versifier works just like ChatGPT. The commands are set, what are now called prompts: argument, register, metric form, historical period and in a few seconds here is the text, perfect, poetic licenses included. The poet is enthusiastic about it, less so the secretary who, it is understood, fears for her job: “Aren’t you going to tell me that this stuff is brilliant?” Asks the secretary, who in a short film she will be played by Milena Vukotich; “Not brilliant – says the poet, in the film Gianrico Tedeschi – but marketable. More than enough for any practical purpose.”
The ending of the story is ingenious: the poet tells of having used the Versificator for two years now and of having entrusted to him, in addition to rhymes, also accounting, payroll and correspondence private: “And he’s doing very well.” This text too, she says, is his work. In short, that machine was already ChatGPT 57 years in advance; and we are the poet who enjoys letting us write things down.
on the subject a few weeks ago this delicious post is out by Dario DeMarco