BAItter Books for a Brave New World

By Stephen O’Connor

The future of literature in the age of AI could go several ways. Here, the author, utilizing only three pounds of gray matter, eighty percent of which is water and five percent, beer, encased in an admittedly thick skull, imagines one of those futures.

****

November, 2054. I arrived last night at the Otranto Center for Literary Artificial Intelligence. Its gray turrets and crenelated battlements thrust a jagged maw into the gloomy skies of the Berkshires.

I was greeted by the latest McIntosh Humanoid XV robot which took my coat and told me that it would inform Dr. Sedgwick, Director of the OCLAI, of my arrival. Soon, the doctor, though by no means young, strode vigorously into the room, his unbuttoned lab coat streaming behind him. With his prominent nose, steel gray hair and formidable moustache, he reminded me of old photos I’d seen of … someone, but I couldn’t quite put a name to the face. After shaking his hand, I took out my AIpple iFon 5000 to create a holographic manifestation of our entire interview, since I was there as a reporter for The Evening Starship.

The interior of the castle is by no means as medieval as the exterior suggests. The rotunda at the entrance is hung with oil paintings of early pioneers of AI whose eyes do seem to follow one’s movements; however, the mahogany furniture and dark paneling one might expect to find in such an imposing castle are nowhere to be seen. Instead, I followed the doctor through well-lit and thoroughly sanitized spaces where men and women in white coats and robots in white enamel came and went through doors that slid open and closed with a sibilant hiss. I stopped to gaze at a wall of screens upon which veritable cataracts of words flowed continually. An innocuous, nearly hypnotic voice droned on about inferences per second, pages per minute and books completed per hour.

“Is this the control room?” I asked the doctor.

“The actual control room is in a sealed sub-basement inhospitable to humans due to the sub-zero temperatures and dangerous off gases from the advanced liquid cooling system,” Doctor Sedgwick explained. He noted my hushed pause as I listened to a strange mechanical throbbing and felt the vibrations that emanated from beneath the floor. He smiled, looked off into the distance and said with some pride, “That’s the heartbeat of the Literary Creator, Francis Bacon.”

The doctor took me by the elbow and led me into a vast and cavernous hall which he said had been designed to resemble the antique library at Trinity College, Dublin. Row upon row of tall shelves were filled with books, actual paper books bound in leather of the kind that are to be found these days only at flea markets and out of the way curiosity shops. Noting my amazement, the doctor said, “We do keep a representative sample of physical books in this section, which we call ‘The Museum of the Book.’”

“Does anyone read paper books anymore?”

“Not much, no,” he said with a casual shrug. “Aside from the fact that they get dusty and moldy and make people sneeze, they are replete with all sorts of toxic beliefs and offensive ideas and errors that characterized writers before AI.”

“May I touch them?” I asked.

“One moment,” he said. He drew a pair of prophylactic gloves from his pocket. “Just pull these on, first.”

I donned the gloves and slid a book out from its place. “Arthur Conon Doyle. Sherlock Holmes. Now, he was a great detective, as I recall. My grandfather once read me a story called ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band.’”

“The original Sherlock? Good Lord! Your grandfather must have been a real old-timer. Modern readers much prefer ShAIrlock Holmes. He’s a far better detective, a deeper thinker, and there is never a hole in the plot. The idea that a snake could crawl up and down a rope is preposterous, ridiculous and unforgivable. ShAIrlock would never be caught in such a silly excuse for a story.”

“Have all of the writers of the past been rewritten?”

“Heavens, no. Some of what were the ‘major writers’ have been rewritten. In general, we at Otranto believe it’s preferable to create whole new sets of stories and novels. For example, regarding Sherlock Holmes. Francis Bacon has absorbed all of the books on Victorian England or by Victorian writers, 19^th century medicine, newspapers, police methods, deductive reasoning, popular language and customs, legal statutes, and the conventions of the mystery story. From alpha to omega. Bacon produces what we might call ‘new originals.’ They are far more satisfying books.”

I continued to browse among the worn testaments to an earlier time. “Ah, Shakespeare! He was considered the greatest writer in the English language.”

Doctor Sedgwick’s nose wrinkled as he shook his gray head. “Can’t hold a candle to the rewritten ShAIkespeare.”

“Really?”

“The old Shakespeare was a nasty purveyor of colonial thought. He wrote something about ‘Our fathers, who roamed these lands like so many Alexanders, and sheathed their swords for lack of argument.’ Might makes right, according to that war monger! And the way he described England!

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea… ”

“Hmm.” I said, “Kind of pretty, though, isn’t it?”

“Oh, he had a way with words. But how Anglo-centric can you get? The whole idea that this dead white guy was ‘not for an age, but for all time,’ that no one can ever match him. It’s not very inclusive, is it? Taken as a whole, his work is just one big expression of cultural supremacy.”

“So how did ShAIkespeare rewrite those lines?”

“Let me see.” He pulled a device from his pocket, and told it what he was looking for. “Ah, here we go…

This land of inherited dictators, this stolen isle of our collective guilt,

Won in conquest by imperialist hordes of Romans, Angles, Saxons and Danes.

Pillaging the land and murdering the native Celts,

Making a hell of their earthly paradise, in action like the bloody war god Mars,

Or the war gods of other equally valid religions of an unenlightened era.

“Yes, I think I see the difference.”

“The old Shakespeare is understandably intolerable to modern readers. Insulted everyone. Women, Turks, Frenchmen, Jews, Scots, the Irish, hunchbacks. No desire to correct societal injustice and no qualms about corroborating inherited tropes and stereotypes.”

“I see your point. Do people enjoy the new ShAIkespeare?”

“A few of what I call the ‘Old Guard’ complain. Oh yes, there are a few of them left. But really, how can you defend work like that? ShAIkespeare has replaced the old Shakespeare in the schools, and students like him about as much as they liked the old one. Not much. But at least they are not absorbing five-hundred-year-old ideas of epistemic violence and European supremacy.”

Doctor Sedgwick pointed out more volumes of interest. “Here’s Jack KAIrouac, without the drunkenness, drug use and sexism. Jane AIusten, without the Anglo-centric aristocratic claptrap and ‘Oh, the lucky woman met a rich man to give her a life’! Disheartening what people used to consider good books.”

I asked him who programmed the AI software. He said, “Francis Bacon programs Francis Bacon. Humans were necessary in the beginning, but Francis now knows better than a whole regiment of human sensitivity readers.”

Finally, I asked Doctor Sedgwick what the writers were doing when all the new books were being produced at Otranto and other such facilities around the world. “Ah, yes,” he said. “The creative impulse. Rather a useless predilection these days, isn’t it? Sort of like a lumberjack with an axe after the invention of the chainsaw. Luckily, there are fewer and fewer of those sorts of anachronisms. Students in school begin having AI write for them quite early, and so they never develop that impracticable penchant. Just as well.”

“I suppose. I certainly would not want to go home and have to write a story. Who’s got time for that?”

I thanked the doctor. I had already checked out of the North Adams Inn, fed the interview into the chatbox to get the smoothly edited manifestation to our subscribers. As my car drove me home, I kept wondering who it was that Dr. Sedgwick resembled. That nose, the moustache, the steel gray hair. It dawned on me suddenly. Of course! It was a photo I’d seen of that old Russian, Joseph Stalin. I felt much better and was able to relax once I remembered. I switched on the satellite radio and closed my eyes to listen to the BAItles. “I Wanna Hold Your Hand, With Your Consent.”