Recently, Vauhini Vara posed this question to Twitter:
In “Ghosts,” a hybrid work that Vauhini Vara refers to here as “essay,” but I might also categorize as “speculative nonfiction,”1 she prompts ChatGPT3 to write about her sister’s death.
I should begin with the caveat that I am, well, unimpressed-to-disgusted by the version of AI our sorry reality has supplied, which is so much less interesting than the AI of my SFF favorites. The writing and art that comes out of AI is stalked by problems of plagiarism, misinformation, threats to employment, and other ethical concerns. Also: most AI-assisted writing and art is, frankly, the worst. I don’t trust it will improve even if the language-modeling does. And yet, I love “Ghosts.” AI stuff has a generally short shelf-life, going viral for the length of a fad or else a Twitter outrage-cycle. “Ghosts” affected me when it first appeared in The Believer (nearly two years ago), and has had staying power since. I tried to articulate why:
But I wanted to expand on these thoughts, although I am admittedly still in flux about them.
This is Collected Fictions.
A good essay is about a layering of the “I.” There is the “I” that experienced the events, the “I” that recollects, and the chasm between. Writing is a process of coming to an understanding, reaching a clarity of thought, which is what the AI-promoters so consistently fail to grasp; the work is the writing. The same is true of nonfiction and fiction. There is no shortcut, no productivity hack. It isn’t a Soylent smoothie.
The “I” is changing, complicated, and searching, in a good essay. Perhaps not undecided, but transforming. This is where the movement comes from, the journey to a place of resolution, a new status quo which is sometimes a thesis.2 Where the self can, momentarily, rest.
The “I” is bifurcated one additional step in “Ghosts.” There are:
The “I” who was present for the events of the sister’s death
The “I” of Vara’s persona as an adult writer, recalling the events
The “I” of Vara’s parallel persona, ChatGPT3, which keeps reinventing itself
This is the initial part of why “Ghosts” is interesting—namely, as an experiment.
Writers have never before had to contend with a machine at the center of the creative process. What novel vocabularies could the chatbot offer?
Perhaps the type of attention might change. I’ve often wished writing allowed for more avenues of mindfulness, such as the relaxed flow I can find with my camera, while out shooting a subject. As a photographer, my attention can be wider, more reactive. A writer daydreams but can’t form sentences without executive function in the driver’s seat, obsessing over commas and word choice. A writer must be always present and in control. A writer begins with a blank page, alone. What if a story could begin, instead, as a conversation? That is what “Ghosts” feels like, heightened by The Believer website’s magician-appearance effect, as you scroll down the paragraphs. When Vara states that previously she’d avoided writing about her sister’s death, and that attempting it with AI felt “illicit” and simultaneously “attractive,” I can see why.
But if it were only the fact of the writing experiment, the essay would have lost interest for us as ChatGPT3 lost some of its novelty. Why hasn’t it?
The experiment is enfolded within the context of real events. Vara’s life story, the tragedy of her sister’s death, her vulnerability and honesty (emphasized by her plain language)—these all set the stage for the reader’s emotional reaction. The layers of “I” create depth.
Vara is transparent about where her contribution begins and ends. She shares her prompts and what elements were edited. Instead of cherrypicking the most convincing or literary version, all the variations are printed. She doesn’t prune the AI outputs to delete the “tells,” in order to make it seem more intelligent, or human. The model’s artifacts remain.
“Ghosts” explores the essential weirdness of the chatbot, as Vara presses it to revise its story of her sister’s death several times. Each additional dramatization of the death feels at once real and strange, because the chatbot’s uncanny lyricism is undercut when it reverses and riffs once again. Suspension of disbelief is not the point. The story is not trying to be told as you would tell a story on your own, without mechanical collaboration. It’s about what a chatbot can and cannot do.
When I argue that “Ghosts” is a response to AI’s limitations as a form, it is not to present limitations as inherently bad. The problem is in the fakes.
Mimicry has commercial value over artistic value.3 Human-intelligence-seeming text generation is useful for companies who want to underpay or cut out the very artists they trained the AI on, to churn out more of the same-enough, good-enough, newish, in a continuing franchising of the world. AI is not actually intelligent. It doesn’t think or learn like a person. That is, for the present, a limit.
Limitations are often what defines a form.
Photography is supposedly objective, but I could hand two identical cameras to two people, set them loose on the same scene, and receive very different results. “Without the photographer in the photograph,” Robert Adams tells us, “the view is no more compelling than product of some anonymous record camera, a machine perhaps capable of happy accident but not of response to form.” Similarly, chatbots are supposedly intelligent. Artifacts of the chatbot are, on their own, only of passing interest. A fad. See instead how the photographer bends the light as it enters the aperture, makes choices about what is and is not included in the composition’s frame. The photographer’s art is in presenting a subjective interpretation of reality.
Is it the truth of Vara’s personal story that makes “Ghosts” so compelling? Partly, as the disconnect alternately grows and slackens between the reader’s projections, the bot’s hallucinations, and the reality we only glimpse. The art is in the writing, is in the picture and not the subject matter. There is a push and pull between the reader’s desire to know more facts about the story, to get the details—a very human and maybe inappropriate desire—the details needed for empathy, and yet invasive. There is what I assume to be the catharsis of telling such a story, and the difficulty of sharing something so intimate, in making the private public. This is at the core of writing about trauma: do we tell? how much?
The language model, in this instance, adds another avenue: a fictional truth. One in which the reader sees the artifice, and yet feels the effect anyway. It’s a fascinating friction. We, the reader, know the bot’s versions aren’t real, and the way “Ghosts” is presented won’t let us forget it…but the mechanics of storytelling work on us, ask us to empathize with the lie-as-truth, all 9 variations.
How much can AI add, rather than merely replace?
A subset of the earliest photographers sought to make their images appear like paintings, because that was what art looked like at the time. The Pictorialists, as they are called, manipulated the image—toned, tinted, retouched, hand-colored with crayons and watercolor—in order to reproduce in a new medium the aesthetic of the old. The tool came first, the artistic form, second.
There is not, yet, a style. I’m not sure how much there can be one.
AI is a tool that has been applied, almost without exception, in an attempt to hide the marks it makes. This is certainly why the GPT chatbot has been made available (and, in what has been historically something of a red flag in tech, free) to the wider public, to be used and tested in order for users to find its weaknesses, and for OpenAI to paper over those flaws in update after update: to inch toward a more convincing facsimile of a person’s voice, of original ideas, of a stream of consciousness—of us. As a medium, it’s in the mimicry phase. A photograph with paint strokes added where no brush has been.
Collage, perhaps that’s the visual metaphor I should have used.
There’s no painter there. What if we didn’t pretend otherwise?
Speculative nonfiction is a subgenre I’m not super familiar with, aside from Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. (I’ve seen some advance praise for Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade, also!)
My former teacher, Charlie D’Ambrosio, very much an influence on these thoughts.
Commercial art can also be artistic, of course!!!