"I write this all to demonstrate that the novel is a historical product that sought to make sense of a world whose natural order was slowly breaking down."
----------
Indeed, especially in hindsight with the coming of the "First" Industrial Revolution (circa 1760). Also in agreement with your thesis was Stanford literary critic, literary historian, and professor of English Ian Watt per his 1957 book "Rise of the Novel" that traces the rise of the modern novel to philosophical, economic, and social trends & conditions that become prominent in the early 18th century.
The best line (and I really appreciate your footnotes and hat-tips to others, a disappearing practice these days of "stolen valor":) "Like some bad joke, humans are being left with the same long working hours, as robots draw, write poetry, and take over creative work."
REALLY NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR NEW "Artificial Intelligence" (an oxymoron if there ever was one) Transhumanist OVERLORDS ushering in the Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) or Industry 5.0 -- brought to you by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, in which you'll eat the bugs and by 2030 "own nothing and be happy."
Ah yeah, Ian Watt's great book is another one I came across while researching this essay!
I recently saw Apple's latest VR headset, and like you said, the market for some reason seems really determined to make pod life real... everything on a subscription model and/or rented while you live in some simulation exploiting your desires. Yeah, it's grim. These days, I'm really running with the thought that it's time to revisit our humanist roots in light of all these nefarious forces at work... be it through art or the novel or our social lives, etc
If one believes in Jungian collective subconsciousness, or nodes of thought being immortal out 'there," then REVELATION is perhaps real. Build context and one is a receiver. But a MACHINE can never receive revelations.
Jun 1, 2023·edited Jun 2, 2023Liked by Anton Cebalo
Fascinating history of the novel, thanks for sharing. I’m not convinced AI will not write a novel, I doubt it will write a particularly good one. AI novels will be as good as their prompts are. It’s unlikely ChatGPT is going to come up with the next Lord of the Rings or Sartor Resartus but it could very well come up with something mediocre or bland. AI will probably just generate shadow works and simulacra of the real thing. The question is whether people will care, some people will but a lot won’t. Does that matter? Probably not.
A question on the horizon is when there are AI novels of passing quality, much like images from MidJourney, will people be able to tell the difference between a mediocre AI story and a mediocre human one. This matters and I’m not optimistic. That blurring line between man and machine is going to create two classes of people - those that accept AI stuff and those who reject it, this has already begun. I don’t have the insight, yet, as to what this will mean but I suspect a small group of people to highly value human art and writing and a larger group that doesn’t care and is quite content with AI content.
I hear you. I tried to qualify by arguing AI will never write a *great* novel because it will never understand the realm of social reality, and hence its writing can never fulfill the actual purpose of the novel. But I also share your pessimism, honestly. Strictly speaking, it can probably write crappy novels with stock plot points. The biggest problem is that automating culture is an extremely attractive prospect to the media corps, because it cuts out the cost entirely. I know Netflix is already leaning heavily into algorithmically-generated scripts and Spotify has been accused of discreetly adding AI-generated songs into their playlists to avoid paying royalties. The race to the bottom with content is already starting with the dominance of super short-form content on virtually every social media platform which could easily be AI-generated on virtually any topic imaginable, just flooding the feed entirely.
Do people actually want to browse this kind of internet? I think people naturally prefer that which is made by others, not machines, but I'm not sure the difference is immediately obvious. Mimicry is powerful, especially when it's tailored specifically for you. AI can do that this at scale, effortlessly. But still, I hold out some hope that this decade artificial content may overwhelm the internet so much that people will get tired, not trusting any of it, and maybe recede back into their actual lives. This could lead to a creative rediscovery maybe... I think that's the best we can hope for
I think the potential quantity could overload the internet, without apps like TikTok that have an endless scrolling feed to pump the crap straight into people's eyeballs. The inability to sort the human from the machine has been thought to lead to the death of the internet. This moment in the next decade where we all put down our phones and step outside. I wish it was going to happen in some sense but would miss parts of it. On the other hand so many of us are tied up online, whether business, social circles, etc, that I don't see how people could leave. A more likely future is one where sites jettison the AI generated 'content' in order to guarantee a 100% human created stories, essays, podcasts, etc.
I wrote about AI content here - https://wanderersnotes.substack.com/p/art-is-dead-long-live-art - and came to a similar conclusion. We care for art, writing, whatever because it was created by a person who worked at it. With AI stuff all the mysticism, all the meaning, is expunged and the result is hollow.
I think most people simply want something made by other humans, at least with regard to images and literature. Like, I'm sure some tech weirdos somewhere are hanging AI art in their offices and on the walls of their mansions, but most people don't want something that a computer just spat out.
We may not talk about it this way, but, deep down, part of what we appreciate about art and literature is the skill and effort that goes into it. If you can just hit a button that says ART, people will be happy to press it all day, but they're also unlikely to value any of it. Because there is no value to it. You push the button and it spits on a new piece of art.
I imagine some would say, "This is exactly how craftsmen in the 19th century talked about their furniture business!" But the difference seems clear. Art and literature don't perform a utilitarian function like seating. We all need chairs and most people are happy to buy one for $20 as opposed to $200, but no one *needs* a novel. So why fill your life with ones algorithmically generated? Especially since you can find thousands of books--including some widely considered to be the best/most important in history--for, like, a dollar or two. As a consumer of literature, you're not saving yourself money by buying a robot generated novel.
Agreed. The problem will be telling one from the other. 'Was this digi-painting by a human or an AI?' is a question I've already had to ask. Thankfully I don't have to ask it in my local art gallery. The internet could become overloaded with AI generated content and the response might be one almighty shrug or 1 - we all leave and return to meatspace, 2 - sites, platforms, begin purging all AI content and advertise themselves as 100% human created stories, art, essays, news, etc.
As you say, we want to know a person made it and part of that is the work they've put into it even though we may not know that when we're watching the latest blockbuster. I wrote about this here - https://wanderersnotes.substack.com/p/art-is-dead-long-live-art - and covered a philosophy paper on time investment in art which was quite pessimistic. If you spend less time with art then you don't have the time to gain the value so the best art for low time preference people is valueless art. For a dry academic paper it had pretty dark conotations but I think some people, maybe a lot, will care and even in low time preference prefer human made TikToks to AI ones.
With regards to novels and stories, there's so much free (all mine are), that we don't need AI ones. And the ones that aren't free aren't expensive. Though the corpos want to cut costs and will try but then there are already pulp revivalist movements popping up in response to corpo behaviour pre-AI. We have Iron Age, PulpRev, Bizarchives, and a dozen more magazines, indies, and what not bypassing trade publishing. The battle will be in marketing, people want human created stuff - yes - but do they know it's out there. How far will they look and can we, as writers, get it to them. The 100% guaranteed human creator websites could be the way, at first.
I think the rise of AI will eventually fill the internet with so much garbage that it'll become effectively useless and people will return to meatspace
Interesting analysis of how the novel arose out of the conditions of modernity. Thanks for sharing! I also agree that AI will not be writing novels anytime soon.
"[The modern] alienation of the individual from her world leads to a situation of “transcendental homelessness” in which individuals must take up a purely normative stance of a SHOULD BE towards the world. The novel is always relating to the development of such individuals."
------------
Was surprised to learn that this quote was from György Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. It reminded me very much of something out of the novelist (and fierce anti-communist) Ayn Rand's "The Romantic Manifesto" -- whose final essay articulates the goal of her own fiction writing as “the projection of an ideal man, as an end in itself," and explains that she originated her philosophy of Objectivism as a means to this end.
Two more applicable quotations from this latter work:
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness ..."
"A novel is THE major literary form -- in respect to its scope, its inexhaustible potentiality, its almost unlimited freedom (including the freedom from physical limitations of the kind that restrict a stage play) and, most importantly, in respect to the fact that a novel is a purely LITERARY form of art which does not require the intermediary of the performing arts to achieve its ultimate effect."
Yes, it is quite interesting. I believe Lukács wrote the essay when he was not yet a Marxist, still quite young and mainly interested in Hegel and existentialism. Also, it's worth considering the context, I think. It was written during WW1 when his own world was falling apart completely and his country of origin (Austria-Hungary) was about to collapse.
I feel like this is channeled through his understanding of the novel. He opens the essay in a very romantic way, almost nostalgically longing for a world that "made sense" again. He writes:
"Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light."
I am honestly inclined to say that his turn to Marxism was so sharp and overwhelming, even dogmatic, precisely because he had lost all meaning in his world, and the 1917 revolution then provided him with a new "God" amid this crisis within him. Indeed, if you read the language written about the revolution at the time, it did have this millenarian quality of "salvation" which is actually how it was promoted to rural peasants at the time. His thought really suffered as time went because of this in my view, but this early essay on the novel was widely admired long after he wrote it
"I write this all to demonstrate that the novel is a historical product that sought to make sense of a world whose natural order was slowly breaking down."
----------
Indeed, especially in hindsight with the coming of the "First" Industrial Revolution (circa 1760). Also in agreement with your thesis was Stanford literary critic, literary historian, and professor of English Ian Watt per his 1957 book "Rise of the Novel" that traces the rise of the modern novel to philosophical, economic, and social trends & conditions that become prominent in the early 18th century.
The best line (and I really appreciate your footnotes and hat-tips to others, a disappearing practice these days of "stolen valor":) "Like some bad joke, humans are being left with the same long working hours, as robots draw, write poetry, and take over creative work."
REALLY NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR NEW "Artificial Intelligence" (an oxymoron if there ever was one) Transhumanist OVERLORDS ushering in the Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) or Industry 5.0 -- brought to you by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, in which you'll eat the bugs and by 2030 "own nothing and be happy."
Ah yeah, Ian Watt's great book is another one I came across while researching this essay!
I recently saw Apple's latest VR headset, and like you said, the market for some reason seems really determined to make pod life real... everything on a subscription model and/or rented while you live in some simulation exploiting your desires. Yeah, it's grim. These days, I'm really running with the thought that it's time to revisit our humanist roots in light of all these nefarious forces at work... be it through art or the novel or our social lives, etc
If one believes in Jungian collective subconsciousness, or nodes of thought being immortal out 'there," then REVELATION is perhaps real. Build context and one is a receiver. But a MACHINE can never receive revelations.
Fascinating history of the novel, thanks for sharing. I’m not convinced AI will not write a novel, I doubt it will write a particularly good one. AI novels will be as good as their prompts are. It’s unlikely ChatGPT is going to come up with the next Lord of the Rings or Sartor Resartus but it could very well come up with something mediocre or bland. AI will probably just generate shadow works and simulacra of the real thing. The question is whether people will care, some people will but a lot won’t. Does that matter? Probably not.
A question on the horizon is when there are AI novels of passing quality, much like images from MidJourney, will people be able to tell the difference between a mediocre AI story and a mediocre human one. This matters and I’m not optimistic. That blurring line between man and machine is going to create two classes of people - those that accept AI stuff and those who reject it, this has already begun. I don’t have the insight, yet, as to what this will mean but I suspect a small group of people to highly value human art and writing and a larger group that doesn’t care and is quite content with AI content.
I hear you. I tried to qualify by arguing AI will never write a *great* novel because it will never understand the realm of social reality, and hence its writing can never fulfill the actual purpose of the novel. But I also share your pessimism, honestly. Strictly speaking, it can probably write crappy novels with stock plot points. The biggest problem is that automating culture is an extremely attractive prospect to the media corps, because it cuts out the cost entirely. I know Netflix is already leaning heavily into algorithmically-generated scripts and Spotify has been accused of discreetly adding AI-generated songs into their playlists to avoid paying royalties. The race to the bottom with content is already starting with the dominance of super short-form content on virtually every social media platform which could easily be AI-generated on virtually any topic imaginable, just flooding the feed entirely.
Do people actually want to browse this kind of internet? I think people naturally prefer that which is made by others, not machines, but I'm not sure the difference is immediately obvious. Mimicry is powerful, especially when it's tailored specifically for you. AI can do that this at scale, effortlessly. But still, I hold out some hope that this decade artificial content may overwhelm the internet so much that people will get tired, not trusting any of it, and maybe recede back into their actual lives. This could lead to a creative rediscovery maybe... I think that's the best we can hope for
I think the potential quantity could overload the internet, without apps like TikTok that have an endless scrolling feed to pump the crap straight into people's eyeballs. The inability to sort the human from the machine has been thought to lead to the death of the internet. This moment in the next decade where we all put down our phones and step outside. I wish it was going to happen in some sense but would miss parts of it. On the other hand so many of us are tied up online, whether business, social circles, etc, that I don't see how people could leave. A more likely future is one where sites jettison the AI generated 'content' in order to guarantee a 100% human created stories, essays, podcasts, etc.
I wrote about AI content here - https://wanderersnotes.substack.com/p/art-is-dead-long-live-art - and came to a similar conclusion. We care for art, writing, whatever because it was created by a person who worked at it. With AI stuff all the mysticism, all the meaning, is expunged and the result is hollow.
I think most people simply want something made by other humans, at least with regard to images and literature. Like, I'm sure some tech weirdos somewhere are hanging AI art in their offices and on the walls of their mansions, but most people don't want something that a computer just spat out.
We may not talk about it this way, but, deep down, part of what we appreciate about art and literature is the skill and effort that goes into it. If you can just hit a button that says ART, people will be happy to press it all day, but they're also unlikely to value any of it. Because there is no value to it. You push the button and it spits on a new piece of art.
I imagine some would say, "This is exactly how craftsmen in the 19th century talked about their furniture business!" But the difference seems clear. Art and literature don't perform a utilitarian function like seating. We all need chairs and most people are happy to buy one for $20 as opposed to $200, but no one *needs* a novel. So why fill your life with ones algorithmically generated? Especially since you can find thousands of books--including some widely considered to be the best/most important in history--for, like, a dollar or two. As a consumer of literature, you're not saving yourself money by buying a robot generated novel.
Agreed. The problem will be telling one from the other. 'Was this digi-painting by a human or an AI?' is a question I've already had to ask. Thankfully I don't have to ask it in my local art gallery. The internet could become overloaded with AI generated content and the response might be one almighty shrug or 1 - we all leave and return to meatspace, 2 - sites, platforms, begin purging all AI content and advertise themselves as 100% human created stories, art, essays, news, etc.
As you say, we want to know a person made it and part of that is the work they've put into it even though we may not know that when we're watching the latest blockbuster. I wrote about this here - https://wanderersnotes.substack.com/p/art-is-dead-long-live-art - and covered a philosophy paper on time investment in art which was quite pessimistic. If you spend less time with art then you don't have the time to gain the value so the best art for low time preference people is valueless art. For a dry academic paper it had pretty dark conotations but I think some people, maybe a lot, will care and even in low time preference prefer human made TikToks to AI ones.
With regards to novels and stories, there's so much free (all mine are), that we don't need AI ones. And the ones that aren't free aren't expensive. Though the corpos want to cut costs and will try but then there are already pulp revivalist movements popping up in response to corpo behaviour pre-AI. We have Iron Age, PulpRev, Bizarchives, and a dozen more magazines, indies, and what not bypassing trade publishing. The battle will be in marketing, people want human created stuff - yes - but do they know it's out there. How far will they look and can we, as writers, get it to them. The 100% guaranteed human creator websites could be the way, at first.
I think the rise of AI will eventually fill the internet with so much garbage that it'll become effectively useless and people will return to meatspace
This is exactly my hope
It's all our hope, I think!
Interesting analysis of how the novel arose out of the conditions of modernity. Thanks for sharing! I also agree that AI will not be writing novels anytime soon.
"[The modern] alienation of the individual from her world leads to a situation of “transcendental homelessness” in which individuals must take up a purely normative stance of a SHOULD BE towards the world. The novel is always relating to the development of such individuals."
------------
Was surprised to learn that this quote was from György Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. It reminded me very much of something out of the novelist (and fierce anti-communist) Ayn Rand's "The Romantic Manifesto" -- whose final essay articulates the goal of her own fiction writing as “the projection of an ideal man, as an end in itself," and explains that she originated her philosophy of Objectivism as a means to this end.
Two more applicable quotations from this latter work:
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness ..."
"A novel is THE major literary form -- in respect to its scope, its inexhaustible potentiality, its almost unlimited freedom (including the freedom from physical limitations of the kind that restrict a stage play) and, most importantly, in respect to the fact that a novel is a purely LITERARY form of art which does not require the intermediary of the performing arts to achieve its ultimate effect."
Yes, it is quite interesting. I believe Lukács wrote the essay when he was not yet a Marxist, still quite young and mainly interested in Hegel and existentialism. Also, it's worth considering the context, I think. It was written during WW1 when his own world was falling apart completely and his country of origin (Austria-Hungary) was about to collapse.
I feel like this is channeled through his understanding of the novel. He opens the essay in a very romantic way, almost nostalgically longing for a world that "made sense" again. He writes:
"Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light."
I am honestly inclined to say that his turn to Marxism was so sharp and overwhelming, even dogmatic, precisely because he had lost all meaning in his world, and the 1917 revolution then provided him with a new "God" amid this crisis within him. Indeed, if you read the language written about the revolution at the time, it did have this millenarian quality of "salvation" which is actually how it was promoted to rural peasants at the time. His thought really suffered as time went because of this in my view, but this early essay on the novel was widely admired long after he wrote it
Most insightful, Anton!
As noted previously, would loved to have had you as a history professor -- thanks!
That is so nice of you to say, thanks! 🙏😁