"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."
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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."
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.
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."
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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."
"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."
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.
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."