Can ChatGPT compete with Tokarchuk, Krasnahorkai or Pynchon?

In the legendary science saga imagination “2001: Space Odyssey” to stanley kubrick (1968) and in Arthur Clarke's novel of the same name, written alongside the film, We Met HAL 9000an artificially intelligent computer that speaks very much like a human, possesses intelligence and critical thinking, recognizes faces and their emotions, analyzes works of art, plays chess, and best of all, we finally see him develop the same emotions.

The predictions of genius creators and innovators like Kubrick and Clark about what artificial intelligence would be like in the 21st century may have been accurate in some places and overly optimistic in others, but everything changed radically when the artificial chatbot was launched on November 30, 2022. Intelligence ChatGPT From OpenAI, it's the closest application to AI we've seen yet. Since then, the new chatbot (artificial intelligence) has monopolized the world's attention and become a tool for millions of people.

In March 2023, the upgraded version of Chat GPT-3.5, GPT-4, based on more data, came to fill the gaps of the previous version and fix bugs and vulnerabilities, providing increased capabilities. And of course there is more to come.

As you know, ChatGPT is based on a huge database and can perform a range of tasks, e.g. Answering diverse and complex questions, writing texts and creating images in different styles, composing music, imitating language patterns, translating, summarizing, writing assignments, teaching, editing and writing computer codes, and much more.

No matter how sophisticated it is and no matter how many ideas will be downloaded via ChatGPT or any other application in the future, there is one thing that is the most difficult to produce and the most important for creating a literary text: emotions.

As you might expect, this amazing new AI tool has many professionals wondering if it could threaten them and steal their jobs. Among them are authors, as he has the ability to write entire books. Amazon and other online bookstores now sell books written entirely with AI or with AI as an announced co-author. No one can know how many and what others were written in this way without announcing it.

Japanese writer Rie Kudan, who a few weeks ago received the Akutagawa Prize, a prestigious Japanese literary award, for her book “Tokyo-to Dojo-to” (“Tokyo Tower of Mercy”), publicly stated that neither more nor less, that about 5% of the book was written by ChatGPT, which was not only accepted by the awarding committee, but its members also confirmed that the book was “so perfect that it is difficult to find fault with it.”

On the other hand, last September, famous writers such as George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and Jonathan Franzen filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of “systematic theft on a massive scale,” as the scripts used by ChatGPT are covered by laws. Copyrights.

As it all unfolds, a whole new chapter of global intellectual production is opening up before us raising reasonable fears and concerns about the unknown risks and ramifications it hides in matters of intellectual property and plagiarism as well as the authenticity of the identity of the author, which makes ethics and ethics imperative. Setting the base.

Can artificial intelligence produce an original literary work that can be compared to the work of a great writer? Can an AI chatbot compete in language, style, intelligence, sensitivity, and depth with Olga Tokarczuk, Laszlo Krasnahorkai, or Thomas Pynchon? Could a machine, no matter how perfect and advanced, in the future write a dark epic like Cormac McCarthy's “Bloody Demise,” or a brutal masterpiece like Roberto Bolaño's “2666”?

If we appear, at least, to be more conservative in our ideas and more austere in our demands, perhaps the market will be flooded with literary books, not masterpieces but with some claim, written by artificial intelligence, which will completely blur the scene, alleviating the tension. Our rule will be rewarded by masses?

The quality of the scripts provided by ChatGPT, to anyone who has tried it in practice, confirms that such a danger is currently invisible. Even in English, the language that gives the best results, there are often errors and inconsistencies, more editing is needed, but most of all it is full of clichés and platitudes, it lacks original thought and seems completely hollow and uninspired constructions, to say the least. At this point we are talking. But in the future?

No matter how sophisticated it is and no matter how many ideas will be downloaded via ChatGPT or any other application in the future, there is one thing that is the most difficult to produce and the most important for creating a literary text: emotions. Although scientists are working in the direction of empathy in artificial intelligence and there are already applications that recognize and react to human emotions, they certainly cannot yet, for example, express feelings of sadness, loneliness, despair, euphoria, or love with love. In a poem.

And it's not just emotion where AI fails. Creativity is not an ordinary cognitive process. Could an AI chatbot feel a shudder of inspiration not unlike a vision running through it? Can a horse be completely reasonable? No doubt it can give ideas to writers and poets, but also to artists, to perform mechanical and repetitive tasks, to proceed with exercises in style, but it will never succeed in touching the unexplored soil of the ineffable and the mysterious that inspires art, at least in its most perfect expressions. .

Art is not just aesthetic pleasure, intellectual perception, and technical perfection, but it is also the transmission of experiences and mental waves, and it is also a process of silencing, ambiguity, existential depth, and mystery. How can a machine that is always destined to “know” approach the ineffable that approaches metaphysics?

Artificial intelligence can be a great tool that will open up new possibilities for writers, as long as it is “tamed” so that it does not become out of control. We can assume that at some point using a chatbot will be considered a completely legal action, in the same way we refer to Google today. The risks are not small, but the challenges are not. After all, similar feelings must have gripped humanity on the threshold of every sweeping technological revolution from the late nineteenth century onward.

But I do not believe that artificial intelligence will ever be able, at least in the field of art, to replace that perfect and at the same time imperfect mechanism, which is the human brain, which it itself created in its own image and likeness, or at least tried to do so – and certainly not the artist who, by The unconscious, the chaos of feelings, thoughts, knowledge, associations, associations, dreams, memories and images, drives processes that even he himself does not know exactly every time. , through artistic brilliance, to the miracle of creation.