Artificial Intelligence and Intentionality
Also: Martin Peretz’s shallow memoir, Caroline Calloway’s “Scammer,” Civil War-era gold coins, the personal turn in philosophy, and more.
In Wired, Elizabeth Minkel argues that AI will neither “fix” nor “disrupt” books. Books aren’t “broken,” she argues, and claims that new technology will make reading more fun is “a solution in search of problem.” New technology, moreover, hasn’t changed the novel. What it has done is introduce new ways—new forms—of writing rather than change existing ones:
The “10x more engaging” crowd has come in waves over the past two decades, washed ashore via broader tech trends, like social media, tablets, virtual reality, NFTs, and AI. These tech enthusiasts promised a vast, untapped market full of people just waiting for technology to make books more “fun” and delivered pronouncements with a grifting sort of energy that urged you to seize on the newest trend while it was hot—even as everyone could see that previous hyped ventures had not, in fact, utterly transformed the way people read. Interactive books could have sound effects or music that hits at certain story beats. NFTs could let readers “own” a character. AI could allow readers to endlessly generate their own books, or to eschew—to borrow one particular framing—“static stories” entirely and put themselves directly into a fictional world.
AI isn’t remotely a new player in the book world. Electronic literature artists and scholars have worked with various forms of virtual and artificial intelligence for decades, and National Novel Generation Month, a collaborative challenge modeled after NaNoWriMo, has been around since 2013. Even now, as much of the book world loudly rejects AI-powered writing tools, some authors are still experimenting, with a wide range of results. But these bespoke, usually one-off projects are a far cry from the tech industry’s proposals to revolutionize reading at scale—not least because the projects were never intended to replace traditional books.
“A lot of interactive storytelling has gone on for a very long time,” says Jeremy Douglass, an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, citing everything from his early career work on hypertext fiction to the class he’ll teach next year on the long history of the pop-up book to centuries-old marginalia like the footnote and the concordance. “These fields are almost always very old, they’re almost always talked about as if they’re brand-new, and there haven’t really been a lot of moments of inventing a new modality.”
To VC claims that AI will totally alter books, Douglass takes what he calls a “yes, and” stance. “What people are actually doing is creating a new medium. They’re not actually replacing the novel; they created a new thing that was like the novel but different, and the old forms carried on. I’m still listening to the radio, despite the film and game industries’ efforts.”
I think Minkel is right about this. ChatGPT can’t replicate what real readers enjoy in a carefully constructed story. In fact, I don’t think it will produce much worth reading alongside the novel. On demand stories keyed to yesterday’s news, for example, may briefly capture the public’s imagination because of their novelty, but automation is the antithesis of art, and it has never had much success.
Remember a hundred years ago when the surrealists thought automatism might usher in a new kind of art? There isn’t one single text of automatic writing today that anyone reads with any regularity (or pleasure). Automatic writing isn’t the same as ChatGPT, which uses a simulated reason rather than an attempt to escape it, but what the two share is an attempt to bypass human intentionality, which is a central (though far from only) element of art.
What we enjoy in a painting or novel is the organization of matter by a creative intelligence into a coherent, meaningful object. What we enjoy in a painting or novel is the act of human creation itself, which is, in turn, a sort of self-recognition. Art is a mirror not so much of nature but ourselves. This is why AI art will never be successful. It can simulate human intention, but it can never intend anything itself, and this intention, while not the only aspect of a work of art, is central to it nonetheless.
Speaking of AI, Matthew B. Crawford argues that the anti-humanism we find in some AI-based solutions (like driverless cars) has been with us for some time: “The premise behind the push for driverless cars is that human beings are terrible drivers. This is one instance of a wider pattern. There is a tacit picture of the human being that guides our institutions, and a shared intellectual DNA for the governing classes. It has various elements, but the common thread is a low regard for human beings, whether on the basis of their fragility, their cognitive limitations, their latent tendency to ‘hate,’ or their imminent obsolescence with the arrival of imagined technological possibilities . . . In the decades after World War II, the ‘rational actor’ model of human behavior was the foundation of economic thinking. It treated people as agents who act to maximize their own utility, which required the further assumption that they act with a perfectly lucid grasp of where their interests lie and how they can be secured. These assumptions may seem psychologically naive, but they provided the tacit anthropology for what we might call the party of the market—what is called “liberalism” in Europe but in the Anglophone world is associated with figures such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In the 1990s, this intellectual edifice was deposed by the more psychologically informed school of behavioral economics, which teaches that our actions are largely guided by pre-reflective cognitive biases and heuristics. These offer ‘fast and frugal’ substitutes for conscious deliberation, which is a slow and costly activity.”
Nic Rowan reviews Martin Peretz’s shallow memoir: “The first thing most people remember about Martin Peretz, the longtime owner and editor-in-chief of The New Republic, is a dust-up that almost seems quaint now. In 2011, Peretz wrote on his blog, The Spine, which he used mostly to bolster American support for Israel, that ‘Muslim life is cheap’ and ‘I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment.’ I say quaint because, on the one hand, hardly anyone writes in such a blunt way anymore, and on the other, thinking in this manner is commonplace. Much public debate now is conducted like this: It assumes the same form of glib, thoughtless, and caustic generalizations . . . More than a decade later, Peretz is back to set the record straight with a memoir, The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left, Right, and Center, in which he settles old scores and makes a case for what he calls ‘humanized technocracy,’ the idea that ‘smart people who came up through and eventually ran the institutions’—Harvard and The New Republic, in his case—'could make the country better, could save it from extremes.’”
Caroline Calloway is back. Kara Kennedy reviews her book, Scammer: “As I was on FaceTime with Caroline Calloway, the Washington Post published a review of her memoir, Scammer, alongside one of a book written by her archnemesis, ex-best friend and former love interest, Natalie Beach. From her squealing — and the way her phone was blowing up with calls from friends who’d read the piece — I could make an educated guess about its contents. ‘Beach is a talented essayist with a promising career ahead of her. Calloway is a lunatic who has already written a masterpiece,’ Calloway read, with an emphasis on ‘lunatic’ and a twinkle in her eye . . . The Post was right. I’m not sure what it is about Scammer that makes it so unputdownable . . . though I haven’t finished a book in one sitting for years (thanks, TikTok brain), I gobbled up all 206 pages as fast as I could get my eyes and brain to work in unison.”
Anna Dorn gives the backstory in case you have no idea who Caroline Calloway is: “Scammer covers Calloway’s dark childhood, in which she was raised by an ornery hoarder and forced to get her kneecaps removed due to a rare medical condition; her rise to Instagram fame after buying 40,000 followers for $4.99 and documenting her lust for life in very long captions; and the public controversies that followed—in particular, failing to produce the memoir she’d sold for half a million dollars. The failed project was many years in the making. At 17, Calloway changed her name from Caroline Gotschall because she thought Calloway would ‘look better on books.’ At 18, when all her friends in Martha’s Vineyard were reading Tucker Max, Calloway memorized the name of Max’s agent, whom Scammer calls ‘Peris Lloyd’ but is actually named Byrd Leavell. Similar to how she lied her way into Cambridge, at 22, Calloway called up Leavell’s secretary and told him she needed to reschedule their meeting, of which the secretary obviously had no record. ‘That’s really not my problem or my job,’ Calloway told her.”
Kentucky man finds 800 gold coins dating from 1840 to 1863: “A man has dug up more than 800 gold coins in a Kentucky cornfield dating back to the civil war era that is estimated to be worth millions. On 9 June, coin dealer GovMint.com uploaded a video on to YouTube of the remarkable discovery. In the video, an unidentified man can be heard identifying $1, $10 and $20 gold coins that he dug up, adding that the discovery was ‘the most insane thing ever’.”
Speaking of gold coins, four men suspected of stealing Celtic gold coins from a Manching museum have been arrested: “The men, aged between 42 and 50 years old, were traced to the area surrounding the city of Schwerin in northern Germany and to Halle in North Rhine-Westphalia, and arrested during a police search of 28 residential premises, business premises, a boathouse and vehicles on Tuesday, police said. One of the men was found with lumps of gold of the same composition as the coins in a plastic bag, a police statement said. That suggests the suspects melted down at least a part of the treasure stolen from the Kelten Römer Museum in Manching in November 2022, the vice president of the Bavarian police force, Guido Limmer, told a press conference today.”
Reuel Marc Gerecht reviews Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West: “An undeniable, unpleasant, and intriguing truth: The Soviets were usually much better at espionage than either the Americans or the Brits. German fascists, who once upon a time also had a substantial fan club in the West and a ruthless police state at home, didn’t do nearly as well as less sophisticated Russians. The Anglo-Americans improved as they got bigger and more battle-scarred, but they never replicated the successes that the Soviets had so often. Calder Walton, an American academic at Harvard who trained at Cambridge University with Christoper Andrews, perhaps the most renowned scholar of spooky things, limns well in Spies the enormous advantages the Soviets had early on, after World War I, and into the 1940s.”
The rise of the ghostwritten celebrity novel: “As long as there have been celebrity memoirs, there have been ghostwriters. It will have surprised no one to learn that Prince Harry did not in fact sit down at a typewriter and bash out his memoir Spare, even before it was revealed that journalist, memoirist and novelist J. R. Moehringer was the writer . . . But what about literature’s latest trend: the celebrity novel? Do the rules that apply to the celebrity memoir remain the same when it comes to celebrity-authored fiction that has been ghostwritten?”
No, you do not have ADHD:
Prescription rates for drugs like Adderall and Ritalin have surged by a fifth in a year, and it is young women in their 20s and 30s who are driving this flood of new cases. According to shrinks and doctors, the culprit behind this mass increase in inattentiveness is ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. . . . The concept of ADHD is not without controversy. It’s a diagnosis that continues to be hotly debated in psychiatry. And many shrinks and clinical psychologists blame the current boom in ADHD cases on diagnostic inflation.
Certainly, ADHD is a legitimate condition for a small percentage of people. Indeed, throughout the history of psychiatry it has been recognised that some people are indeed chronically distractible, suffering from an acute inability to focus their attention. Many of us will know of those children and adults who seem inveterately incapable of sitting still and focussing. But psychiatry has a tendency to medicalise an ever-increasing number of everyday problems, largely in order to create a role for itself. And this appears to be what is happening with ADHD.
Crispin Sartwell writes about the personal turn in philosophy: “Memoir and personal essay were dominant literary forms by the 1990s, of course; this led to some widely admired masterpieces, such as Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995), which often focused on the author’s struggles with addiction and mental illness and the ways these were ameliorated or overcome, at least enough to write the book. Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) showed that a high-end intellectual approach to self-help could land on bestseller lists, and it gave everyone, even younger philosophers, a template: “How [Insert Your Favorite Philosopher Here] Can Change Your Life.” Each such foray was an assertion that philosophy wasn’t merely an intellectual exercise or an abstract pursuit of truths at the highest level of generality, but something potentially useful, even ‘life-changing.’”