Words for Worlds - Issue 123 (the AI issue)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
I’ve spent the last two weeks in London, which means a lot of new books to read and write about. I always end up with a haul from the London Review of Books bookshop; from my own favourite bookshop, John Sandoe, which sometimes feels that it is specially curated for me; and from Foyle’s, whose vast stock on every topic under the sun means that you always find something you didn’t know you were looking for.
This time, I discovered an anarchist bookshop in Whitechapel called Freedom Press, which has a superb collection (especially if, like me, you’re interested in the histories of the Spanish Civil War). Freedom Press is located in a little alley of the Aldgate East Tube Station, which opens into a courtyard that is so nondescript, that you’d never imagine there was a bookshop there. In some ways, it reminded me of my favourite anarchist bookshop, Jura Books in Sydney, which is located bang in the middle of an industrial area, amidst a row of stores that have nothing to do with books. Once inside, however, you’re in an entirely different world - so if you’re in London, and haven’t yet been to Freedom Press, I’d recommend it.
My primary purpose in London, however, was not literary. I came to be involved in the last two weeks of the football season. It also unlocked in me a long-dormant desire to exercise a different writing muscle: that is, to write about football (a writing tradition whose most famous exponent, of course, is Eduardo Galeano). I’ve made a start with a second Substack which - drawing on Galeano - is called Football in Sun and Shadow. The first post addresses the cognitive and ethical dissonance involved in being a modern football fan, and then there’s a trilogy of posts about the last twenty-two years spent supporting Arsenal. Give it a look if you’re interested.
A few days ago, a piece written in the Times of India, about the fraying of adult friendships in the age of social media, went viral online. I glanced through it when it appeared on my timeline, didn’t find it very compelling, chalked it down to taste, and moved past. Very soon after, people who read it more carefully than me pointed out that it was very likely AI-authored. Around the same time, other people pointed out that the prize-winning story in this year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize competition, published in Granta, was likely AI-authored. Both these events threw up a predictable storm online, and in WhatsApp groups.
What struck me most, however, was the defensive manner in which a lot of people who had been enthusiastically sharing the Times of India piece reacted to the news that it was likely AI-authored. I enjoyed it, they said, it spoke to me, who cares how it was authored as long as it did that?
Fair enough, but if I found an AI-authored piece speaking to me, I would want to at least be curious about - and interrogate - why that is so.
Reams have already been written about this, and I don’t want to add to a debate that, at times, veers into the sophomoric (including done-to-death debates around “what is art?”). There was something about the Times of India piece, however, that struck me: how easy it was. I mean that both in terms of its formal style and in terms of the emotion it sought to elicit from its readers. Its formal style reminded me of a stone on a river-bank that is worn smooth by millennia of flowing water, or the manicured grass that you find in an elite golf course. Writing that has been varnished and polished to a degree that all that’s left is the polish. The cadence of the sentences is so rhythmically symmetrical that you could fall asleep to it (I think this, in part, is why the piece did nothing for me).
And in substance, too, it felt to me that the essay was - in effect - telling people how to feel. I once read an excellent term for this: unearned emotion. A good piece of writing, in my view, ensures that its emotional pay-off is earned, that the reader comes to that emotion in the process of working through the text. When I went back and re-read the Times of India piece, it made me feel like a consumer at the department store of emotions, shopping for a ready fit (in this case, a blend of nostalgia, melancholy, and regret).
One phrase, in particular, stood out for me: “Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence.”
“Unoptimised presence.” These two words in close conjunction feel almost grotesque to me. The word “presence” carries weight, freight - it is something that resists subsumption into the corporate newspeak that we’re bombarded with every day. On the other hand, “unoptimised” is precisely the kind of corporate newspeak that dominates much of the written word that we experience in our daily lives. This, for me, is the biggest AI-tell, and what made the piece so jarring.
As I read it, I couldn’t but help think of the most beautiful piece that I have read on adult friendships: Patti Smith’s eulogy for Sam Sheppard. Here is how it starts:
He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling. But most often he would call from his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could hear the stars breathing. Just a late-night phone call out of a blue, as startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get lost in, a blue that might lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up some Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids, or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.
“Gogol was Ukrainian,” he once said, seemingly out of nowhere. Only not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere that, when lifted in a certain light, became a somewhere. I’d pick up the thread, and we’d improvise into dawn, like two beat-up tenor saxophones, exchanging riffs.
There is nothing smooth or easy about this opening. The rhythm of the sentences is non-uniform, almost choppy. The images come at you from all angles, in the true Shklovskian sense they defamiliarise your sense of the world and of the proper order of things, and yet they fit. Consider the phrase “not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere.” These words demand something of you, and then give you back a sense of meaning and of the world that more than repays it.
And for me, that is - at least at present - the crucial difference between AI-writing and human writing. Invariably, at both the formal and the substantive level, AI will make your reading experience easy. AI will treat you as a consumer (and should we really be surprised, given that for a few years now, people have been talking about how they “consume” art - a phrase I utterly despise), and give you the product that you ordered. Human writing - or at least, the kind of human writing that is worth reading - will not do that. Good human writing makes you earn it.
There may come a time when AI becomes sophisticated enough to do what I’ve talked about above, at which point the conversation will shift again. But for now, and for me, here is where the difference lies (and also why I will continue writing novels and stories, no matter what!).
What I’m Reading
I haven’t been able to finish too many books over the last fortnight, but one I did read was Ann Leckie’s latest, Radiant Star. This one’s set in the same universe of the Imperial Radch as her groundbreaking Ancillary Justice, and takes place on a colonised, undersea world just as the Imperial Radch is breaking apart in civil war (the events at the end of Ancillary Justice), and is about intra-world conflicts between religious sects, as well as the distorting influence of the colonisers.
I had mixed feelings about this: everything that Leckie writes will be brimming with ideas, and executed with a high degree of skill and finesse. For all that, I never felt entirely immersed in the world. This might simply be the result of familiarity, something that readers new to Leckie might not be burdened with: for example, the gender pronoun switches, which felt so formally radical in Ancillary Justice when we read it a decade ago, now feel worn - and, in this book, not entirely explained or earned. The politics, too, felt almost over-familiar (although there were some brilliant bits of world-building involving food and architecture). It’s the kind of book I liked well enough when reading it, but not one that would stay with me very long after.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
After reading my brief thoughts on Radiant Star, read a much more comprehensive review of it in Strange Horizons.
Also, our annual fund-drive - which is what keeps us alive - starts in a week, so keep an eye out on that. I’ll be posting about it here, but it will also be on our X, BlueSky, and Instagram handles.
The Indian Scene
Nothing stirring this week.
Recommendations Corner
After a somewhat lukewarm reception to a Leckie novel, it’s only fair to recommend one too. Translation State is not directly a part of the Radch series, and is sometimes overlooked in the Leckie canon as a stand-alone novel, but I think this is perhaps her most conceptually challenging - and rewarding - books. It takes on that most difficult task in SF - writing from a non-anthropomorphic point of view - and for the most part, accomplishes it really well.