Birth of the A(I)uthor

My guest on the show today is Tuhin Chakrabarty, an assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook University and the culprit behind my first ever trigger warning on eminent Americans.Here we go: if a big part of your identity is vested in being a writer, and you are already experiencing existential dread about the prospect of AI getting better than you at writing, you may want to not listen to this podcast, or at least you may need to take a Xanax or a gummy before listening. Because Tuhin’s work, training AI to produce super high quality samples of high literary writing, is existentially threatening. It goes right at the heart of what we wordsmiths do. Just to give a sense, here’s a passage from a New Yorker article by Vauhini Vara that explores what Tuhin has found:I asked Chakrabarty to run an informal version of his experiment on my writing, with a twist: I would pit his model directly against me. To start, he fine-tuned a model on my published writing, much as he’d done in the formal experiment. Then I sent him four short excerpts from a novel that I’m currently writing. No one else had read these excerpts; they had never been published or circulated. There was no way that a large language model could have seen them before.The narrator of my novel in progress is an Indian American ex-journalist. She runs a nonprofit that publishes stories from immigrant and refugee women, but it’s strapped for funding, so she courts an Indian American venture capitalist as a potential donor. Chakrabarty used an L.L.M. to create content summaries of the excerpts I’d sent him. (One representative sentence, from a summary about the narrator’s journaling habit, explains, “A pivotal memory is introduced: in ninth grade, the narrator’s mother read this journal, an act seen as a profound betrayal.”) Finally, he gave the summaries to his fine-tuned model, and he asked it to compose passages “in the style of Vauhini Vara.”Going into all this, I was self-assured, even smug. I’d always felt that my style was original and, more important, that my books were totally distinct from one another. I figured that, even if the A.I. model could imitate my past books, it couldn’t predict the style of the novel in progress. So, when Chakrabarty sent me the A.I.-generated imitations, I was genuinely confused. Like Díaz and Nunez, I found lots of stylistic details—rhythm, verbiage—annoying. But the text produced by the model was eerily close to mine. Reading some of its lines next to my own, I couldn’t remember which was which. Unlike Díaz or Nunez, I even preferred some of the doppelgänger’s versions. My style seemed to be more consistent across projects than I’d realized.I sent four passages to some readers who’d liked my previous books, explaining that half were mine and half were the model’s. I wanted them to guess which were which. … The first of my readers to respond was Dana Mauriello, my best friend from college and an accomplished tech entrepreneur. “Truth: this was terrifying!” she wrote. “I was so nervous that I would say that AI wrote something that you wrote, and you would be insulted!!!” Her anxiety, it turned out, was justified. She didn’t get any of them right.Dana blamed this partly on her not being a writer. But, of my seven readers, none correctly identified more than half the passages. One of the last people I heard from was the novelist Karan Mahajan, a professor of literary arts at Brown University. He and I learned to write together in college, along with Tony Tulathimutte, and have been sharing drafts with each other ever since. He’s among the most perceptive writers and readers I’ve met. “Oof, this was really confusing and mindmelting,” Karan wrote. Then he, too, misidentified all four excerpts.To be clear, Tuhin isn’t claiming that AI, except under the very specific, rather contrived circumstances of his experiments, can already match the best human writers. And he doesn’t know if they ever will be able to match or surpass us. I don’t know how much consolation that affords, though; what he has done is threatening enough. Moreover, in this episode we’re doing what is sometimes the most anxiety producing thing of all when it comes to fraught questions: We’re sitting in the uncertainty, and poking at it. How does his method work? What does and doesn’t it prove? Why did he think to do it in the first place? What are its implications? What technical challenges would need to be solved for it to move from short samples, where detailed plot points and themes are provided by a human, to actually generating a full book with just a short prompt or a broad outline? And what are we human writers owed if it’s our work, used as training data, that creates the conditions for being superseded by AI? Etc.I wrote a long essay, not too long ago, about my intuition that most of the fiercest responses to AI out there, both from the hardcore boosters and the hardcore haters, are flip sides of the same coin. They’re dysfunctional manifestations of the anxiety that so many of us have right now in the face of what may be an extinction level event not so much in the Skynet takes over the world sense but of a more existential sort. We may soon be deprived of some of the core ways we’ve understood what it means to be distinctively human, how we’ve constructed our unique purpose as humans.Because of this fear, Tuhin has gotten a bit of hate for what he’s done and shown, but from my perspective he’s dealing with the existential threat we face in exactly the right way, the psychologically functional way. He’s looking directly at it. He’s rejecting both utopian boosterism and head in the sand denialism as strategies of evasion. He’s being creative with the thing itself. And he’s thinking in super pragmatic ways about how to best serve human interests in the long run. And not just thinking about that but doing something concrete and positive about it, collaborating with legal scholars on how to think about and craft policies that protect and compensate authors.So I’m sorry to stoke your anxieties, dear listeners, if that’s what we do, but I’m not sorry I had Tuhin on the show. He’s a fascinating and flexible thinker, a hard core computer scientist and a true lover of literature.Also: Eminent Americans, my sweet baby, is now produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and is distributed through its publication, Arc Magazine. You can find all of Arc’s podcasts and much more online at arcmag.org.Hope you enjoy the show, and that the radiant beams of humanity and thoughtfulness that Tuhin and I generate between us don’t just soothe your anxiety but ultimately help you to process it.Peace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe