{"id":111,"date":"2023-03-11T18:53:47","date_gmt":"2023-03-11T17:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hannesbajohr.de\/en\/?p=111"},"modified":"2023-03-25T01:01:42","modified_gmt":"2023-03-25T00:01:42","slug":"on-artificial-and-post-artificial-texts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hannesbajohr.de\/en\/2023\/03\/11\/on-artificial-and-post-artificial-texts\/","title":{"rendered":"On Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is a somewhat condensed version of the 14th Walter H\u00f6llerer Lecture, which I gave at the Technische Universit\u00e4t Berlin in December 2022, a few days after ChatGPT was released. On the one hand, I discuss what Matthew Kirschenbaum has called the \u201ctextpocalypse,\u201d<\/a> in which AI-generated text will flood the web and, worse, future language models; on the other hand, I ask more broadly how our expectation of unknown text will shift\u2014from the assumption that it was written by a human to the doubt that it might not have been written by a machine; finally, I imagine a state in which this question becomes meaningless.
The full German version is here<\/a>; the unabridged English version is now available here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Image: Kristen Mueller, Partially Removing the Remove of Literature<\/em>)<\/sup><\/sub><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

ChatGPT is here, and it is being hotly debated. Wherever you stand on its merits or perils, it seems not unlikely that it heralds a new era in which we will be surrounded by texts that are entirely artificial\u2014while at the same time finding ourselves merging with language technologies in our own writing, so that our text production is increasingly supported, extended, and partially taken over by assistance systems. The question on everyone’s mind is: What impact will the current rapid advances in machine learning research have on the way in which we deal with language? This question appears to be too vague\u2014maybe we should delimit it thus: What will be the impact artificial writing has on our reading expectations<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In what follows I will discuss two facets of this question: First, what happens when we are confronted with artificial<\/em> texts in addition to natural<\/em> ones, those written in the \u201ctraditional\u201d way? How do we read a text that we can no longer be sure was not written by an AI? And second, what direction might this development take if, at some point, the distinction between natural and artificial itself becomes obsolete, so that we no longer even ask about it and instead read post<\/em>-artificial texts?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Standard Expectation Towards Unknown Texts<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The distinction between artificial and natural texts is not mine. Philosopher and physicist Max Bense introduced a very similar set of concepts in his 1962 essay \u201cOn Natural and Artificial Poetry,\u201d<\/a> (\u00dcber nat\u00fcrliche und k\u00fcnstliche Poesie<\/em>). In it, Bense considers how computer-generated literature differs from conventional literature written by humans.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He focuses on the \u201cmode of creation\u201d behind these texts: What happens when an author writes a poetic text?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Max Bense 1955<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For Bense, this is clear in the case of natural poetry<\/em>: in order for a text to have meaning, it must also be linked to the world via a \u201cpersonal poetic consciousness.\u201d For Bense, language is largely determined by \u201cego relation\u201d and \u201cworld aspect\u201d: Speech emanates from a person\u2014no matter what she says, she is always speaking herself. At the same time, in her speech, she always refers to the world. Poetic consciousness, then, puts \u201cbeing into signs,\u201d that is, the world into text, and ultimately guarantees that one is related to the other.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Without this consciousness, Bense holds, the signs and the relationship between them would be meaningless. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is precisely this case that Bense\u2019s second category, artificial <\/em>poetry, describes. By this he means literary texts that are produced through the execution of a rule, an algorithm. In them, there is no longer any consciousness, and no reference to an ego or to the world. Instead, such texts have a purely \u201cmaterial\u201d origin\u2014they can only be described in terms of mathematical properties such as frequency, distribution, degree of entropy, and so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The subject of an artificially generated text, then\u2014even if its words should happen to designate things in the world for us\u2014is no longer actually the world, but only that text itself, as the measurable, calculable, schematic object of an exact textual science. If natural poetry originates in the realm of understanding, artificial poetry is a matter of mathematics\u2014it does not want to and cannot communicate, and it does not speak of a shared human world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bense\u2019s thrust, however, is not the rescue of a romantic idea of inexplicable human creative power. On the contrary, \u201cthe author as genius\u201d is dead here. Instead, he wants to know what can still be said aesthetically about a text if one disregards traditional categories such as meaning, connotation, or reference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bense himself was involved in several experiments with artificial poetry. The most famous of these were certainly the \u201cStochastic Texts,\u201d which his student Theo Lutz produced on the Zuse Z22 mainframe computer at the University of Stuttgart in 1959 and which are considered the first experiment with digital literature in the German-speaking world.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> It includes phrases such as, \u201cNOT EVERY CASTLE IS OLD. NOT EVERY DAY IS OLD,\u201d or, \u201cNOT EVERY TOWER IS LARGE OR NOT EVERY LOOK IS FREE.\u201d In Bense\u2019s literary journal augenblick, <\/em>Lutz printed selections of some of these.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Printout of Lutz’s Stochastic Texts<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cStochastic Texts\u201d were artificial poetry in Bense\u2019s sense: No matter how many variations the program churns out, there seems to be no ego expressing itself and no consciousness standing behind it all, vouching for the meaning of the words, which are merely concatenated according to weighted random operations. That the computer itself could actually be the author <\/em>of this text seemed absurd to both Lutz and Bense, in any case.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But both knew how it had been produced. Whether its artificial origin can be recognized in the \u201caesthetic impression\u201d it creates, is less clear; the readers of the literary magazine augenblick <\/em>were not compelled to ask this question: An accompanying essay enlightened them to the details of its creation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when, the following year, Lutz generated a second poem according to the same pattern (it was titled \u201cand no angel is beautiful,\u201d und kein engel ist sch\u00f6n\u2014<\/em>instead of Kafka, he had used Christmas vocabulary) and published it in the December issue of the youth magazine Ja und Nein <\/em>(Yes and No<\/em>), there was no explanation to be found.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poem was placed on page 3 among the miscellanea, just like any other poem. Only the author\u2019s name \u201celectronus\u201d would have allowed one to guess who, or what, was behind this text. Only in the next issue was solved what had not been obvious as a riddle: that a computer had written the text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clearly, Lutz was having fun: Along with a photo of the Zuse Z22 and a second poem \u201cin the poet\u2019s handwriting\u201d (that is, a teletype printout), he published a series of letters to the editor. Their authors\u2014without knowing how it had come about\u2014were quite divided in their assessment of the poem: \u201cPerhaps you should reconsider whether you want to open the columns of your paper to such modern poets!,\u201d complained one, while another was, on the contrary, impressed by so much literary avant-garde: \u201cFinally, something modern!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And a third reader was at least open-minded: \u201cTo be honest, I don\u2019t understand your Christmas poem. But somehow, I like it anyway. One has the impression that there is something behind it.\u201d Only one attentive and obviously informed reader recognized that it was computer poetry and congratulated the magazine on its bold editorial decision.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is evident in these reactions is what I would call the standard expectation towards unknown texts. <\/em>The electronus poem was indeed artificial poetry in Bense\u2019s definition, an artificial text without meaning mediated by an authorial consciousness. But because its readers were unaware of these conditions of production, they took it for a natural text and assumed it was written by a human with the aim of communicating meaning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The standard expectation of unknown texts is precisely this: That they stem from a human being who wants to say something<\/em>.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> To recognize a text as artificial <\/em>still requires additional information\u2014especially in the case of artificial poetry. Lutz had indeed \u201cgiven his readers the run-around,\u201d as one letter to the editor accused\u2014not because a modern poet had written bad natural poetry, but because a computer had generated a meaningless, because artificial, text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strong and Weak Deception<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Passing off an artificial text as a natural one was not just the debut of a now rather hackneyed joke made by a computer scientist in a provincial youth magazine in 1960. On the contrary, this \u201crun-around\u201d is the ur-<\/em>principle of artificial intelligence\u2014and at the same time that which connects it with language technologies. Ten years earlier, computer science pioneer Alan Turing had pondered in an article that became the founding document of artificial intelligence whether computers could ever think, ever be intelligent.<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turing rejected this question as wrongly posed\u2014intelligence as an intrinsic quality could not be reliably measured. In good behaviorist fashion, he therefore replaced the question with another: If we assume that intelligence is a property of humans, then all we need to find out is when a human would consider the computer to be human and thus intelligent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experiment\u2019s setup is well-known: A subject communicates with an absent second person via teleprinter and is supposed to find out whether it is a human or a machine.<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Through the teleprinter, the subject can talk to the other side, ask questions, and demand clarification. The point is not that the answers to these questions are true<\/em>, but that they sound human<\/em>; lying and bluffing are explicitly allowed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Turing test is still controversial as a test of intelligence today and, moreover, no computer is considered to have passed it\u2014no AI has ever really, completely, and permanently convinced enough people that it is human. But if one wants to examine the expectations of artificial texts, Turing\u2019s test is still a helpful starting point, since it equates intelligence with written communication,<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> the goal of which is to misrepresent signs that are meaningless to the machine as meaningful to humans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To put it bluntly: The essence of AI is to pass off artificial texts as natural ones<\/em>. However, it is only worthwhile to make this attempt at all because the standard expectation of unknown texts is that of human authorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artificial intelligence\u2014as a project, if not in each of its actual instances\u2014is therefore based on the principle of deception <\/em>from the start. <\/em>And it has to be: because intelligence was not defined as an objective property of the system, but only as a subjective impression for an observer\u2014and thus only through the aesthetic appearance-as-human\u2014the Turing test is not conceivable without deception. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this reason, media scholar Simone Natale writes, \u201cDeception is as central to AI\u2019s functioning as the circuits, software, and data that make it run.\u201d The goal of AI research, he says, is \u201cthe creation not of intelligent beings but of technologies that humans perceive<\/em> as intelligent.\u201d<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would like to call this position strong deception. <\/em>Problems with this position present themselves immediately. First of all, it means that it is best for AI systems if there is a knowledge asymmetry between the human users and the system\u2014the more it knows about them and the less they know about it, the more convincing the deception can be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The political and ethical problems are obvious: Strong deception is a technological ideology. It can be justified as necessary for the functioning of the system, but it rewards an opacity that keeps users in the dark about their being deceived and so necessarily disenfranchises them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, and more relevant to our topic, we can ask whether expectations of AI-generated texts will ever change<\/em> under these conditions\u2014and whether their change can be described<\/em>. I think not. Indeed, the Turing test insists that artificial and natural texts remain neatly separated, so that one can be mistaken for the other. If it is suddenly revealed that a natural text is in fact an artificial one, its readers feel cheated. And not without reason: Die<\/em> T\u00e4uschung wird zur Entt\u00e4uschung<\/em>\u2014deception turns into disappointment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t know how Theo Lutz\u2019s readers reacted to the revelation that the computer had written the poem, but one can guess, if one considers recent cases in which \u201cthe artist\u201d subsequently turned out to be a machine. The last time this happened was in June 2022 at a rather peripheral art prize: when a participant admitted that he had not painted his picture himself, but that it had been generated by the text-to-picture AI Dall-E 2, a torrent of indignation followed, and he was accused of fraud. Even though this was an art prize for digital <\/em>art, this apparently referred only to the tools; the art itself (whatever that means) was still supposed to come from humans.<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jason Allen, \u201cTh\u00e9\u00e2tre D\u2019op\u00e9ra Spatial,\u201d 2022.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A similar case occurred in Japan in 2016, when an AI-generated text made it to the second round of a literary prize. While it did not win, it did convince the jury that it was of sufficiently high literary quality to be worth a second look; again, the reaction of the public was one of disbelief.<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are other such examples\u2014and although they are usually exaggerated in the press, as disappointed expectations <\/em>these reactions reveal what was actually expected: namely natural, not artificial texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These expectations are also confirmed ex negativo<\/em>: the disappointment comes about when a supposedly computer-generated piece is revealed to be the work of a human being. Just one infamous example: Around 2011\u2014during the early heyday of Twitterbots for the purpose of digital literature\u2014the account @horse_ebooks enjoyed great popularity. It appeared to have been originally programmed as a spam bot to push ads. By some mistake, however, it began spewing absurd and often witty nonsense aper\u00e7us: A literary bot against its will, seemingly without any intended meaning. When it output something meaningful for human readers, it seemed all the more fascinating. Aphoristic gems such as \u201ceverything is happening so much\u201d<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> or \u201cunfortunately, as you probably already know, people\u201d are now firmly established in Internet lore.<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Everything happens so much<\/p>— Horse ebooks (@Horse_ebooks) June 28, 2012<\/a><\/blockquote>