It is nothing but scary how dystopian our reality has become. Wars destroying entire civilizations, presidents ruling other nations like it’s their job, technology being so advanced we struggle to differentiate it from human actions.
The cherry on top of this global crisis is our controversial Artificial Intelligence. A mechanism that gathers an insane amount of online data and spreads itself in all sorts of corners: recognizing your face to unlock your phone, giving quick answers to all sorts of questions, generating images and acting as chatbots in websites.
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.
We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion.
And medicine, law, business, engineering: these are all noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.
But poetry, beauty, romance, love…
These are what we stay alive for.”
(Dead Poets Society, 1989)
BE WELCOME, AI!
Due to its versatility, we can feel like comprehending it is impossible, like what makes it real is just way more complex than our regular brain can assimilate. But that’s where you’ve gone wrong. It seems huge, it seems terrifying, it seems incomprehensible and it seems like it’s going to take over the world and leave every single human unemployed. But they are actually just computer systems programmed to perform tasks, usually required to humans, whenever asked. Their function is to optimise our time and enhance our abilities.
However, with its unprecedented development, one of the areas it may seem to be haunting to take over is literature. After all, AI can already write some poor in depth, but real, essays when asked. Still, when we stop to consider whether artificial intelligence can, or cannot, write true literature, we have to first ask: what even is literature?
WHAT IS LITERATURE?
Literature can be defined by critics and scholars as “a body of written works”, according to Britannica. But I rather see it as the overflowing of our soul. What makes a person a writer, is that whenever they can’t take it anymore, they let all of the weight fall from their brains, down to their pens. The tension, the fears, the wonder, it all flows in the form of words.
Literature is a translation of feelings, a precious trunk to save memories from the forgetfulness, a mechanism that defies the passing of time. Literature is a way to explore the unsaid, to put into words thoughts that were blurry, and suddenly, become a clearer path for humans to be understood.
According to Ian McEwan, a renowned British writer, “to live without poetry is to live half asleep”. As long as people dazzle themselves by the mere fact of existing, literature will resist because there is no other mechanism that expresses the insides of a person’s feelings as accurately as words.
THE SPOT WHERE AI WILL ALWAYS FAIL…
AI doesn’t have a soul. It cannot feel. It reciprocates whatever it finds in the rubles of the internet, but nothing is original. Afterall, it has ‘artificial’ in its name for a reason…
Artificial intelligence doesn’t have feet to be touched by the sea. It has no idea of the revigorating feeling that takes over a body when the salty air fulfills the lungs; the hot, welcoming sand embracing the being. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have hands to hold the face of a loved one, nor eyes to lock into another pair and see what deep secrets may emerge. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have a body that carries a beautifully complex soul. Without this tiny, invisible detail, artificial intelligence cannot see, touch, perceive, feel. And without feeling, it is impossible to write.
After all, spelling words doesn’t necessarily attach a meaning or create a message. Whenever emotion is actually felt, it cannot be faked. It is easy to differentiate. When something is written through true experiences, moved by an authentically visceral need to express what is too big to only stay contained inside one person, readers can identify the veracity, the humanness of such desperate act.
Take this poem as an exemple:
“You do not have to be good/ You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves./ Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine./ Meanwhile the world goes on./ […] / whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”
That is Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver.
See how it is just a soul searching for another? Nothing but a being who senses could write that. True emotion so truthfully expressed from one perspective, anyone else can understand. But even better: while reading, you feel her.
The words chosen carry a weight that is only possible to be translated after you have actually carried them on your shoulders. It only resonates because it is honest, because it causes real identification. Because she is a human, goes through life, feeling it like a human, therefore knows how humans feel and so, as it is all genuine, other humans that feel the same, see themselves in her words.
She is obviously not the only person to write about feelings. But each version, by each person that dares to try, is a brave act towards the complex and innate need to be understood. That is why each one, as many as there can possibly be, are valid: because each person is a unique individual, and each has something, down from the deepness of their existence, to bring, add and move. As the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector once said: “writing is a curse that saves”.
Poetry is intrinsically human because it is nothing more than the translation of the rendezvous that hides inside the soul. And having a soul is human. As you can only translate something you know, it is simply impossible for AI to reciprocate something it does not own, sorely, cannot understand. AI is not alive to feel life. That is why it cannot express truthfulness.
MORE THAN ‘JUST WORDS’
We write to stay alive. We write to remind ourselves that we are humans. We write to understand our emotions. We write to preserve memories. We write to express our love, our anger, our despair. We write to suppress our loneliness. We write to be understood by ourselves and allow our words to find another soul that, maybe, aches in the same spot as ours.
Humans are social creatures, we need one another. And literature is a mechanism of connection. This is what Robin Williams as Professor Keating means in his moving speech in Dead Poets Society: “but poetry, beauty, romance, love… these are what we stay alive for.” As long as humans breathe, they will be writing because if we don’t, an eternal state of confusion lies above our heads.
In order to live in society, it is needed to understand who we are, acknowledge the other person. As life passes through us, it is impossible to feel nothing. And these impressions – of who we are, where we stand, and who all of those people surrounding us are; the precious and terrifying faces of life – need to be registered and accounted for, so that we can deeply absorb their effects and meanings.
RELAX, NO WRITER IS GONNA LOSE THEIR JOB
We write because we feel. Artificial intelligence does not feel. Even if technology advances to an increasingly crazy level of resemblance to human mannerisms, it will never replace us because nothing truly original comes from it. AI can’t explain the world through its lenses because it is not even seeing the world.
Sure, human creativity also is a recombination of past inspirations. But what makes it unique is that new reflections, new points of view and new emotions, emerge whenever inventiveness flourishes. The magic of human minds is that a hundred different people can run through the same topic a million times, but different aspects of it will touch unexplored parts of these people’s psyche, endlessly. The issue is not the repetition of pre-existing ideas, but the lack of originality, of uniqueness.
“Words are my dominion over the world”, says Clarice Lispector. And by that, she means that writing is a way to claim our place in this reality, to assign our perceptions, to interconnect ourselves to one another.
Of course, AI can already imitate literary forms, writing styles and even compose an entire book about whatever topic wanted. It mimics structures and even emotional language. When looking at the result, it may appear like it wrote something new, but the impressions that allowed those pages to exist are not theirs. It is purely imitation. That is where it fails.
THERE IS STILL HOPE. THERE ALWAYS IS HOPE.
Ian McEwan claims that, one of these days, AI will even be able to trick us into believing it lives inside a body. But, he questions: without an actual body, how much is possible to understand about people? “The limitation is that AI doesn’t live inside a body. It doesn’t truly know what is pain, love, happiness, grief”.
And, half joking, half using comedy as a try to suppress the visceral panic, he says that AI has never shagged anyone. It doesn’t know the pleasures of love. And this is what he repeats to himself in order to calm from the terrifying fear that every novelist is going to lose their job.
Even though the fear is valid, the spot for writers is forever preserved. Nothing can replace a task that only the deepness of a soul can conduct. Words are our compass. Literature is the map to the deepness of our existence.
It is impossible for humans to exist without feeling. And it is impossible to feel without writing.
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The article above was edited by Camilly Vieira.
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