Algorithm prose

Just as with a hammer in our hands, we come up with ideas we wouldn't have if we did so with our bare hands, the tool of AI changes our relationship with language and with the creation of texts. In the coming decades, we will see to what extent it affects—influences or conditions—'serious' literature, although popular literature is already, right now, the one suffering most from the effects of this great disruption. Thousands of 'novels' are uploaded to digital bookstores in e-book form, fictions created thanks to AI, which, to a greater or lesser extent, has helped their authors finish their creation. Created with language simulators and thanks to algorithmic invention, these novels are intended to be sold wholesale, and there seems to be a public willing to buy them, in part because they are cheaper and evidently easier to read. Those who are only looking for escapist literature, easy-to-understand and based on stereotypical situations, can find a machine capable of giving them the runaround. If literature was 'the war against the cliché,' as Martin Amis put it, these machines teach you to see any literature as a form of cliché, more or less obvious, but always capable of being reproduced.

There are also cases of female authors of best-sellers –of popular literature fueled by clichés, that is– who are beginning to find that works signed with their name are circulating in digital bookstores, but written by an AI, pushed by some clever person or forger. Here, the authorship is false and should be denounced, but to what extent can it be said that what an AI has created after studying an author's clichés is that author's work and should generate rights for them or their heirs? Cervantes already found someone who circulated other adventures from his Quixote during his lifetime, as did Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda; what can be achieved right now with AI is not very different from what some authors have already found in the past, such as Calderón de la Barca, who complained about the large number of works apocryphally attributed to him. Now, fake – and horrible – Borges poems are circulating on the internet (they are spread and enjoyed much more than the authentic poems).

We find equally disturbing the case of the dead author who is made to speak thanks to AI. AI, after assimilating the prose writer's complete works and thousands of interviews and articles about—or by—the author, is supposedly able to tell us what he or she would think on certain topics and, therefore, answer questions about current affairs. AI is based on simulating a language based on patterns of language, and now also of style, assimilated by the machine once it is 'fed' by the deceased author's literature. AI, and this is unquestionable, does not 'create' anything original, but it is capable of reproducing patterns, and the work of a given author is reducible to a series of forms and languages, from which the machine can be simulated to 'think' and 'speak', as the deceased would. Before AI did it, certain 'skilled' authors – also in the press – wrote opinion pieces in the style of the 'masters' of the genre, with very meritorious results (such as Sergi Pàmies).