Literature and silicon

This summer, at the Can Picafort festivities, during the pyromusical that concludes the Mare de Déu d’Agost celebrations, they played a piece of rock music that was composed by an AI.

It has become fashionable for a decade or more to combine fireworks with music, all to give it a more epic, magnificent, and emotional air, but I did not expect that the extreme of 'composing' music with AI had already been reached, just for the fun of hearing a song that talks about our town in particular, and about the festivities and the beach and the heat and the revelry, and also in Catalan, at some festivities, by the way, where public events usually have a presenter who addresses the people in a foreign language.

The piece was more or less horrible, but it was funny for that reason of hearing rock music that talks about your town; the machine must have composed it, for free, in a few minutes, while a custom-made piece, made by a local rock band, could have been better, it is true, but also more expensive.

The point is to fill gaps, space or content, as it is called now, and AI can do this in a matter of seconds; no one from Can Picafort, it must be said, seemed very shocked by the nonsense.

But those who have been up in arms are the literary society upon seeing that certain award-winning novels, already considered reasonably good, could be the result of AI work, no matter how much their authors still try to deny it with arguments that are not entirely convincing, at least judging by how the literary society has ostracized them. A curious thing in both cases (a Haitian and a Peruvian) is that both novels deal with the miseries of the world, the journey of a professor through various countries that mistreat him until he arrives in Canada, or the exploitation of agricultural workers in the case of the Peruvian.

Literature does not seem very relevant: they may be more or less poorly written books, but they reveal good moral intentions, denunciations, poverties, exploitations, and of course, resistance, oh. And this is liked more than good prose or the mastery of demanding narrative forms. Here at home, we also have this tendency to highly value the poor trickery of victim literature, over a literary art that, if it is just a little efficient, can already finish off a sad robot.