Ryan Murphy

AI writing is produced by reading a tremendous volume of human writing and then using a statistical algorithm to produce new text that is as close as possible to the exact average of everything in its training set. In other words, when you tell it to write something that sounds literary, it produces figurative language that resembles good writing in superficial ways but lacks intent, meaning and purpose, the things AI is incapable of. That is how you get passages like: “If the village had a mouth, it was hers.” At first read, it sounds like strong characterization containing a witty observation, because it is mimicking texts with those qualities, but it actually has no content. It says nothing about Marsha. Does it mean she is a leader who speaks for the village? Does it mean that she is a gossip? Does it mean she eats everything? “Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture.” Why would anybody apologize to furniture? Once again, this is an algorithmic system fundamentally incapable of understanding humor trying to replicate it. In the training set, it is statistically likely that writers will humorously describe a fat person by the way their weight affects furniture, and this is the AI’s attempt at approximating such a description. “She knew the ways of men hollowed by want until only one thing remained.” What? Who are these men? What is the thing that remains after they are hollowed by want? How does she know the ways of these men? This is just an approximation of literary language that is entirely empty of meaning or purpose. And then we get to: “People talk about bush like it dumb. But bush keeps memory the way hair keeps scent.” This, like everything else here is meaningless. But it sounds really ethnic and exotic, and that veneer of exoticism is what short-circuited whatever mechanism the white liberal judges of the Commonwealth Prize had for perceiving slop.