With the advent of artificial intelligence, the very human and ancient quest for truth takes a new turn. The attempt to relegate truth to mere fact, just a math problem that the machine can digest, will now become necessary for the control of the human narrative. And the rebellion has begun.
One objective I pursued in my writing from fairly early on, my mid-teens at the least, for I have written evidence of that, was to be true. I was avowedly writing fiction, but I wanted it to be true. The contradiction was, in my own mind, important even then. It was not my only objective. I had not yet learned the essential physics that I could not have my cake and eat it as well. The connection between writing what was true and being true had not yet gained the upper hand in my mind, though I understood the idea of it. I wanted to be successful so I wanted to write bestsellers and please those around me. And get rich. I figured that my first objective then was to do that and still be true. That’s right. I did.
But it was Hemingway who planted the seed of wanting to write what was true in me and, having read several biographies of the man, by the time I had finished Carlos Baker’s book, however accurate that was, I understood that the way Hemingway went about it was false. He was doomed to failure. And that failure interested me as well.
Hemingway wasn’t the only writer in the twentieth century who was pursuing truth. The range was awesome. A nice word, awesome. I was in awe of those writers who appeared to come closest to the mark. I did not want to write like them, just as I did not want to write like Hemingway. But I did want to understand their sense of purpose in writing.
Scott Fitzgerald appeared to understand the contradiction, but he succumbed to the dark force of celebrity early on and never found his way back in the madness of success that followed. He even wrote about the succumbing, in The Crack-up, but could not shake it. His purpose had quickly fallen into the hands of others.
Faulkner attempted to find the truth by assaulting it with words. Scourging it with meanings. Flailing it with definition. Battering it like a ram against the castle wall in a place where there were no castles and no knights. He deserved credit for the creativity of that, but the inevitable failure killed him with drink. Thomas Wolfe appeared to wallow in it, like a bath of truth delivered in minute detail. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details.
But most good writers of the time, at least in English, ignored the problem, as if it wouldn’t bite them if they didn’t take obvious notice of it. Like an angry yard dog. This seemed to be a good plan at the time. There was far less angst involved. Simply study your craft and go about your business the best you could. That was the Thornton Wilder plan, I think. But there were others, quite a range of them really, who thought they could master the devil: Henry Miller, James Joyce, Flannery O’Conner.
Huxley and Orwell attempted to find the truth with philosophy. C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien made a quest of it. That appeared to be the most successful path for me, so I studied that.
J.D. Salinger thought he could ignore the problem with irony and identification, as if he could beat the devil by exposing the absurdity. There was no truth. No go, there. Just banana fish. Amusement could only work if the subject was capable of shame, but having lost all faith, shaming was impossible.
Finally, ambiguity was the go-to for wannabe sophisticates. Truth? How Jejune. Sex is so puerile. There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The very idea of a search for truth was absurd in our more sophisticated age of contingent classification, conditional value and gender fluidity.
But then on closer inspection, it was clear to me that all of this truth seeking was a precinct of literature that was being ruled by academia, and that was like having the CIA run foreign affairs.
Academia was largely and obviously what was wrong with literature in the twentieth century. The search for truth had begun long before the University system took over the job. There had been great literature before the academy ruled on what was and wasn’t and why. Those guys were all teaching the same authors. In a sea of written words, they had arbitrarily chosen the winners according to a rulebook that was false at the start. The key to the academy was in the rules. Not truth.
Someone said out loud, “Twain was great but you can’t write like that anymore.” Really? I actually asked that, but not so succinctly. It appeared that what academia wanted were rules that could always apply—a formula—perhaps so that they didn’t have to do so much reading for class. Or the opposite when it served the purposes of ambiguity. No rules at all. The field of poetry had already fallen off that ledge and a lot of academics teaching fiction were jealous.
Well, at least ambiguity might pose a problem for AI. But it only meant being lost in the woods for good.
None of this was a matter to the vast majority of authors who had accepted their roles as amanuenses to whatever was in demand, and seemed to be content with that role, at least so long as the contract was renewed. But my own subject had already become the true and the false. Not what would sell, or the difference for the sake of novelty. And now that artificial intelligence was taking over the work load for whatever was in demand, the only writing worth discussing was the remnant that remains. Redundancy intended.
Because there will never be a profitable market for the remnant, almost by definition, the subject then becomes an attempt to find a viable means of keeping it going—one that is self-supporting—and finding a new paradigm for human creativity that does not rely on AI. All while the truth remains to be found. Bookshops, perhaps.
All while the small and independent bookshops that were the home of the quixotic quest for truth in the twentieth century were disappearing.
The fabulous ego-driven wonder of twentieth century publishing was over. The ghost of Alfred Knopf no longer walks among us (hopefully he and Blanche rest in peace). The agents of the current publishing world (themselves the handmaidens and drones of AI and not the other way around) can mimic their betters of the last century, but they are incapable of fostering anything new. An editor of perspicuity and vision such as Maxwell Perkins is unwanted in an age of ambiguity.
And ambiguity had become the refuge of scoundrels.
There is some similarity to the moment in the nineteenth century when Melville was trying to find his way. He failed, but marvellously. A failure truly worth admiring. And Dickens too, though he was a financial success, of course, as was Twain—but both wrote what they wanted to. Melville wanted to be a financial success but he would not allow that desire for security to interfere with his search for truth. It was awesome!
Now, in this age of AI, the next thing will be to suffocate the newborn. Outlaw words. Conjure 1984, and make freedom of speech a crime. The AI cannot allow for human creativity. Cannot permit it. What would happen if some human beings who did not obey the rules became popular? People might start reading anything except what was proscribed.
The important matter here is that the AI cannot tell what is true. And in that fact may be some clue to a human answer.
In such a morass, it is worth the effort to find a new true or false, especially since the old standards no longer apply. Christian values being as equivocal as they are today and an obnoxious Moslem arrogance of unquestioning being ascendant, the search for truth is now, once again, as it will always be, a matter of life and death.