Angels in the Algorithm
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love AI.
Forever chemicals have entered my bloodstream. My words flavor the AI soup. Which of these alarming facts should I worry about more? Yes, but I’d rather not think about that one, so here we are. This post about AI is brought to you by my primitive nervous system, which knows how to deal with ravening wolves (run away!) but short-circuits at the thought of gradual, unwitting self-poisoning. I’ll do something about the PFAS in my dental floss…tomorrow.
AI-phabet Soup and Word Piracy
A vexing problem facing writers, artists, and other online content creators is that unscrupulous AI-based businesses are “scraping” copyright-protected content against their wishes, just as shady search engines ignore the “disallow” commands in robots.txt files. I have the following setting turned on for my newsletter, but I can safely assume that some content scrapers are thumbing their noses at it.
For perspective, shameless opportunists have been stealing writers’ works, and the writers have been railing impotently against them, for centuries. Case in point from almost 200 years ago: Charles Dickens and non-existent international copyright laws.
Dickens had great interest in American democracy, and he embarked on his now-famous tour of the U.S. with eager curiosity and optimism. His resulting travelogue, American Notes, gives honest, thoughtful, sometimes praising, and sometimes horrified witness to his experiences here. American realities were a far cry from Dickens’ idealistic imagination, sometimes hilariously so. For example, the U.S. Congress appalled him in ways that sound familiar:
I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers…Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.
Yep, things were already that bad in 1842.
But worst of all for Dickens as a writer, copyright laws had not yet gone international, so American publishers and printers could pirate his works without any legal consequences. American cities fêted Dickens as a rock-star celebrity, and at the same time, they blithely cheated him out of royalties for his books. He was not amused.
Now AI is the brash new world of content piracy. How should we combat it? One writer took inspiration from the 19th-century Luddites and decided to poison the well, or sabotage the bots with crafty, resource-intensive traps.
That’s a funny and poetic form of justice, but in reality, such traps trigger the use of extra processing power and thus waste tons of electricity. Plus the pirates will get wise and find workarounds. (The Luddites were a lost cause, too.) I think I’ll pass on accelerating climate change in an ever-escalating battle with bots.
Hugh Howey concurs, helpfully pointing out that the life of an artist is hard and people will always find ways to steal our work.
The problem is not AI, which, like the printing press, is a tool that is morally neutral in itself. The problem is people. What are we going to do about people? Two hundred years of efforts to civilize Congress have been wildly unsuccessful; the cheaters and liars simply find new ways to cheat and lie—and yes, AI technology is aiding their villainy in alarming ways. But AI is also helping the rest of us to do good work in the world.
Along with my personal writing, I write works for hire for educational publishers and other clients, and AI has become a useful tool for generating raw content and lists of sources. I always fact-check and revise the generated texts, but it’s nice to get a jumpstart from a virtual assistant that doesn’t look like an annoying paperclip.
On purely creative and communicative levels, I’m exhilarated by AI-based improvements in translation systems. In 2016, Google Translate switched to a system called Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) that learns from millions of examples, enabling greater accuracy of translation and the addition of more than 100 new languages. I used to fear that works of Yiddish literature would disappear forever because there would be too few people left to read them; now, I can translate and read them myself with the help of this tool.
Re-Absorbing Rilke with the Help of AI
Is it such a bad thing for AI engines to train themselves on my words? For their output to be me-flavored, somehow? My own answer to this question evolved in an unlikely way.
I’ve been rereading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies for decades, and I find it interesting to compare translations. Stephen Mitchell’s modern free-verse translations are the ones I like best, but I know they make free with the original German text, which Rilke wrote in 1912-1922. How could I, with my one year of high-school German and a non-scholarly knowledge of context, know what’s the poet and what’s the translator? Is it OK for a translator to flavor the translation with their own personal associations?
As a playful experiment, I spend some time running the first two public-domain Elegies through Google Translate. Then I compared the output with other English versions and made small tweaks of my own, based on how the poems speak to me.
Here is the resulting translation of a passage from the Second Elegy:
…while we, in the heat of our feelings, turn to smoke;
we breathe ourselves out and away; from ember to ember
we give off a fainter scent.
Even if someone says to us: "Yes, you’ve gotten into my blood,
this room, the whole springtime is filled with you"—
What’s the use? They can’t contain us,
we dissolve in and around them. And those who are beautiful,
ah, who can hold them? Ceaselessly
beauty rises in their faces and then drifts away.
Like dew from the morning grass, like steam from a hot dish
What is ours leaves us. O smile, where to?
Oh, look up: new, warm, escaping wave of the heart —;
we are that.Does the space we dissolve into taste of us, then? Do the angels
really only catch what is theirs, what has streamed out of them,
or do they scoop up, as if by accident, a little of our being with theirs?
Do we mix into their features like that vague look
in the faces of pregnant women? They do not notice it
(how could they notice?) in their whirling return to themselves.—Rilke, Second Duino Elegy, transl. by Google and me
At the beginning of the first Elegy, the angels are Beauty on the cusp of Terror: beings so powerful and alien that it seems pointless to turn to them. According to Rilke, the first line came to him on the wind when he was walking along the cliffs near Duino Castle as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis:
Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angels?
In the first Elegy, every angel is terrifying; in the second, the speaker poignantly imagines how our being might mingle with theirs, exactly because we are too small and diffuse to be noticed.
“Translating” the first two Duino Elegies was a way to meditate more deeply on them. At the same time, this meditation flavored the other subject on my mind: AI and my love-hate relationship to it as a writer.
The Duino Elegies have that quality that all great writing has but that nobody can precisely define: voice. Like a friend calling to us across a crowded room, we know voice when we hear it.
Luckily for us writers, voice is the one thing that AI cannot pull off. If we want to stay ahead of the machines, then the most effective thing we can do is not to battle bots but to find and refine our own voices as writers. Coincidentally, that’s also the best way to create works of lasting power.
If our works have voice, then it doesn’t much matter if the AI space we dissolve into tastes of us. I choose to be glad if it does. It’s a beautiful, anonymous kind of immortality, and also community as our words intermingle with millions of others.
If the hucksters make a buck from training their code on my words, well, then they make a buck—but they will never have the pleasure of making an original work, and discerning readers will always know the difference.
The day that AI achieves a voice of its own, then I’ll whisper like Rilke did into the wind: What is that? What is coming?
Am I not right…to wait before the puppet stage,
looking so fully that, to balance my gaze
in the end an angel must step in to pull the strings?
—Rilke, Fourth Duino Elegy