An AI scandal is currently shaking the literary scene in France. Haitian-Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien has been accused of using artificial intelligence to write his debut novel “C’était ça ou mourir” (“It was either this or die”). The novel published by Grasset, which tells a refugee story from Haiti, was a sensation of this book season. Already a bestseller and winning multiple awards, it was also one of the favorites for major French literary prizes such as the Prix Goncourt. After initial strong opposition, many experts have now agreed with the verdict about the novel's origins from language models. It seems to be a clear case.
There are likely to be many similar cases in the coming months and years, and if not, it will probably be because the models and the instructions given to them (the “prompting”) have improved to such an extent that the use of artificial intelligence can no longer be recognized based on simple idiosyncrasies of style. In the case of Orélien's “work,” this is, according to his critics, quite simple. For example, because everything constantly occurs in threes: something is redundant, superfluous and also predictable.
The better new versions of the language models are and - even more important - the more experienced their users, the more likely a novel will be seen by publishers, critics and ultimately readers as an independent creation of the people named on the cover, even if there can no longer be any question of authorship in the traditional sense. (This also applies to translations, of course). To paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche: Today we are experiencing the origin of the novel in the spirit of computer science.
But what's actually so bad about it? Hasn't the common idea of authorship always been a mystification? Critics well versed in literary theory point to Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault's now six-decade-old diagnosis of the “death of the author”: Wasn't the idea of the author as a meaningful authority always a practical fiction, useful for sorting and structuring masses of text and, not least, necessary to ensure remuneration through copyright and the book market? Isn't a text always the result of social discourse, a mix of historical models, collective language usage, reader expectations, and in this respect always more than the lonely product of a brilliant creator?
If that is the case, then an appropriately programmed language model would output exactly what a human writer fed with literary history, biographies, themes and theories would produce. Because, let’s be honest, “originality” is always a relative value. Crime novels follow genre conventions just like generational novels, stereotypical characters appear in the best family novels, and realism as a narrative mode knows certain rules of production just like the avant-garde prose experiment. Yes, the AI is probably particularly good at imitating the latter. A novel like Georges Perec's groundbreaking work "La Disparition" from 1969, which does not contain the letter "e", would be easy for artificial intelligence today.
So no one believes that language models are primarily suitable for so-called entertainment literature and that ambitious “high” literature is immune due to aesthetic quality assurance. Thélyson Orélien is the best proof to the contrary. What is interesting in this context is that now, after the alleged “unmasking”, the quality of his text is suddenly being disputed. Now some people want to have known it beforehand. It's certainly easier and quicker to write a prompt for a hockey romance than for a book award candidate. Just like writing with natural intelligence.
So what's the problem? Where does the disturbing feeling come from when the reader of a novel at some point suspects that it is an artificial product? And what exactly is artificial about something that belongs in the realm of fiction anyway? Real authors also have annoying peculiarities and can also construct bad sentences and banal characters, without any AI! Can’t you just write it on the front: “Made in Data Centers”? And what would that change?
An old concept may help to explain this: the idea of the “autobiographical pact”, which the French literary scholar Philippe Lejeune developed in the 1970s based on classics of autobiography such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Leiris. Lejeune's suggestion was to define what is special about an autobiography by analogy to a legal contract: In an autobiography, author and reader enter into an unspoken pact according to which the author (named on the book cover), the narrator and the protagonist of the book are identical.
What is important is not whether the events described are actually “true”. It's not about a more or less great "similarity" between the main character and the author, but rather about the "legal" identity, so to speak, the assertion of which (through the same name or through other "unique" characteristics) establishes the pact. The reader therefore reads an autobiography fundamentally differently than a novel - including an autobiographical novel or any other first-person novel - even if individual events there are also authenticated by authentic experience. Just because this pact exists, it can also be violated, for example if events described turn out to be fictitious or completely falsified. In a novel this would be legitimate as poetic freedom.
Currently it's not about autobiographies - because by definition an AI cannot write them. If she did, it would simply be a fake, a gross deception, the invention of the life story of a person who doesn't exist.
I'm concerned with something that, analogous to Lejeune's, could be called the “autographic pact”, the pact of self-writing. Regardless of the content of a novel, regardless of the material that may or may not be taken from the author's life, there is this broader version of Lejeune's contract. It is the implicit agreement between the reader and the author named on the cover, which implies that the latter wrote the novel himself. “Handmade” in the sense that every word contained therein was thought and recorded by the author himself (the most common exception is the ghostwriter, which is obviously frowned upon in the literary field).
Let's take, for example, a character in a novel who expresses moral theses about climate change or tolerance towards sexual minorities in a dialogue. Even if this does not have to be the author's opinion, the reader naturally assumes that he has formulated the arguments himself and has had a kind of argument in his mind's eye, even if he does not necessarily take sides.
The reader assumes that the thoughts about eternal love presented by the narrator, no matter how cheesy they may be, were formulated by the author, an author who has personally experienced and felt the happiness and suffering of love. Like all the feelings described in it, such as exuberant joy or deep sadness or panic or hunger or pain. And that the long description of the sunset and the mountain landscape comes from someone who has already seen the evening sun or mountain peaks with their own eyes. Even if he is by no means the first to describe it, and his words have been consciously or unconsciously influenced by previous writers.
The autographic pact is a widespread, perhaps even universal practice. Reading a book is like a conversation across space and time, a conversation between people, one of whom may even be long dead. When book lovers talk about their reading experiences in a reading group, they naturally believe in the real existence, if not of the characters in the novel, then at least of the people who created them.
A strong symbol of this intimate reader-author relationship is the enormous rush at book signings. For many people, the handwritten dedication in the book is a significant thing with high intellectual value. The author's personal signature seals the autographic pact, so to speak; it is like the signature on the contract with the reader. As is well known, every handwritten certificate of a person is called an autograph; At auctions, huge sums of money are paid for corresponding letters or everyday documents from writers.
If the readers of a novel were to find out (e.g. through a note on the cover) that their book is a machine product that was merely cleverly prompted, this virtual conversation would be deprived of the basis. Novels by ghosts would be a betrayal of the spirit of the novel.
The autographic pact contains the promise that a text is self-written—written by another self, a consciousness at eye level with the reader. If literature by artificial intelligence became socially acceptable in the future, it would be the end of literary culture as we know it.
