These are hard times for the written word. A large number of people can neither read nor write anything down on their own and instead use AI for help. Consequently, AI-generated texts are now appearing everywhere, sometimes in surprising places such as in newspapers and publishers' manuscript piles. But above all, they are on the internet. They pour out of chatbots, graze on social media, seep into all contexts where text occurs.
As a text maker, AI is a competent krabat. Its articles are accessible and easy to follow. The text is simple, neat and clear. The AI client that appeared in my Word program operates entirely in this spirit. While working on this text, it has made various tempting offers: "Make this more concise." "Structure and refine this document." "Improve this to be clear and professional."
I prefer not to. Not just out of professional pride, but because AI text doesn't stick in my skull for some reason. Despite being so skilfully written, it evaporates after reading, without leaving any particular impression behind. What remains is a feeling of emptiness and absence, a kind of reading depression.
Thankfully, there is a cure: repeated association with one of literature's great stylists. Take, for example, Vladimir Nabokov. On my bookshelf is, among other things, his memoir "Tala, minne" in a yellowed, thumbed paperback, whose pale blue cover depicts a drawing of a distinguished gentleman with closed eyelids and fastidious pouty lips. Below, the author remembers how, as a 20-year-old, he escapes the revolution in Russia and ends up in Cambridge:
"During two spring months in Greece I sought, in constant brave struggle with intolerant sheepdogs in vain for three rare butterflies: I was in the wrong part of the country. On the Cunard steamer Panonia which left Greece for New York on May 18, 1919 (twenty-eight years too early as far as I was concerned) but left by us at Marseilles, I learned to dance the foxtrot. France shook by in the pitch-black night. English the pale waters of the canal were still lapping at us when the train from Dover reached London. Long rows of gray pears on the dirty walls of Victoria station advertised the bath soap that English governesses had used on me in my childhood. A week later I was rubbing cheek to cheek at a charity ball with my first English love, a whimsical, slim girl, five years older than me."
Immediately a direct line opens up between our pixel flickering now and the misty Europe of the interwar period. But this time I don't want to recommend Nabokov as a genius time machine, but for his details, his meticulousness, his ability to pack time tightly into a single carelessly elegant sentence. See how he lets the soap ad represent something exotic-new and nostalgic-homely at the same time. How the train station dirt is connected with the sensation of a freshly washed child.
In addition, Nabokov demonstrates the art of handling adjectives. Usually we go with the first best word that pleases to appear, but our pedantic writer is never that slack. His adjectives have a function: through their contrasting effect, they turn up the self-irony (brave fight/intolerant shepherd dog) or give the scenery a certain unexpected beauty (black night/bleached water).
Sometimes stronger thuds are needed to shake up the feeling of language. Why not Thomas Mann? Here is an example from the novel "Doctor Faustus". The Narrator has taken to writing down the story of his friend Adrian, a composer who sold his soul to the devil, a task that often causes him discomfort:
"It's simply the case that certain things that I have to tell about from time to time, I see them with fear and anxiety, even with terror in my eyes from afar; they appear to me, therefore, very heavy and oppressive, and I try to distribute their weight by already in advance, suggestively and comprehensible only to myself, bringing them into speech - by half-by-half opening the language box and letting them out."
The quote is part of a reasoning that winds over half a page, and it was not easy to find a party that allowed itself to be lifted out in this way. Mann can fill a sentence with subordinate clauses until it almost bursts; you scan for period but only find hyphens and commas.
Indirectly, the novel says "You can do this", like a sober teacher, used to the students' laziness but confident in their ability to overcome it
Mann seems to think highly of his readers. He assumes that we tolerate the narrator's circumstance and leaves it up to us to piece together elements into a larger context. In the text, there is no attempt to simplify, adapt or make available. Indirectly, the novel says "You can do this", like a sober teacher, used to the students' laziness but confident in their ability to overcome it.
Anyone who has no taste for Thomas Mann can profitably turn to the master of sentences, Virginia Woolf. Here is an example from "A Room of One's Own", where Woolf describes a visit to the library. She tries to clear up the question of how it is that women have no money. A "torrent of books" slides down onto her table and sets in motion a reflection on the importance of education for the ability to seek answers and knowledge:
"But if, unluckily enough, one has not received a university education, the questions rush hither and thither, huffing and puffing, like a frightened flock of sheep chased by a whole pack of dogs, instead of being led to their fold. Professors, teachers, sociologists, priests, writers, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualifications other than not being women, chased my single and simple question - Why are women poor? - until it became fifty questions and the fifty the questions jumped desperately into the middle furrow of the stream and were carried away."
Woolf is something of a nervous prima ballerina of the style – you wonder how that pirouette will actually end, but she always pulls it off with enviable finesse. The reader who follows along through all the spins will be rewarded for their efforts. Because doesn't Woolf capture something of the movement of thought itself – a multi-layered, associative process where several things are going on at the same time?
Our poor mental faculties are not nearly as well-oiled as the large-scale language models. When dealing with them, one need only prompt one's question - "Why are women poor?" – to be immediately served a straightforward answer. "Women," says Chat GPT, "are not poor because they are women, but often because society's economic conditions, norms and opportunities affect women and men differently." And so it continues, in a competent and neat account, completely freed from rampant flocks of sheep.
Is it easier to understand? Do you understand more? Does the knowledge get a permanent place on one of the dusty shelves in the brain's department for Society and History?
What does encountering such a text do to the reader? Is it easier to understand? Do you understand more? Does the knowledge get a permanent place on one of the dusty shelves in the brain's department for Society and History?
I fear that it is rather as the saying goes: easily caught, easily gone. The helpful summaries flutter away and sink into oblivion. Man is a fundamentally linguistic being. We are at the mercy of language when we deal with the outside world, when we try to understand something, when we relate to ourselves. An overly smooth language easily leads to an overly smooth thought.
They have not been satisfied with the simplest, the most common, the clearest expression, and for this we should be very grateful
Speaking of which: We can read the above quote in Swedish thanks to the translators Lars Gustav Hellström (Nabokov), Elisabeth Mansén (Woolf) and Ulrika Wallenström (Mann). They have not been content with the simplest, the most common, the clearest expression, and for this we should be very grateful. Even in translation, the works offer their readers a wayward precision, a particular look. The thoughts of the lyrics are not necessarily original in themselves (how many thoughts are there really?) but through the style – the individual, specific, sometimes annoying and in various ways awkward style – something essential about the state of things is still conveyed.
Read more:
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