Essays

Semi-Random Thoughts on Chatbots and the Book of Mormon

Share
Tweet
Email

Jacob Bender

1. I dimly recall a scene from William Gaddis’s massive (and massively overlooked) 1955 novel The Recognitions, wherein some fashionably nameless character at a dinner party tells of this novel new computer program that can write whole new Sherlock Holmes story, by algorithmically reproducing Arthur Conan Doyle’s most frequently used vocabulary, syntax, and story beats. These incredible new computers, he tells everyone, eliminate the need for human beings entirely in the production of art.

When someone asks him if these auto-generated Sherlock stories are any good, he responds, “Oh no, of course not, they are utter garbage and nonsense,” or something to that effect. Given that the entire novel is preoccupied with the blurry line between plagiarism and art (its most-famous plotline concerns a struggling young artist hired by a conman to create paintings in the style of the old Dutch masters so that he can pass them off as originals–yet still he paints them with the same passion and care as Van Dyke), The Recognitions has been on my mind again lately.

2. The first known photographs were taken in France in the late-1820s. The process became popularized in the 1840s by the Parisian Louis Daguerre, who perfected what we now know as the Daguerreotype in 1838. This is relevant because France is also where the the avant-garde art movement known as Impressionism first arose, only one generation later. Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, and a host of other painters who have since become house-hold names, were the first to realize that photography had effectively put them out of a job–because no hand-painted portrait, no matter how precise and detailed and artful, could ever be as “realistic” as a photograph. So, they pivoted to doing the one thing a photograph can never do: capture the impression of a scene, its emotions and feeling. (I had a Monet calendar on my mission, incidentally). That is, rather than feebly reproduce the world as is, they created all new ones. Impressionism in turn paved the way for Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Impressionism–with their attendant masters Van Gogh, Picasso, Dali, Pollack, and more.

That is, they were creating spaces for us all to be human again.

3a. The influence of photography upon French Impressionism was on my mind during department meetings earlier this month, which were largely dominated by all-hands-on-deck red-alerts about the recent debut of ChatGPT, the most terrifyingly powerful predictive-AI chatbot yet. To demonstrate what a pandora’s box had been opened, the Dean shared with everyone a trio of sample 5-paragraph-essays on slavery in America, and challenged the faculty to tell which one was chatbot made.

Confessedly, few if any of us could. However, left unspoken during that demonstration was the fact that all three of those 5-paragraph-essays sucked. Like Gaddis’s new Sherlock story they were absolute nonsense and garbage–human- and AI-written alike. And why were they terrible? Because they were 5-paragraph-essays, perhaps the most perniciously useless essay genre of all time, for it only teaches students how to be vague, generic, mechanical, robotic, uncreative, with an utter absence of personal voice.

In other words, the 5-paragraph-essay is utterly dehumanizing. I have been railing against 5-paragraph-essays for literally my entire teaching career, and now ChatGPT has ironically given me extra ammunition to use against it: for the problem isn’t just that a machine can now write like a human being, but rather that we have been training human beings to write like machines all along.

3b. As an ’80s child raised on Terminator and The Matrix, I am of course pre-conditioned to be suspicious of the rise of AI; but if the Chatbot finally of necessity kills off the 5-paragraph-essay for good, then I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

3c. These are anxieties that are at least a century old, tracing back to the Modernist period (my era of specialization in grad school, by the way), when the rise of mass-automation in turn gave rise to the feeling that the human subject in general was becoming automated, mechanized, de-humanized, just another cog in the machine (anxieties we still share today). Hence the revolt of Abstract Expressionism in art, atonality in music, and Modernist experimentalism in literature, that permeated the early-20th century. They were all collectively rebelling against the rise of the machines; they, too, were trying to create spaces to be human again.

3c. I have not been so radical in my composition classes. But I have spent my career insisting my students forget everything their previous English teachers taught them, because I not only allow but demand they use their personal pronouns, their personal stories, personal voice, in any and all academic writing. Before the chatbots, I insisted they do so simply because such made for more interesting and persuasive writing; now I also insist they do so because the particularity and individuality of their personal stories, their personal selves, are the one things the predictive-AI cannot write or predict, for the simple fact that the chatbot is not them. No one is. Each of us really are astoundingly unique (indeed, the worth of souls is great in the sight of God).

In my own small way, I too am trying to create a space for my students to be human again.

4. Ironically, the rise of AI Chat also means that our most personal of literary-genres–the memoir, the personal essay, etc.–are now our also most precious and important. Now that our most mechanistic genres (like, again, the 5-paragraph-essay) can now be produced by literal machines, all that’s left for us, then, is to write the only things that can still be written solely by humans. As Nick Cave blisteringly said, an algorithm cannot suffer, and data-sets know not what it means to endure; and as Kurt Vonnegut famously said, we write to feel less alone.

As anyone who has ever navigated a voice-mail menu with customer service knows, nothing is more infuriating than talking to a machine when what you need more desperately than anything is to just talk to a human. We need to know that there is a human being on the other side of whatever text we’re reading–not just for grading integrity reasons or whatever, but simply to know we’re not alone. (It is also why we pray to God.)

But in order to do that, we need to be sure that our own writing is human in the first place, too.

5a. It’s predictive software, after all–it predicts based on what has come before. Hence, in order to preserve a space for the human, that also means we need to become unpredictable again (like unto little children, as the Savior taught), to utterly break with what came before. Suddenly the Modernism and Postmodernism of the previous century comes back into play. They, too, were trying to utterly break with what came before; they, too, were trying to resist automation; they were not only ahead of their own time, but ours.

5b. (If I might be a touch self-promotive, this is also all why I wrote my novella And All Eternity Shook as an experimental work of creative non-fiction–to create something new and unpredictable yet also human and personal. My mother had died of cancer only two days after I got home from my mission, you see; so, like Vonnegut, I wrote something just to feel less alone. But the usual cliches we use for grieving all felt hopelessly inadequate to my situation, so I of necessity had to create something new. The end result (I dare flatter myself) was something the chatbots–nor anyone else for that matter–could never have created, simply because no one else had experienced it like me.)

(And at the risk of being further presumptive, I had hoped that all else might go forth and do likewise).

5c. And it is here that I recall that Christ said ye cannot put old wine into new bottles; and Isaiah warns us of how the Lord will “do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act”; and how Paul declared “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”

And I recall just how offensive the Book of Mormon was (and still is) when Joseph Smith brought it forth to the world.

6a. I am keenly aware that in many quarters, the Book of Mormon is treated as a logical product of its time–that its various sermons and flagrant King James pastiches are but a response to a whole host of early-19th century theological debates then extant across upstate New York (as though the Book were simply a more earnest version of “George Lucas in Love“). The argument appears to be that the Book of Mormon was after all just the consequence of rather mundane and predictable historical factors.

5b. But that explanation has never really flown for me, simply because that’s not how the Book of Mormon was greeted. It was the sheer impudence of it innovation, of its very novelty, that scandalized the populace about Joseph Smith (years before polygamy gave them a much more welcome beating-stick). Absolutely no one was clamoring for this sort of book, there was no market need it was fulfilling, and virtually everyone hated it from the moment it debuted clear down to the present day (just try and buy tickets to the Broadway musical if you doubt the claim). If the Book of Mormon was merely the result of a bunch of mundane and predictable historical factors, then there would be more Book of Mormons. There aren’t. There’s only the one. It is a thoroughly Black Swan event, what Baudrillard called an Absolute Event–something unimaginable right up until the moment it happens.

6c. Even if you completely reject any and all of his faith claims, one must still give Joseph Smith his due, for anarchically throwing this literary Molotov cocktail into the fray, something that was a complete break with whatever came before. Like the Impressionists and the Abstract Expressionists, he was ahead of not only his time, but our own. And he was doing it for the same reason: in the midst of our dehumanizing and fallen Earth, he was daring to create whole new worlds (literally, in the case of his apotheosis theology).

7. That is, he too was trying to create a space for us all to be human again.

Share
Tweet
LinkedIn
Email
Print