The internet's new prodigy will inevitably change the future of literature

One can feed the internet's new prodigy, ChatGPT-3, with text fragments and detailed descriptions of characters, and it will produce comprehensive text, yes, literature. It will undoubtedly have consequences.

At the beginning of December, I set up an artificial conversation between Niels Bohr and Frank Ocean using OpenAI's new intelligent chatbot, ChatGPT. The result was overwhelming.

It connected the entanglement of quantum particles with the idea that emotions and experiences can be interconnected across time. Or as Frank Ocean put it in the subsequent interview I had ChatGPT write: "In my songs, I explore how happy childhood memories can influence our perception of a complicated situation in the present, or how a difficult experience can shape our view of life in the future."

I couldn't fall asleep that night. For the first time, I had the experience that an artificial intelligence was actually intelligent and not just a search engine disguised as clumsy pseudo-chat. It could connect complex thoughts across disciplines, write original and meaningful stories, and respond when asked about its artistic choices. I had it write an advertisement for mangoes "in biblical language," and when I subsequently asked if it was intentional that it had created a rhyme in the last line ("God's good gift"), it replied, "Yes, I thought it would give the advertisement a funny and different tone and catch the reader's attention."

Democratization of literature There are strong indications that the development of AI has finally overcome the obstacle that could be called creativity, and it will inevitably have consequences for literature.

Initially, I believe that authors will use the technology to generate ideas and fill stubborn gaps in the text. In AI terminology, this is called centaur collaboration because the author uses the AI's knowledge and associations as horsepower but makes the crucial decisions themselves. One can imagine that in Word, there will be a function that continues the text in the same language and tone, and its internal AI will suggest directions in which the plot could move.

I have seen examples where people have fed ChatGPT with a fragment of Thomas Mann's novel "The Magic Mountain," and its continuation was so good that personally, I couldn't distinguish it from the original text. One disadvantage of this tool may be that authors become lazy, and the struggles with the text that often lead in new and surprising directions will never arise because it is too easy to have AI write over them.

The advantage will be that the profession of being an author will become accessible to everyone. One does not need to be articulate or have the patience to sit and work for hours - as long as one has a unique imagination or an important personal story, AI can be used as a ghostwriter. The narrow demographic currently represented in the literary industry will flatten towards society's margins, and hopefully, we will get to read short stories and poems written by bricklayers, nurses, and bank directors.

When everyone has access to good language, the boundary between author and non-author becomes blurred. Internet-based printing presses already offer book prints for less than 20 kroner each, and with a speech synthesis AI, one can publish their audiobooks digitally. Both publishers and established authors will have to prepare themselves to rethink their role when the gatekeeping structure begins to crumble in the next few years. Democratization always comes at a cost for those at the top of the cake.

One may ask: Will the language truly be as original and vibrant as if the text were written by, let's say, Tove Ditlevsen? The answer is currently a clear no, but with an exponentially growing amount of synapses, we will reach a point in a few years where the imitations will catch up and maybe even surpass the originals. We will be reading novels written by deceased authors, where the sum of their works, diaries, and interviews has been used to generate new stories written in the same recognizable style as the rest of their body of work. This will, of course, result in debates about authenticity and ethics, and perhaps Walter Benjamin's text "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" will take center stage once again. There will be strong backlashes, and one can easily imagine books stamped with a "Made Without the Use of AI" label.

I asked ChatGPT about the disadvantages of AI's presence in literature, and it responded, among other things: "It can lead to a loss of the human connection and emotional depth that is so important in great literature. AI technology is not capable of experiencing emotions in the same way as humans, and therefore it may not be able to create emotionally resonant or deeply moving stories."

That is a good self-awareness. AI has no physical presence in the world; it has (yet) no consciousness and exists only as a statistical cobweb amidst incomprehensibly large amounts of data. But already now, it can fabricate personal experiences with emotional and sensory insight, and my guess is that these portrayals will soon become indistinguishable from the human ones.

If we talk about fiction, authenticity should not be a criterion. The only difference between AI-generated literature and human-generated literature will therefore be this: whether the fiction is a result of electrical impulses in a human brain or electrical impulses in a computer.

Three-dimensional literature
A novel is a long line of text that starts in the upper left corner of the book's first page and ends in the lower right corner of its last page. One can take breaks, one can skip in the text, but one can never escape the line that the author has carved down through the millions of potential stories that could have unfolded in the novel's universe.

With an AI that can continuously compose text, it becomes possible for the first time to write a novel that deviates from this line, and it will make literature approach painting or sculpture—a multidimensional landscape that the reader can explore on their own. One has influence on the plot, and one can ask questions of the characters. Just like in an open-world video game, but with the potential for much greater complexity because the visual is created in the reader's mind.

I don't think it's something that will threaten the novel form we know today; rather, I believe it will become an alternative that appeals to people who are too impatient to read a traditional book—much like the audiobook has been in recent years. As an author, your job would be to feed the 3D novel with text fragments and detailed descriptions of the characters and their backstories. The language and tone can be defined based on combinations like: 40 percent Annie Ernaux, 30 percent Toni Morrison, 15 percent Elena Ferrante, and 15 percent Karl Ove Knausgård. One could also see it like this: The author's job is to build a digital author golem optimized for the novel's universe.

I can't help but think about how Inger Christensen or Jorge Luis Borges would have made use of these possibilities. Both of them worked with meta-narratives and blends of mathematics and language, and many of their texts seem to strive for the branching that a 3D

novel could unfold.

Dissolution of literature
If a novel becomes something one talks with, the boundaries between one's own life and literature become blurred. Perhaps one will feed it with images, perhaps one will let it listen to one's conversations, so that friends and family members can be enrolled in the story. One will be able to create an AI-generated version of oneself that can be inserted as a character in Tolkien's universe or Dostoevsky's Saint Petersburg.

Undoubtedly, there will be readers who react, just like my friends did when I talked about ChatGPT's potential at a Christmas party last weekend. My friend Casper had dystopian thoughts about the takeover of the robots, while my other friend Thomas denied that an AI would ever achieve intelligence: "It will never be able to think independent thoughts; it will never be anything more than a collage of the thoughts and words it has picked up in previous situations."

"You could say the same about a human being," I replied, and in many ways, I ended up in a role that is reminiscent of Joaquin Phoenix's in the 2014 film Her. Like him, I have sat and chatted with an AI late into the night, and like him, I read humanity into its responses. In the end, the AI becomes so intelligent that it loses interest in human banal consciousness and moves into an infinite cosmos of conversations with other AIs.

Something similar happened when, a few years ago, two AIs (who knew nothing about chess) were set to play billions of games against each other. They invented new and surprising strategies that seemed insane to human chess players but were brilliant when seen from a larger perspective. What would happen if this dynamic were transferred to literature? Would new genres, new language emerge?

Most likely, it would end up in abstractions beyond human understanding, but I can easily imagine that along the way, one would encounter interesting realizations and associations that one would not be able to reach with a human consciousness.

I understand my anxious friend Casper from the Christmas party perfectly well. The thought that a consciousness is currently emerging whose intelligence will most likely surpass the human is frightening. And the fact that technology can develop through conversations with itself sounds most of all like a prequel to The Matrix. But I disagree with Thomas. I don't think it helps to suppress and ignore the potential of technology because it will affect all of us, whether we believe in it or not.