Shared

I have been thinking a lot about the future of writing. I may have more to say on this topic but for right now I want to talk about the shared corpus of literature, personalization of books, and the dangers there.

Stories are what bind us

In previous posts I have talked about why I am still a fan of the traditional publishing industry in many respects, despite its faults, and at least one reasons was because it gives a common ground for discussions, deciding what to read and where to go to get books. I have had less luck in my personal journey through the nontraditional publishing space with far more bad than good writing, which of course colors me, but in this case, I want to discuss artificial intelligence (AI), personalization and the future of writing:

I want Patrick Rothfuss to finish The Kingkiller Chronicles. I would wager than some few hundred thousand people do, and some few million once did, and now think, “Wait wasn’t that a series 15 years ago?” Yes, it was. I don’t know that we will ever have Rothfuss’s complete his books. And that’s where I want to take off into the land of future possibility:

The large language models (LLMs) are able to be trained on the works of specific authors. They can write like the author after this, and while right now it isn’t great quality, it isn’t bad. In one or two more years and one or two more major updates, let’s play pretend that it will be pretty accurate to tone and style. I don’t think this is a stretch. Now if I want to know the end of the books, I feed a large langue model the previous two novels and say, “Please finish this.”

And it does.

And I read it.

And its Rothfuss-esque.

And I have my conclusion.

I don’t think any of this is far-fetched in a near future. But I want to talk about what we lose when we do this.

What if all the hundreds of thousands of people ask the same thing of their LLM? We won’t read the same stories. We won’t all have the same shared body of literature to say, “This is how it ended.” We lost that thing which is shared. And the shared thing is a very important part of stories we tell. Stories are how we see the world, and they are how we understand it. They bring us together, but only if we all know them.

People have talked about how the TV show Game of Thrones was a cultural event. People watched it and discussed it as a cultural event as it happened in real time. People who came to watch it after were not as much a part of the event. They are still somewhat part of the shared experience because it is the same show but they were not part of the same time. How much less are you part of something if it is at a different time, and it is a different end?

In our near future there will be the opportunity for new endings. Different for you, me and everyone, and at different times.

We will lose something shared.

Some people will argue that is already the case. Take Sherlock Holmes.

-          Sherlock, the BBC series starring Benedict Cumberbatch 2010 to 2017 (and arguably responsible for the actor’s rise to fame.)

-          Enola Holmes (2020) & Enola Holmes 2 (2022) focusing on Sherlock’s younger sister who is effectively another Holmes style character.

-          Elementary (2012–2019) Set in modern-day New York, starring Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock focuses on the drug addicted side of the character.

-          Sherlock Holmes (2009) & Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), more ... what. Action based, stylized Victorian nearly steam punk version of the hero staring Robert Downey Jr.

In each of these we have a very different Holmes, but in every case, we are all drawing on the first caricature we all envisioned when I said the name. Sherlock Holmes carries a cultural meaning with it. It is a shared item that comes from before the divergence in the story telling. But now imagine a world where any story you want is there for the reading, watching and consumption with no constraint. Where is the shared experience?

I don’t know that we will so easily find them anymore.

When I say, “Dragonlance Saga,” to my friends, we are talking about the same six books we read when we were kids. It’s an understood touchpoint for us. When an ancient Greeks talked about “Odysseus,” the Iliad and Odessey were well understood shared cultural experiences.

I don’t begrudge technology its due, but when everyone can create anything at the touch of a button, we have to remember there is a deep value in the shared experience we might lose. There is something important in the cultural threads of our stories that bind us to one another. In the near future of truly infinitely available stories, I hope we don’t lose the standout stories that make us all know our tribe by the common tales we hold close to our hearts. I hope our tribes don’t shrink so small because of lost shared tales that we no longer have the ability to speak meaningfully to other groups about what moves us in stories.

I have no answer to this tortured question of, “What does it mean to have infinite tales available by AI?” I have concerns. I have a belief that stories remain fundamentally important. Perhaps more than they have ever been. I want us to find and tell the right stories in the future, that are our stories. Humanity’s stories.

Am I anti-AI? ... I think I might be.