THE A.I. CHALLENGE: ACT, REACT, OR FREEZE
CURRENT literary ideology at the highest levels services not the needs of the art, but of college English departments. Usually coming from former English majors afraid to challenge the memory of their professors. Unfortunately, that description includes our nation’s literary critics. Those who via essays and reviews determine the direction of the art.
Their current thing: Close Reading. I haven’t yet read any of the new books on the topic– though I plan to when I get a few days to devote to it. Or weeks, or whatever investment in time and commitment is required. Sounds like a challenge. I’ve seen close reading compared to close listening in the music field, a technique engaged in by music students, usually at high-priced academies, particularly classical music students. My personal opinion about close listening is that at best it’s beside the point. As a genre, classical music has remained static for sixty years. (Ever since close listening began?) During that period, recorded and performed music exploded in popularity and importance, a direct result of the fusion of various strands of roots music into rock n roll and its many offshoots. Pure cultural energy which morphed into what the Beatles described as “intelligent pop,” leaving the museum version of music far behind. The lesson: Top-down direction of culture and art doesn’t work. Culture is organic: from the people up.
If literary mandarins truly believe they can increase literature’s role in American culture through “close reading,” I can only say, “Good luck!”
Not that that’s their goal. In the face of an increased AI botbook assault, close reading is a strategy geared toward mere survival. Retreating within the literary castle and pulling up the drawbridge. Or within a monastery, as if they were medieval monks preserving ancient scrolls.
Writers, editors and publishers can do better! At New Pop Lit we’ve gone on the attack. We were among the first to oppose the entry of AI writing and art into the literary realm. First, with a petition begun in March, 2023. (More urgent now than then. Please sign if you have not already done so.) Second, with my report at the Lit Mag News Substack in September 2023.
RELEVANCE AND INTELLIGENCE
Our two most recent feature fiction offerings express both necessary objectives: relevance and intelligence. Currently “Top of the Pop” at this site is a short tale about the madness of AI: “Ghost In the Machine” by Andie Weber. All about the purpose and sole principle of an AI tech company: making money! Our featured story before that, “Crypto” by Jonathan Stone, is also as topical as can be, about a young investing genius and his aloof personality.
(ALSO, don’t forget our Fast Pop Lit site, where we’ll be placing more of our effort once we catch up on things. Currently we’re featuring there a terrific poem by John Zedolik, “Ubi Est?” Or, “Where Is It?”— fitting our ongoing theme of societal loss and change which is all-too relentlessly– ruthlessly– accelerating.)
THE POINT of this post is this is no time for writers to bury their heads in the sand. Not when masses of people, here in America and around the world, are being displaced, in a variety of ways. Writers– novelists, poets and playwrights– have traditionally been the conscience of civilization. If not us, who else?
Literary change is coming.
-Karl Wenclas, Editor