WE LIVE IN AN AGE of technology indistinguishable from magic, especially in the realm of thinking machines. Among other tasks, you can ask ChatGPT, one of the world’s most advanced deeplearning generative language models, to defend a position like “Science fiction is just another kind of fairy tale,” to explain the quicksort algorithm using an episode of My Little Pony, to teach you how to be become a chess master using a series of haikus, to draft verses in the style of the King James Bible on various topics, and, of course, if you wish to be boring, to write college essays.
There are now businesses devoted to helping consultants garner the appearance of expertise by publishing “machine ghost”–written how-to books—largely by feeding the output of the artificial intelligence (AI) back into itself. (This recursive pattern is necessary because AI currently suffers from an inability to remember the context of a long conversation, sort of like the fabled goldfish with a three-second memory.)
Faced with the advent of such powerful mechanical brains, dire predictions proliferate like the rats of Hamelin. Cassandras cry about the obsolescence of white-collar work, conjure visions of robots replacing writers, warn that computers will beguile us with their endless, effortless productivity. We’ll fade away like Merlin sinking into the hawthorn bush while Nimue reads from her book of spells. The Author is about to die.
I’m neither qualified nor interested in discussing the future of office work, the contribution of AI to the GDP, or the devaluation of “Art,” however defined. As a storyteller, I’m interested in only one thing: what kind of stories can machines tell?
Writers have long related to technology using fairy-tale logic. But for sheer relatability to the present moment, nothing matches the book-writing machine found in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Gulliver encounters this wondrous drafting engine in Lagado, the capital of Balnibarbi. The engine consists of a large square frame with a fine grid of dice that could be freely spun by cranks attached to the sides. The dice are covered with the words of the Balnibarbian language, distributed without any apparent order. The worthy professor who invented this machine gives Gulliver a demonstration:
The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes.
By this means, according to the professor (and anticipating Jasper.ai by centuries), “the most ignorant person, at
