『길 위 1번지』, AI 제임스의 소설:「소설의 기술」과 인공신경망 알고리즘의 글쓰기

Abstract

This article explores the implications of 1 the Road (2018), a fiction produced by an artificial neural network, for the debate on machine creativity. Unlike most of the recent deeplearning writing programs, its creator Ross Goodwin traveled with this neural network machine from New York to New Orleans in a Cadillac equipped with a surveillance camera, a voice recognizer, and GPS. The AI thus had continuous feeds of fresh images and sounds, not unlike a novelist who hits the road searching for an experience. I argue that we can better understand this attempt of 1 the Road when discussed alongside Henry James’s realist notion of fiction in his essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884). Even though James is often considered an arch-humanist in his belief that fiction is an expression of the unique personality of a novelist, his idea of experience offers a way of understanding Goodwin’s machine as a creative writer. Its algorithmic operation―processing the new sense data via the CNN algorithm and producing the result as writing via the RNN algorithm―is strikingly similar to the workings of the novelist’s mind in James’s view. I do not argue that those sense data are unmediated, and this fact is reflected in the CNN’s algorithm that imitates the human mind. In fact, James asserts that sensory data are the result of mediated selection, which can only be seen through the final result, the writing itself. What I propose is that regardless of whether the machine has a so-called “consciousness,” its writing can affect the reader in similar ways as does a text written by a human being. As long as it works as a linguistic medium to relate the “experience,” which is the algorithmic process of selection and transcription, it is a creative writer.