The Great Automatic Grammatizator: writing, labour, computers

Martin Paul Eve

doi:10.1111/criq.12359

Abstract

What does it mean when we say that computers can ‘write’ and how are recent developments in neural networks and machine learning changing this capacity? This article examines the long-standing literary fear of authorship being replaced by machines while also interrogating the labour and credit implications that sit behind widely used structures of authorship in a technological age. The argument makes reference to one work of computer-generated writing – Johannes Helden & Hakan Jonson’s Evolution [2014] – and to one software paradigm (a character-based recurrent neural networks for language acquisition trained on the corpus of the journal Textual Practice). I here argue that unless we conceive more broadly of the criteria for ‘authorship’ as a labour function, and unless we take seriously the need to see textual production as social production, hybridized (but predominantly) machine identities will come to dominate a literary landscape.

Highlights

Even before the advent and mass uptake of the word processor, authors and publishers often imagined their own erasure at the hands of machines that can write
Among the more widely circulated of these fearful prophecies, though, is Roald Dahl’s imagined ‘Great Automatic Grammatizator’, from his 1953 collection, Someone Like You – a story that features a machine that quantifies human creativity through the mathematicisation of language
As with all the symbolic economies described by Pierre Bourdieu, these virtualised currencies map onto real economies

Summary

Martin Paul Eve

Even before the advent and mass uptake of the word processor, authors and publishers often imagined their own erasure at the hands of machines that can write. Among the more widely circulated of these fearful prophecies, though, is Roald Dahl’s imagined ‘Great Automatic Grammatizator’, from his 1953 collection, Someone Like You – a story that features a machine that quantifies human creativity through the mathematicisation of language. Capital has not quite yet built a technology at this level of competence, so far as we know It has already devised factory-like environments where many anonymous authors produce texts under a single name (most notably in recent days, James Patterson) in order to dominate the literary market. The ability to harness abundant digital potentialities is restricted by an underlying material economy In this way, I argue, the digital space provides us with a new commodity fetishism, in which we focus upon our technical relationships with the digital prostheses with which we all write, instead of our labour relationships between people that underwrite such technologies. If the work of literature is a social text, or event, what forms of labour are invested in the technological tool chains that contribute to its creation but that often lie unrecognised by our contemporary systems of authorship? I want to push the question asked by McGann – ‘where is information technology driving literary and cultural studies?’15 – to its limit by asking what labour underpins such a textual socialisation when, in the current age of books in the making, we believe that computers can write

Writing like Someone Like You

Textual practice as social undertaking