Anonymous

 

Iso-mandala No. 33, July 2020

How would a student reference online forms of AI if allowed to use them? What is the citation format? This was never a question until this year because this year is the lift-off, the launch without champagne breaking on the bow, of the chatbot. The chatbot generates human-like text prompted, we believe, by actual humans. Poetry, which makes what is plain, mysterious and what’s mysterious plain, reads of this invention with the same mixture of consternation and curiosity as other fields of human enquiry. While cataloguers, those pre-eminent practitioners of citation, ask the very pre-2023 question, who is responsible for the work in hand? Anecdotal evidence in these early stages of launch suggest that AI-generated texts are, at best, co-authored; the two authors being human and machine. This simple equation breaks down as soon as we see that the machine contribution may be drawn from any number of unknown and unacknowledged authors who produced their own sentient sentences decades or even centuries before they were chatbottled. Is the catalogue record going to include all of them? Is the thesis bibliography about to list single citations as long as your arm? The solution in the launch period is to cite the link, but what happens when link goes clink? Authorship is sacrosanct, certainly now since it is being found that its sanctity is under attack. When I apply AI to the sermons of John Donne, it would take a Donne-like ego to claim they were my words, or his for that matter. The one responsible for the work in hand (or screen, perchance) is the mysterious third person, or in fact non-person, that convention calls Anonymous. Chatbots are generating more anonymous material in a short time than every town crier and pamphleteer recorded in state libraries worldwide. Respectability, or simple honesty, might like to attach Pseudonymous to its text-based productions, though pseudonyms are one of a cataloguer’s most time-consuming rabbit holes. It’s quite enough trying to deal with the Revd. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s never-ending mathematical games with words anyway, without having to work out when or if he’s Lewis Carroll as well. Pseudonyms will proliferate, each more difficult to trace than the last one, until libraries will be required to advertise for a Pseudonyms Cataloguer, or similar. Chatbots might be in the honeymoon period, but ask not for whom the bell tolls. The anonymous chatbot cannot speak for you, but can only generate what it has been told. For this reason it is not a human with a name and the gift of knowing past, present, and future. Once a sentient human has used the pseudonym Frumious Bandersnatch for their co-authored chatbot essay, can anyone else use Frumious Bandersnatch, or will that cause a clash of name authorities?