Spoof

 

Spoof is a word used, without hint of irony, for the word products of artificial intelligence. My information technology man said to me yesterday that we are at an Orville Wright moment. He explained how I could feed all of my writing into chat and chat could fashion a work of literature in my style on any subject, the outcome being what I have since discovered is spoof. He might be awfully right, not least about chat creating a pale imitation of the sentence structure, vocabulary, and shifts of thought that comprise the kind of thing that I am at least halfway happy with at the time of composition. My consolation is that I can think about whether the words on the page work or not, a skill beyond the capability of artificial intelligence. Inventing new words, imagining poetic forms, making surprise digressions are also within my purlieu, or is that purview, or bailiwick. The other day I read about the man who invented artificial intelligence and thereby, wittingly or not, chat and spoof. He was renouncing artificial intelligence and all its works, saying it wasn’t meant to go down that path, perhaps he meant a flight path, or just the Wright path, that this was not what he had in mind one bit, and he regretted how his brainchild had turned into every parent’s nightmare. He seemed to be going through an Albert Einstein moment, of which admittedly there a few, but the one where the exciting discovery of relativity led to the exciting prospect of splitting the atom, or more particularly the unexciting prospect of the world being destroyed by people who wanted to use their science for the wrong ends. The artificial man’s ire was directed in particular at young information technologists who had perfected the chat’s insatiable appetite for devouring a person’s entire written lifetime then regurgitating said words in the manner of the devoured person. Not though as well, not using language that made connections between the imitation sentences, or in other words, spoof. His ire, a synonym for anger, was especially inspired by their attitude that they’d proven it could be done, and someone else can sort out the problems later. Inventing new theorems, imagining technological feasibilities, making surprise discoveries are one thing, but the silicon children just want to have fun with the libraries of the known world, regardless of copyright or authors’ finer feelings or the wonders of human originality or good expression, either. Spoof is the word they use for their creature’s unreadable mangling of the available text. While authors go through their own William Shakespeare moment, asking did we write the words we just wrote or was it a descendant of the Earl of Oxford, it’s unclear if all the persiflage spewed out by artificial intelligence using said words has any author, any past, or even more particularly, any future.

Image: Iso-mandala No. 262 (Ovid Void 6), a homage to Thomas Merton made in the summer of 2021.