AI edition of books

“It is a curious fact that the last remaining form of social life in which the people of London are still interested is Twitter.” This is the beginning of the 1897 story titled “The Importance of Being on Twitter”, by English writer Jerome Klapka Jerome. One may wonder how that’s possible. Wasn’t social media, even the internet, unquestio­nable in those days? Well, German artist Mario Klingemann shared this story in 2020. He revealed that the story was manufactured by GPT-3, the predecessor of ChatGPT. All Klingemann offered was the title, the author’s name, and the initial “IT”. And it resulted in a story written in the style of Jerome K Jerome.

The estates of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, or Ian Fleming have approved “continuation novels” by new writers in order to maintain the literary franchise’s worth. The question naturally arises: Why not apply AI? Nevertheless, AI is engaging in a growing number of artistic endeavours. Today, it’s possible to digitally resurrect a deceased actor to complete an unfinished film. In 2019, Huawei generated a melody for Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony’s third and fourth movements, using AI. Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony, which was left unfinished, was finished in 2021 thanks to AI.
 

Likewise, because of the authors’ passing, many literary classics remain unfinished. Many people agree that Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is not finished. Many authors have attempted to finish Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A version was even produced that purportedly had been “ghost-written” by him, channelling the spirit of Dickens! In 1990, the renowned Dumas scholar Claude Schopp re-discovered Alexandre Dumas’s last, unfinished book, The Last Cavalier.
Over the next 12 years or so, Schopp used published pieces, drafts, and letters to piece together the occurrences, and the book was published in 2005. It might be thrilling to know what happens to Charlotte Heywood in Jane Austen’s Sanditon or how Cecilia Brady handles her grief in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Then there’s Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, Kafka’s Amerika, Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown, and so on — a whole genre of other unfinished novels. We could even want to finish Virgil’s Aeneid, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, and Plautus’ Amphitruo if we dig into ancient Greek and Roman literature. Who knows how the original writers would have completed them, though? However, AI may now add a new dimension to them. 

Further­more, several AI models may generate disparate renditions of an incomplete book.
 

Since GPT-3’s Twitter story, AI has greatly improved. All that is required for the GenAIs to perfectly emulate the writing style of a certain author is to have a large portion of that author’s writings in their training data. Simple. Thus, should unfinished books published as “AI editions” be considered “ghost-written” in some sense? The most alluring aspect of an incomplete work, on the other hand, is that readers are free to guess and feel in charge of the piece without the author. A partially completed book, thus, holds the promise of revelation.
 

Why would we want to use AI to complete incomplete novels then? Pleasure is one apparent response. Of course, there are also business motives. Philosophical questions regarding morality and literary conundrums still exist. Even so, Japanese novelist Rie Kudan recently got the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s most coveted literary honours, while acknowledging that about 5 per cent of her book Tokyo-to Dojo-to was generated verbatim by ChatGPT! It’s important that the selection committee finds nothing wrong with Ms Kudan’s use of AI. Thus, the question is: How can we strike a balance between reality

and morality? It’s never simple, nevertheless, to evaluate such “half-human, half-AI works” in terms of originality, intellectual property rights, ethics, and, most crucially, the rights of the departed. In many parts of the world, even the laws are unclear.
 

Given that GPT-3 penned the Twitter narrative in the vein of Jerome K Jerome, is it possible that an AI version of a Dickensian tale will incorporate the description of the internet era or that Virgil’s Aeneid, a follow-up of the Trojan War, will include details about contemporary warfare like drones and missiles? In any case, AIs are known to be biased, to have hallucinations, and to lack a sense of reality. A shade of uncertainty thus remains.

The writer is professor of statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata