AI and literature: the muse in the machine

Novelists are captivated by the potential of artificial intelligence. But what happens when the machines start writing about us?

To generalise heroically, the entire arc of world literature can be summarised as follows: writing about gods, then kings and queens, then ordinary people and, finally, ourselves.

But having exhaustively explored the divine and almost every dimension of the human, we are plunging deeper into a new era of literary history: writing about machines. And that may even presage the most startling evolution of all: machines writing about humans and perhaps, one day, machines writing about machines.

Literature, sometimes described as crystallised emotion, contains the very essence of the human experience. So what will it mean when machine intelligence trespasses into human territory? Will it open up exciting new vistas of understanding and insight? Or will it only highlight our own diminishment in the cosmic scheme of things?

Almost every day brings a startling new advance in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the seemingly magical general-purpose technology of our times. In 1997, the world was stunned when IBM’S Deep Blue computer beat the greatest chess player of all time, Garry Kasparov. Although impressive in its way, Deep Blue was little more than an immensely powerful rules-based calculating machine, a “$10m alarm

clock”, in Kasparov’s irritable phrase.

But more recent advances in Deep Learning techniques, combined with an explosion of data from our smartphones and computers and massive increases in computing power, have enabled machinelearning programs to perform an increasing array of tasks as well as (if not better than) any human: interpreting radiology scans, flying aircraft, identifying images and recognising speech (just ask Siri).

Google Deepmind’s defeat of two of the best players of the ancient — and fiendishly complex — Chinese game of Go in 2016 and 2017 also captivated a global audience. Using a very different technique from Deep Blue, Alphago’s success stemmed from “learning” by itself, defying 2,500 years of accepted wisdom about the game. Little wonder that some Chinese researchers called this a “Sputnik moment” for the country, stimulating a massive increase in spending on AI amid talk of a new technological arms race.

All this buzz about AI has also sparked the imagination of some of our most inventive novelists, among them Jeanette Winterson and Ian Mcewan. Once the exclusive preserve of science fiction, thinking robots have now entered the literary mainstream. Mcewan’s most recent muse is none other than Demis Hassabis, the luminous founder of Google Deepmind.