Recently, a fellow reporter mentioned that LinkedIn is recruiting writers to assist in efforts to develop artificial intelligence (AI) to the point where it can write creatively.
Interesting.
Of course there’s irony here in that LinkedIn is asking writers — who, after all, make their living by writing — to help “educate” a technology that would automate their jobs. And should that prove successful, employers would no longer have to pay anybody to write.
I wonder at the technocrats who dream of replicating human creativity by manipulating mathematical equations. I don’t believe they can, in any meaningful sense.
Let me introduce you to Robert Burton (1577-1640) and contemporary poet Reina del Cid to argue against that idea. Of course, I could have cited countless other great artists, but space here is limited, and I like those two.
Burton, author of the multi-volume “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621), has long been a pick-me-up to me in my indigo moments. His magnum opus purports to examine the various strains of melancholy as described by great writers of the past, and by so doing mastering it.
In the passage below, Burton turns his attention to “love melancholy.” He writes about a love-sick man, but I am certain the tables could be turned, and the unflattering features that love blinds him to in his lady could just as apply to me. Anyhow, it’s not the content that cheers me, but Burton’s crazy, verbal dexterity and opulent prose. He loved lists and catalogs of nouns, verbs and adjectives.
So here it is. I have kept the archaic spellings, which seem to add a certain period charm.
“Every Lover admires his Mistress,” Burton begins, “though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favored, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tann’d, tallow-fac’d, have a swoln juglers platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed or with staring eyes, she looks like a squis’d cat …
“have a a sharp chin, be lave-eared, with a long crane’s neck, which stands awry too … bloody-falln fingers, she have filthy, long, unpaired, nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tan’d skin, a rotton carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splea footed, as slender in the middle as a cow in the wast, gowty legs, her ankles hang over her shooes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a meer changeling, a very monster, an aufe imperfect, her whole complexion savors, an harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gate, a vast virago … , a trusse, a long lean rawbone, a Skeleton, a Sneaker …a slug, a fat fustilugs.”
Burton’s point is that the lover pays no heed to any such imperfections of body or mind. If he were an emperor, the woman he loves would be his empress, his queen.
I don’t believe AI could ever be as original as this.
And here is a clever Reina del Cid poem, which I will quote in full:
Before the Big Bang, she writes,
“there was no up
there was no down
there was no side-to-side
there was no light
there was no dark
nor shape of any kind
there were no stars or planet Mars
or protons to collide
there was no up
there was no down
there was no side to side
and furthermore to underscore this total lacking state
there was no here
there was no there
because there was no space
and in this endless void which can’t be thought of as a place
there was no time
and so no passing minutes, hours, days
of all the paradoxes
that belabour common sense
I think this one’s the greatest
this time before events
because how did we go from nothing
to infinitely dense?
from immeasurably small
to inconceivably immense?
but before we get unmoored from the question at the start
let’s take a breath and marvel
at when math becomes an art
because we don’t have to understand it
to know there was a time
when there was no up
there was no down
there was no side to side.”
Call me a skeptic. I do not believe AI can do anything like what these two alone have done, not to mention William Shakespeare, or John Milton, or the many other greats. Among the writers amused by Burton were Jonathan Swift, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Herman Melville and Samuel Beckett. Some of his pages recall “Finnegans Wake.”
I don’t believe AI will ever join this illustrious company. This pitch of creativity is a human thing and always will be.
Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.
