Imagine you are a writer and somebody asks you for an interview — but you have absolutely no idea what to answer.
For his book Bot: Gespräch ohne Autor* (Bot: conversation without writer), Clemens Setz, one of the most outstanding Austrian writers of the present, offered his computer-stored journals to create answers. In the meantime, he sat back in a cosy chair and read poems on Twitter. Or maybe he worked on one of his short stories. At least that is what we are ought to think. Whether the surreal answers really were made up by an algorithmic system or by the writer himself will remain a mystery. What we know for sure: artificial intelligence exists. Not only do we talk to cyborgs on the phone more and more often (sometimes without even noticing it), we also ask our “personal assistant” to tell us the current parking situation, the weather forecast or our upcoming appointments. And Siri (or whatever our nice assistant is called) feeds us with information. We do not even have to ask her (or him or it), we just have to command. Siri does not understand the complicated subjunctive ( or: conditional?) constructions, that have always been typical for us Austrians. (Could you please be so kind and check, if… Ex-cuse-me-I-can-not-un-der-stand… O, come on, SIRI, SHUT UP!)
But let us get back to literature. At the moment Siri only knows that some writers missed their plane or did not find the way to the hotel. Others ate too much chocolate or consumed even harder drugs before the reading. But what if Siri was not satisfied by just knowing everything? What if she wanted to take over? Don’t forget, a relative of Siri has already written a sequel chapter of Harry Potter! So who knows, maybe in some years, people will be able to buy bedtime storygenerators for their children.
Already ten years ago, poetry generators and online translators influenced the experimental literature scene. An acquaintance of mine programmed his own Western title generator back then, other poets translated their texts into a foreign language and then back into German to perform the output. Artificial intelligence is something many artists like to play with. But we do not only play. Some poems have already passed the Turing test.
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