Like everyone else, I’m curious about what the new artificial intelligence (AI) programs can do for us, or perhaps to us.
So in an idle hour recently, I decided to experiment. This is what happens when you have too much time on your hands.
For whom the AI tolls?
For starters, as a lifelong reader, I wanted to see how AI might capture the style and content of some of my favorite writers. So I asked Google’s AI program to write me 50 words on taking a bus in Detroit in the style of Ernest Hemingway. Here’s what it came up with:
The bus came, late as always. The street was wet. Men waited. Women too. They stood in the grey light. The air was cold, but no one shivered. They rode the bus to work, to wherever they needed to go. It was their way. No one talked much. The city outside was a blurred reflection in the windows. They rode the bus.
Pretty bad, I thought. AI was able to echo Hemingway’s spare tone, his short declarative sentences, but that was all. It captured none of the emotion that Hemingway used to pack into his stories like dynamite beneath the bridge in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” It was mimicry, nothing more, the sort of thing you might see in a Bad Hemingway Writing contest.
So I tried again with 50 words on taking a bus in the style of William Faulkner:
The city, vast and sprawling like a spilled ink bottle, held its breath in the humid afternoon heat. The bus, a hulking metal beast, groaned forward, each stop a brief agony, a momentary suspension before the inexorable surge toward some unknowable destination. Faces, etched with the inscrutable narratives of lives endured, blurred past the grimy window – a tapestry woven of weariness and the stubborn, unyielding hope that defied the very dust of the streets.
Forgive me, AI, but this was even more ludicrous. The city “sprawling like a spilled ink bottle???” Images gone awry, laughable metaphors, word salads with no real meaning. This was AI’s best effort?
A truth universally acknowledged
How about Jane Austen? Could AI do better at capturing the feel of the author of “Pride and Prejudice?” As it turns out, not really:
Does that sound like the author of “Emma” and “Sense and Sensibility?” Maybe. But Jane Austen’s piercing examination of the manners and mores of her time is nowhere to be found.
AI is no poet
So I tried once more with a seemingly simple one: Write me a haiku on taking a bus in Detroit.
City scenes rush by,Engine hums a steady beat,Detroit journeys on
As in the other examples, AI got the rough idea, but its execution was limp, devoid of any emotion or even meaning.
I’m not worried … yet
I know people worry a lot these days about AI taking away all our jobs. AI has been accused of writing newspaper copy, movie scripts, advertising ditties, even legal documents. Many a pundit warns that AI will produce generations of brainless young people who never learn to think for themselves.
True? Alarmist? I don’t know yet. And I don’t pretend that my little experiment says much of anything about AI’s potential for good or harm. Certainly there seem to be a lot of positive applications, too.
But I do think my idle-hour musing illustrates that creative work is more than rote imitation. Achieving anything good still requires sweat and labor. Anything else is just doggerel.
John Gallagher was a reporter and columnist for the Free Press for 32 years prior to his retirement in 2019. His book, “Rust Belt Reporter: A Memoir,” was published last year by Wayne State University Press
