In a new novella, “Death of an Author,” the writer, Aidan Marchine, describes an undersized plate of nachos as follows:
“The cheese was congealed and the fries soggy, soggy and smeared with a greasy coating like some sort of scum from a lake. Gus forced himself to take a bite, but the taste was rancid, a sickly sweet imitation of cheese. He washed it down with a sip of beer, but even that tasted ugly, like it had been in the sun too long.”
The writing is lively, but there’s nothing special about it. However, Aidan Marchine is an unusual author – at least for now – because Aidan Marchine is a collection of computer systems. Kind of.
The journalist and author Stephen Marche wrote “Death of an Author” using three artificial intelligence programs. Or three artificial intelligence programs wrote it with extensive conspiracy and prodding from Stephen Marche. It depends how you look at it.
“I am the creator of this work, 100 percent,” said Marche, “but on the other hand, I didn’t create the words.”
Pushkin Industries, an audio production company, will publish the novella as an audiobook and e-book next month. Even the name “Marchine” is an invention of a program, a combination of Marche and machine.
In January, Pushkin CEO Jacob Weisberg approached Marche, who has been writing with and about artificial intelligence since 2017. He asked if Marche was interested in using the technology to produce a murder mystery. The result of that collaboration is ‘Death of Author’, in which an author who uses AI extensively becomes dead.
Whodunit? Was it her estranged daughter? Was it the crime and cyberfiction professor who was an expert at her job? Was it the eccentric billionaire who collaborated with her on a secretive AI project?
To get the story off his laptop, Marche used three programs, starting with ChatGPT. He ran an outline of the plot through the software, along with numerous prompts and notes. While AI was good at many things, especially dialogue, he said, the plots were terrible.
He then used Sudowrite, asking the program to lengthen or shorten a sentence, adopt a more conversational tone, or make the writing sound like Ernest Hemingway’s. He then used Cohere to create what he called the best lines in the book. If he wanted to describe the smell of coffee, he trained the program with examples and then asked it to generate equations until he found one he liked.
“To me, the process was a bit like hip-hop,” he said. “When you’re making hip-hop, you don’t necessarily know how to play the drums, but you definitely need to know how beats work, how hooks work, and you need to be able to combine them in a meaningful way.”
Marche said these programs could be a resource for writers, and expressed optimism about the growth of algorithmic writing in his field. But the prospect makes many writers and their representatives extremely nervous, afraid that machines will strip writers of their jobs. The Author’s Guild has called for “legal and policy interventions that balance the development of useful AI tools with the protection of human authorship”.
Weisberg, Pushkin’s CEO, said that while new tools very often drove people out, they also created opportunities. Take journalism, for example.
“If routine news stories are drafted or generated by technology,” he said, “instead of reporting every fire, you as a journalist can write interesting news stories about AI”
Marche and Pushkin tried to use software to create as much of “Death of an Author” as possible, including blurbs and the cover art. But there was one area where the creators felt the technology was lacking: narration for the audiobook. So they hired a human, Edoardo Ballerini, who has won several awards in the field.
“But this stuff moves so fast,” Weisberg said. “If we did it now instead of six weeks ago, I think we could get AI narration that would be up to snuff.”
