That sounds to me like the most reasonable attitude. If a story is compelling for a certain person, why care about how it was created?
That sounds to me like the most reasonable attitude. If a story is compelling for a certain person, why care about how it was created?
Part of the appeal of literature generally and the novel in particular is that it provides you with an incredibly intimate connection to the subjectivity of another person, though they may be long dead, or the speaker of another language, or from a far away part of the world that you would never be able to visit yourself.
I would argue that a story can mainly provide a connection with your own subjectivity. If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters.
If your goal by reading is too learn about the subjectivity of another real person, then yes, read human authors. You said it, that's it's part of what a book can offer, but there can be other reasons for reading
> If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters.
This is a values question. Many would say that literature has a role in modeling certain behaviors and teaching lessons that are functional in society. Basically the fables and proverbs idea. Simply catering to what feels nice and what reinforces the biases and wishes of readers is not the same thing. Yes, most of literature is already crap and simply caters to readers instead of challenging them. But if you RLHF your way to AI literature that people "engage with" the most, you will get unvirtuous literature that doesn't do this function. Of course you're welcome to disagree with this entire framing and purely see reading as hedonistic pleasure and nothing else.
As you say, that already occurs with human made commercial crap literature.
A person directing an IA could also lead it to build a story that teaches values.
True, but it's easier to get lazy and to just wire it up to an automatic engagement farming loop with no human input. Imagine the worst form of audience capture possible.
What's wrong with that? There's the low quality slop for the people who desire it, and then there's the high quality literature that's appreciated by people with good taste, and that cannot be easily produced
Off topic, but you name is somewhat ironic. Argentina's most famous writer, Jorge Luis Borges, built much of his career on the idea that writing is inextricably and inherantly linked to its author.
Completely agree with Borges in that. When the author is an AI, there's no human author, the result is a mix of what information it was feed, how its algorithms work, and what does the person giving commands to the IA asks. There's some link to the person who directs the IA.
I believe Borges would have loved IA.
At the very least there is no doubt in my mind that he would have used it to create something intellectually provocative! Maybe something in the spirit of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"?
This mindset is called "death of the author" [1] and the quick summary is that the author's intent doesn't matter. Most book people I know disagree with it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
What does matter? That's completely subjective. If the intent of the author matters to you, then, to you, it does.
There's not an abstract "not mattering of the intent of the author" independent of different people with certain values.
You could say that the intent of the author is the number one issue that matters. That's completely subjective, that's just, like, your opinion, man.