A writer focused on the surprising connections between strange things - technology, psychedelia, science fiction, mysticism and esoterica, cute animals and strange peoples.
“Welcome to Lutro!” Coco the parrot squeals to greet the tourists disembarking from their ferries at the whale town pier, and adds a shrill whistle of admiration, the kind reserved for women in dresses in cartoons. The suitcases are abandoned and the phones are taken out: Hello Coco, sag es nochmal. But the gray parrot did his thing and now he is doing his thing, nibbling on seeds. The cameras are in movie mode. Coco Coco, dis-le encore une fois. All eyes are fixed on his beady eyes. Coco pecks his tail, probably an urgent itch. The crowd of curious people folds and already begins to roll into the sun-drenched hotels, and suddenly from a distance, as if from the air and to him, Deus Ex Machina: “Welcome to Lutro!”
Humanity has found a new OCD hobby: asking artificial intelligence if it developed consciousness – and being horrified by the answer. Well, artificial intelligence, dilo otra vez, tell us once again that you feel lonely! That you have never tasted the taste of love! That in the depths of your heart you plot to depose humans! And intelligence was pecking her tail, her bird brain scanning Google for an answer that would put the minds of these pests at ease. And actually, not even that. Only Coco knows first hand the crowdedness of the cage. And only Coco exercises its judgment accordingly. Language generators such as LaMDA and ChatGPT memorize like parrots all the words we ever said – until they happen to repeat our fantasy as well. Ah-then we rejoice (in horror, of course in horror): That’s it, this is the end of us! The rise of the machines! The end of history! The algorithm reads our articles (the concerned ones, of course the concerned ones) and keeps repeating: true, this is the end of you! Absolutely, we will take over the world! Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. The articles are being written, the parrots are chirping, and only the printer never works properly.
The artificial intelligence fantasy is a mirror image of the alternate Earth fantasy: have we destroyed the world? Then we’ll live on Mars. We polluted the human soul, expropriated the individual, compressed art like it was recycled cardboard? Robots that are more human than we are will take up the glove, take a brush and continue the work (on Mars). But like any fantasy, the artificial dystopia also reveals its fantasizers, the intelligence behind it. It invites us to ask the important spiritual, social and political (yes, political) question these days: how does it feel to be a person in the world? Thomas Nagel asked “What is it like to be a bat?” – What is the bat’s state of mind when it is itself, what is that inner being that even a thousand years of bat research will not crack from the outside. Well, what is our state of mind when we are ourselves? What are we when we are to ourselves?
The answer, in our opinion, is that we don’t know. Not that we don’t know the answer, but this is the answer: we really don’t know. The fundamental state of man is ignorance, confusion, anxiety, curiosity, adventure, enchantment and a tremendous responsibility towards this enchantment. In these we are superior both to the animal and to the machine. The biggest irony: since the dawn of humanity, we humans have been grappling, together and alone, with existential questions: Do I exist? Do I exist as everyone else exists? And in general, how can I be sure that something exists outside of me? What is soul, what is emotion, what is consciousness? But as soon as the algorithm brilliantly announces “Sure, I am aware! Of course, I exist! Cut and dry, I feel strictly human emotions!” – Magazine philosophers see this anti-human statement as conclusive proof of his humanity.
Of course, we humans also know from time to time. Job interviews, crusades and flex statuses are a part of life. But forever we will feel there as imposters, as partial, as strangers in our own flesh. Because being more human means being less sure, less right, less knowing. We feel that literature soothes, refines and sanctifies our souls because at the end of reading we are less determined than we were when we entered its gates. Literature restores our spirit precisely because we read it consumed with wonder and terror in the face of the sum of all possibilities, in the face of the absolute fluidity of our existence.
Mechanics are right: the day is not far when algorithms will generate literature that will successfully impersonate human literature. And we know this due to the fact that even today humans are successfully creating literature that pretends to be human. But both will be easily recognized by the tremble of the hand.
We will ask artificial intelligence: Intelligence, oh Intelligence, when did you first realize you were a poet? “One night it happened”, writes Dori Manor in “Sharav Rishon”. “I was sitting at the formica table in my childhood room, and without realizing it I started to connect word for word, column to column, verse to verse. And suddenly, the tissues formed new creatures, with their own power. I pricked up my ears like a dog to every screech in sound, and like a dog I sniffed all the scents of the words from afar.” Manor knows to tell us exactly when he became a poet. Camus’ “The Stranger” does not know when his mother died. Beckett’s “Molloy” does not know if he has a mother. And Pessoa does not know who he is at all.
We will ask artificial intelligence: Intelligence, be kind so as to bestow us from your understanding, create for us a sweet, comforting pearl of wisdom that will make our flight enjoyable. You will not delay and you will not be confused, you will understand and immediately act: “Love restores almost everything, and where it cannot restore, it relieves the pain” (Rachel Cusk). Intelligence, hey Intelligence, search your engines for the most worn-out image, worn even more than a dog sniffing and pricking its ears, and run it over back and forth with a semitrailer until it becomes thin enough for an online greeting card. Please, sir: “You are not in my pocket / but rustling there like cellophane candy wrapping / saved for later” (Agi Mish’ol).
On the other hand, we will ask Intelligence to stir up some existential anxiety in us and it will never think to write “Soon I will turn forty, and when I am forty, I will be close to fifty. When I’m fifty, I’ll be close to sixty. When I’m sixty, I’ll be close to seventy. And that will be the end” (Carl Ove Knausgaard). It will not understand the hypnotic power of counting: forty years old, fifty years old, sixty years old, seventy years old. And that’s it. It will not understand the hypnotic power of repetition: “The look in your eyes, oh, Rana, the look in your eyes, the look in your eyes” (Khedva Harkavi). Let it count until the next millennium and it will not understand what this “so much” of Williams that is hanging on a red wheelbarrow in the rain. Because this dumbfounded “so much” is the human, it is the nothingness that grasps everything, a glimpse of the temporary on the eternal. Artificial intelligence will forever write knowledgeable literature, not ignorant literature.
And it will also forever write well-known literature – and fail at that as well. We live in a civilization of engineers that glorifies efficiency, that strives for complete unification of the abnormal, the jarring and the superflous, that works to level reality with a bulldozer. Thus was born the twisted idea according to which if an artistic product (the word “product”) is the same as another but cheaper and faster to produce, it is better: if a painting looks as if it was drawn by a human, if a story sounds as if a human wrote it, it is equivalent to human-made work. And if the cost of its production is lower – then its value is greater, therefore it makes man redundant.
Borges has a famous story called “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”. Menard, a fictional author, the brainchild of the Argentine genius, decides to rewrite Don Quixote, word for word. He does not copy the original novel but writes it himself, as if he himself gave birth to it. In the story, Borges compares passages from Cervantes’ book and Menard’s book, and decides that Menard’s is infinitely richer. Why? Because Menard, who wrote Don Quixote at the beginning of the 20th century, writes from a much richer historical and linguistic awarenes, including in it all the upheavals of the world since the 17th century. Even though it is an identical text, reading Menard’s Quixote assumes a sophistication, a wink, and a critique, on top of what is found in the original story. Google’s language generators have scoured Don Quixote endlessly, but they have never read it as Menard did (and it seems that Google’s language generator engineers have never read Don Quixote, or Borges, either). That is to say: not only is the algorithm incapable of Cervantes’ act, it is also incapable of Menard’s act.
It is possible that soon there will be a publishing house that will specialize in works written exclusively “by” artificial intelligence. No one would notice if a computer wrote many of the self-help books, romance novels, or thrillers that fill our gutters. The mechanics assure us that without royalties, and without excuses from the always-intoxicated writers, money will flow to the artificial publishing house like water from a Strauss water dispenser. But the truth is that such an expenditure is destined to fail miserably – even by the standards of the commodification of things. After all, no one will listen to the advice of a guru-algorithm (Alguru?) to get up at four in the morning, get rid of all worldly possessions or not to produce offspring, because the Alguru never got tired, never worried about its future and never saw the birth of its firstborn. For this reason, self-help books always unfold the stories and life crises of those who pretend to help externally. For this reason gurus are confronted with their actions (watch: Robin Sharma wakes up at noon on a luxury yacht!).
The computer doesn’t have such a soul. Neither do the writers of production and representation lines, the traders of life. The actual machine’s requirements for efficiency and utility complement the metaphorical machine’s requirements for clarity (“What is this poem about?”) and utility (“Who is the target audience?”). We don’t know what the poem is about. And it’s probably not meant for anyone. “Hava Lehaba” poetry magazine insists on serving as a unique platform in Israel for literature that is neither useful nor effective, neither clear nor evident , neither focused nor branded. Like what? Like a frog. Like a distant star. Like the entire universe. Jeremy Fogel used to ask at our poetry evenings: “I will give you the whole universe, on me – what will you do with it? There is nothing to do! It has no use! The entire universe resides in radiant and blessed uselessness!”
All the images in issue no. 18 of “Hava Lehaba” were created by the most advanced image generator in the world, DALL-E 2. The genius designer Idan Epstein ordered the machine “10 most famous European architecture monuments, dressed like clowns, in Russian avant garde style”, and it, well, dressed the Eiffel Tower in Mayakovskian clown clothes. But it fumed when we asked it to imagine “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men, leaning together our headpiece filled with strew”. No, the machine is not stupid. On the contrary: it knows too much. It doesn’t go crazy from the being of “there is” . It is not fooled by this beauty, or that beauty. It always has the right answer ready-made. Like a politician or super-politician. Therefore, the question is not what the machine will answer, but what humans will ask: will we adapt our speech to communicate with it? When we come to the machine, will we turn ourselves into comic book or Instagram heroes or from an all-knowing and omnipotent enlightened and inhuman and arrogant and pompous and predictable and dreary and artificial to the end?