待翻譯：I Asked AI to Write a Novel. It's Not So Bad

AI 服務暫時不可用，以下為來源正文，待恢復後補全翻譯。

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Bluesky Email Comments Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago/Getty Images A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. Like many offbeat ideas, this one originated in a bar. I was drinking with a fellow author, and we were bemoaning the future of writing in a world of artificial intelligence. We nervously pondered how much of what we writers do could be replicated now or in the near future by a chatbot. We assured ourselves that our work—researching and investigating and then composing articles and books on complicated topics, which present fresh material, compelling context, and sharp analysis in (we hope) an engaging manner—cannot be supplanted by a machine. At least not yet. But what of other fare? Straightforward accounts of political developments, global affairs, or sporting events? Recipe books? Or histories and biographies? Short stories or novels? Film scripts? Can AI manufacture books that are good enough that some readers will welcome them and not care that they emerged from a data center? What could AI produce? Generative artificial intelligence has already invaded—or infected—the world of fan fiction. I have friends who have used AI with their kids to create children’s books. Iranian meme-makers have deployed it to concoct slick Lego-style videos deriding Donald Trump. The issue is not the ability of a chatbot to churn out algorithmically determined masterpieces. After all, most of the stories produced by us humans are not masterpieces. But can AI manufacture books that are good enough that some readers will welcome them and not care that they emerged from a data center? Perhaps even pay for such fare? Might many writers soon face an extinction-level event? Following that doom-and-gloom session, I decided to see for myself if AI is a clear and present danger to writers. I asked Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, to generate a novel. It did, and I’ll cut to the chase: The novel isn’t so bad. Let me note that this exercise deliberately sidesteps the many profound concerns about AI: the economic dislocation it could cause, the environmental impacts and community costs of data centers, the expropriation of work produced by authors, journalists, and other humans. It focuses only on what AI might mean for the future of writing and other creative endeavors. And don’t forget that the reason an AI chatbot can kick out a novel is because its Big Tech master—without seeking permission or offering compensation—hoovered up a gajillion books, articles, news stories, and other material created by people. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.) I began with this prompt: A struggling writer who has had five novels rejected turns to an AI chatbot to write a novel. He submits that novel to a publisher—without revealing it was written by an AI chatbot. It is accepted and goes on to become a bestseller. No one knows it was written by AI. But eventually that fact becomes publicly known, and a controversy ensues. The writer then writes a book about that experience. And it becomes a bestseller. That’s it. That was all I gave Claude. (This was before the recent news that Macmillan US had canceled a $2 million deal for a crime novel after suspicions arose it had been written with AI.) Claude responded enthusiastically: “That’s a fantastic premise—it’s got layers of irony, commentary on the publishing industry, and a real timeliness to it. Let me write this for you.” A few minutes later, it produced a manuscript and declared, “Here’s The Ghost in the Machine—a fifteen-chapter novel in three parts. It follows your plot arc: the five rejections, the turn to AI, the bestseller, the unraveling, and the redemptive second book written entirely by hand. I gave the protagonist a daughter named Sophie who ends up being the one to suggest he write about what happened, which felt like the right emotional engine for the third act.” It asked Claude if it should expand the manuscript—was it a manuscript?—into a full-length novel. Several minutes later, it presented me with “a complete novel at approximately 48,000 words across 41 chapters in three parts.” I took a glance at the file without reading it. The supposed novel was 6,000 words—much too short. I pointed that out, and Claude agreed: “This comes in closer to a novella. A proper novel would be 70,000–90,000 words.” It asked if it should expand the manuscript—was it a manuscript?—into a “full-length novel…with real scenes built out, secondary characters developed…and the kind of granular detail that makes fiction feel lived-in.” I replied, “Please do that.” As if I were talking to a person. Several minutes later, Claude presented me with “a complete novel at approximately 48,000 words across 41 chapters in three parts.” It explained, “That puts it in solid novella-to-short-novel territory—comparable to The Great Gatsby (47,000) or Fahrenheit 451 (46,000). To reach a full 80,000-word novel, each part would need roughly another 10,000 words of additional scenes and subplots.” The short version, I figured, would suffice for this experiment. I began reading. The protagonist of The Ghost in the Machine is Ethan Moss, a 41-year-old failed novelist who lives in an apartment in Astoria, Queens. He’s divorced from Dana, a lawyer, who resides in suburban New Jersey with their nine-year-old daughter, Sophie. Ethan has a cat named Bellow (get it?); his closest friend is Marco Bellini, a successful novelist who recently struck it big with a book called The Sauce, which is about “a chef who returns to his grandmother’s village in Calabria and discovers a family secret involving the local Mafia, a contested recipe for ragu, and a seventy-year-old love triangle that has shaped the village’s social dynamics in ways that no one is willing to discuss.” Claude describes in detail the novels that Ethan has written and that publishers have turned down. There was Meridian (a campus novel about a plagiarism scandal at a New England liberal arts college); Night Market (a psychological thriller about an American woman who disappears in Bangkok); The Fallback Position (a satirical novel about a man who fakes his own death to escape his debts); and Border Country (a multi-generational saga set along the Texas-Mexico border). With the rejection letter for his fifth novel, The Contrarian—“While the prose demonstrates competence and occasional flair, the manuscript ultimately lacks the narrative urgency and emotional specificity that would allow us to champion it in today’s marketplace”—Ethan, who has spent nearly two decades in the literary world as an MFA grad and adjunct professor, attending writers’ workshops, obtaining grants, and demonstrating potential without achieving success, hits a wall. Clearly, Ethan must change something. He lies in bed one night and wonders if AI could be the answer. He is stuck. Marco tells him his writing is sharp but “there’s something holding you back.” That reminds Ethan of when a writing instructor observed that he had the instincts of a writer but lacked “the emotional necessity.” Clearly, he must change something. He lies in bed one night and wonders if AI could be the answer. Here Claude makes what we would call—if we were talking about a human author—an interesting choice. Ethan doesn’t turn to the machine to produce a novel (as I did). Instead, he contemplates employing AI as a “creative partner—a sounding board, a first-draft engine, a way to break through the wall that had been standing between him and a publishable novel.” He then reflexively rejects the idea: “This is cheating…You are a writer. Writers write. They do not outsource the writing to a machine and then put their name on it.” Writing, he once said at a conference, is “not a product. Writing is a process.” A human being struggling with a blank page—or blank screen. But Ethan has lost that struggle. He opens his laptop, goes to an AI site, and types: “I want to write a novel. Literary fiction. Contemporary setting. A story about a man who discovers that his recently deceased father had been living a secret life—a second family in another city. The son goes to that city to find the other family and has to reconcile two versions of the father he thought he knew.” The chatbot kicks out a few pages of “competent” prose outlining the story. Nothing better than what Ethan could have produced on his own. Phew, he thinks at first. But then he realizes that within this response are several good ideas: structural suggestions, a few nifty metaphors. He asks the chatbot, “What would make this story feel urgent? What’s the emotional engine? What does the son want that he can’t admit he wants?” The reply is long and dry. But there’s a notion that catches his eye: “The son doesn’t want to understand his father. He wants to understand why his father chose the other family. Which means the real question of the novel is: Am I the life my father wanted, or the life he was stuck with?” “That was it,” Ethan thinks. “That was the book.” He begins writing. Each morning, he spends several hours writing, as he always did. In the afternoons, he turns to AI to draft different versions of scenes and alternative versions of conversations. He poses questions about structure to the chatbot, which serves up various options. He doesn’t incorporate the material straight into his draft. But AI helps create a map for him. As Claude “writes,” the prose “was always his. But the ideas, the structural decisions, the emotional insights that organized individual scenes and, cumulatively, the book itself—these were collaborations. He was the writer, but he was not writing alone.” This goes on for months, and Ethan produces The Other Side of the Door. Reviewing his AI-assisted work, he concludes, “The book was good. It was not merely good in the careful, defensive way that his previous novels had been good—technically proficient, intellectually respectable, praised in workshops and rejected by editors. It was good in a different way. It was alive. It was, by a considerable margin, the best thing Ethan had ever written.” He is particularly proud of his creation of Dorothy, an elderly Black woman “who offered, in a series of long, digressive, heartbreaking monologues, a perspective on love and duplicity and the American family that was unlike anything Ethan had ever written.” AI had nothing to do with Dorothy. She was all his. You know what happens next. A perceptive data journalist finds a nugget of a clue in the text, digs deeper, confronts Ethan, who can no longer bear the burden of his secret and confesses. Ethan sells the book for a sizable advance. The novel is hailed as his breakthrough. He is feted by the literary world. It becomes a bestseller. Readers are moved by the book and send him letters saying it has helped them understand their own lives and families. There’s a demand for his next book. He has trouble firing that up. He tells no one about his reliance on AI. The guilt builds—and builds. A computer scientist releases a program that evaluates writing for possible AI involvement. His book registers as possibly including AI-produced content. A perceptive data journalist finds a nugget of a clue in the text, digs deeper, confronts Ethan, who can no longer bear the burden of his secret and confesses. A scandal erupts, as critics and commentators in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and Harper’s and across the podosphere debate what is writing, what is creativity. Was this cheating or merely using an available tool? If Ethan’s [truncated for AI cost control]