First project: a writing dialogue is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, non-fiction, test writers and poets, highlighting the voices of writers when they discuss their work, their profession and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First project celebrates creative writing and individuals who devote themselves to bringing their words carefully chosen to print as well as the impact that writers have on the world in which we live.
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In this episode, Mitzi speaks to Vauhini Vara about his new book, Research.
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Of the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: I wanted to ask you questions about a piece Research This certainly concerns writers and readers where you look at the models that this technology uses to learn large quantities of language, and you have a quote that I like someone named Gideon Lewis-Kraus who says “you are not what you write, but what you have read”. You start talking about the ways in which AI uses the work of the writer to train. There is a huge trial right now with Meta on this subject. And then there is a woman in there who says, I prefer to tell the AI some elements of the story and have an AI to write the story that I will read to my child because it is more significant than what I find there. It really struck me and deeply injured my feelings because I think that part of the reason we are also reading is for empathy. I wouldn’t want to read to my children only a story that I could create. It’s about reading the gift you get when you read a book because you can get into someone else’s mind.
Vauhini Vara: I mean, it’s a joker for me. I think that we, as writers, can somehow talk about everything we want with what AI does not accomplish for us, as I did earlier, and talk about trying to write a test using AI and find all this did not succeed. It’s good. But in the end, books are products when we give birth to them, and to have a career as writers, there must be people ready to read these books, and not only to have careers, for art, I would say, to exist, he must be co-created by a reader and a writer. This is where the magic takes place. If I write a book and nobody reads it, you know, there is something incomplete in the work itself. And so, given that, it is the responsibility of the readers to decide, once again, what is precious to them in the literature. And I think that this is where the conception proposed by my husband of literature is necessarily created by man is precious because if readers decide, listen, knowing that there is a human being on the other side of this text, knowing that what is happening here is a communication between me and whoever wrote these words is fundamental for my reading experiences. If readers decide, then this AI thing is a non-starter, then AI does not matter. However, if readers decide that everything concerns the text on the page; I don’t care where this text comes from. As long as it is entertaining for me, forcing for me, even moving to me, so you know, it becomes an existential problem for us as writers and for us as a literary society. The AI model I used to write this test Spectra I did not convey my experience, but I supported in the book that the AI model produced text that I sometimes found very moving. And then, how can I praise this as a reader with my desire that literature is created by man? What does this mean that as a reader, I read part of the text that the AI model produced and thought like, Wow, it’s really beautiful. What if that is enough? The question is, what is it enough? And I would like the answer to be no, but it’s not for me to say.
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Vauhini Vara has been a journalist and publisher since The Atlantic,, The New Yorkerand the New York Times magazineand is the award -winning author of King Immortal Rao And This is recovered. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. His new non-fiction book is called Research.
