Machines that write books. Eighty years ago

In times of war, of nuclear threat, of doubts about the future of democracy, and of a shift in the balance of power in America, one’s thoughts inevitably turn to artificial intelligence; I am not referring to the year 2026 that has befallen us, but rather to 1945, when Kenneth Patchen’s Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer was published (now impossible to find in bookshops, though the old Sugar edition can be bought online and at street stalls at highly variable prices). It is a novel whose Byzantine experimentalism today irritates anyone who is not a fan of the sometimes tacky gimmicks that were distributed at the time by City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookshop and publishing house in San Francisco, a feeling heightened by the Tuscan-tinged translation that Luciano Bianciardi produced in 1962, whilst, with his other hand, he was writing La vita agra, no less.

And yet that book, which was then dismissed as a babble of pacifist ranting, now leaves one aghast thanks to its prediction of a tool that would not only enable any goods to be delivered instantly to any corner of the globe, but also allow anyone to broadcast their own videos to the entire world population. One begins to wonder whether Patchen had travelled into the future and returned when one comes across the passage in which he describes ‘a machine that writes books’: there are buttons to determine the characters, the setting, the plot – rather like in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, where a computer was imagined capable of adding snow to Madame Bovary to automatically transform it into Anna Karenina – and, above all, the literary genre, for example a light-hearted novel set in New England. As with books written in series by AI, ‘it is simply a matter of incremental progression, until one arrives at a particular type of person out of millions of possibilities, a house, a chair, a specific instance of incest, adultery or violence’: the important thing, the inventor explains, is that the quality should be nothing special; otherwise, the public becomes suspicious and realises that behind the exquisite prose lies a machine. Eighty years have passed, but even then Patchen had sensed that AI would fulfil a need deeply rooted in the human soul: the need to write badly.