December 31, 2024

An Infinite Dialogue of the Imagination

Borges on AI-generated "art"

In 1951, our friend Jorge Luis Borges published an essay bemoaning the absurdity of AI-generated art, in particular AI-generated literature:

Those who practice this game forget that a book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. This dialogue is infinite; the words amica silentia lunae now mean the intimate, silent and shining moon, and in the Aeneid they meant the interlunar period, the darkness which allowed the Greeks to enter the stronghold of Troy… Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. […]* The conception of literature as a formalistic game leads, in the best of cases, to the fine chiseling of a period or a stanza, to an artful decorum (Johnson, Renan, Flaubert), and in the worst, to the discomforts of a work made of surprises dictated by vanity and chance (Gracián, Herrera y Reissig).

If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations. The lapidary formula “Everything flows” abbreviates in two words the philosophy of Heraclitus: Raymond Lully1 would say that, with the first word given, it would be sufficient to essay the intransitive verbs to discover the second and obtain, thanks to methodical chance, that philosophy and many others. Here it is fitting to reply that the formula obtained by this process of elimination would lack all value and even meaning; for it to have some virtue we must conceive it in terms of Heraclitus, in terms of an experience of Heraclitus, even though “Heraclitus” is nothing more than the presumed subject of that experience.

Note Borges’s explanation of how, in essence, language models like ChatGPT operate: one word is given to follow another via evaluation of linguistic probabilities. In this way, he explains, it is possible to obtain the philosophies of Heraclitus and many others, as well as the Aeneid and all imaginable literatures. Or rather: in this way you can obtain the series of verbal structures which form these philosophies and literatures—but, as Borges explains, a book is more than its verbal structure, and whatever is obtained by this process lacks all value and meaning. If a language model had generated the words “amica silentia lunae” rather than Virgil, it would be surprising but ultimately meaningless: vanity and chance. “A book is not an isolated being”: the Aeneid is not merely the words of which it consists, it is those words and their relationship to you and to the Iliad and to Rome and to us and the durable image of the intimate, silent, and shining moon in your memory.2 This is what makes it literature or philosophy, because a book is not fundamentally its verbal structures, it is fundamentally that relationship, or “an axis of innumerable relationships:” the relationship between the book and its reader, to be sure; but also between the book and its author, the book and its time and place of origin, the book and ever-changing situations of time and place, the book and all the books that came before and the books that will come after. Virgil and the Aeneid, Virgil and his country, Virgil and his contemporaries, Virgil and Homer, Virgil and those that followed him; his work viewed now by you and I darkly and permuted across two thousand years of cumulative dialogue: the relationship between two consciousnesses or the congress of a thousand consciousnesses.

Because consciousness is the source of meaning in writing. For writing to have meaning, Borges says, it must be conceived in terms of an experience. It is possible that today or someday a language model could produce a novel consisting of verbal structures that equal those of Herman Melville. Or, to make the metaphor even clearer: it is possible to imagine a world in which Melville did not write Moby Dick at all but instead the exact same text was someday generated by a language model. Such a text would be devoid of meaning. For it could not be understood in terms of an experience: Melville’s experience aboard a whaling vessel, or his experience struggling with the existence of God, or his experience yearning to break free from the mundanity of everyday life and seek adventure. These things would be missing from the book, and though the text would be the same, the book would not produce the dialogue with its reader that makes it literature: your experience of the yearning for adventure that comes as a result of your comprehension of the presumed subject’s experience. This dialogue is what makes a book a book and not merely a text, Borges explains, and it is infinite—my gesturing at the specific experiences does a disservice to this infinity, because it only restricts the reality of the infinite dialogue of experience to a finite set of specific experiences. Borges uses Heraclitus as an example, a historical person of whom and whose experiences very little is known, to illustrate the fact that it’s not the specific experiences that lend a book meaning, but the understanding that the book was borne of a person’s subjective experience. Heraclitus, whose historicity is shrouded in mystery and was known even by his contemporaries as “the Obscure,” could only function as the presumed subject of the experience from which his philosophy springs—we don’t know much about his experiences at all, little more than that there was a man named Heraclitus and he was the subject of the experiences from which his philosophy originated. But this presumption is necessary for the verbal structure to become philosophy at all. Or take as an example an authorship even more obscure: that of One Thousand and One Nights. A story of stories the authors of which are of resolutely indeterminate number, let alone identity. The origins of some of the tales in that book almost certainly trace back to civilization’s origins in Mesopotamia. But we can be sure that they were all of them authored by subjects of experience, ancient authors who experienced the joys and sorrows of life much same in the same way we do, and it was from these experiences that the tales of One Thousand and One Nights were conceived, and that is what makes them meaningful.

This claim can be generalized to apply to all art: for art to have meaning it must be conceived in terms of an experience. A novel, a song, a painting, or a movie created by an AI has no meaning—it’s not art—because it did not arise from an expression of the author’s subjective experience. We have all of us now suffered “the discomforts of a work made of surprises dictated by vanity and chance.” These works can be surprising, yes, and maybe even beautiful, but they remain meaningless. What would it mean if an AI had generated the artwork at the top of this page? It would mean nothing, just as if a language model had been the one to generate the words “amica silentia lunae.” It has never had an experience of the moon. We would not be engaging in a dialogue of imaginations of the moon. What would it mean for a language model to generate the words “Everything flows”? It is not a participant in this everything. There is no flowing.

I removed from the middle of the above excerpt of Borges’s essay this quote:

One literature differs from another, prior or posterior, less because of the text than because of the way in which it is read: if I were granted the possibility of reading any present-day page—this one, for example—as it will be read in the year two thousand, I would know what the literature of the year two thousand will be like.

“Literature is not exhaustible,” Borges says, “for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is.” More than 150 years after it was written I found in the pages of Moby Dick an inexplicable piece of my soul; so you may too in the same text, or in the Aeneid, or in One Thousand and One Nights—all the while you may wonder upon what Arabian sands or under what eastern stars your kindred spirit of thousands of years ago and the author of that story dreamed it—; more than 50 years after it was written, engaged in one of these infinite dialogues of the imagination, I found in a single page written by Jorge Luis Borges an expression or warning of the literary/spiritual maladies which we are suffering today.