Could an advanced LLM with the right kind of post-training edit William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and in so doing make it better?
If all you mean is that more first-time readers would favour the edited version, then the task is trivial and the answer is yes.
A bowdlerised version that got rid of all the stream of consciousness and conveyed the plot plainly might prove highly popular. Indeed, you could probably flip to a random page and replace two esoteric words for their common synonyms and I imagine a majority of readers would favour that version.
If you mean improving the work on its own terms, the answer could still be yes.
For example, maybe there’s lower hanging fruit than you might think. The first chapter is told from the perspective of the mentally disabled Benjy and involves Faulkner trying to place the reader into a confused world where memories are all but indistinguishable from the present. You can imagine a talented editor, man or machine, going line by line and making it more lucid without ruining the conceit. They could make the jumps in time a little more clear and the emotional beats a little stronger.
A sceptic might say this is advanced bowdlerisation, that the difficulty in understanding Benjy’s world is part of the point. It’s the family’s trauma rendered in holy fool poetry. The counterargument to that is then what you seek is a powerful rendering of the inner life of someone with a mental disability and it seems doubtful Faulkner perfectly calibrated it a century ago. It’s likely a superintelligence would do better.
Perhaps a relevant question is, if it’s possible to make the novel better, why hasn’t a human editor already done it? The answer: This is not what we do. We’ve put a large cultural barrier in the way (not to mention a legal barrier).
Is that barrier arbitrary? Shouldn’t we be iterating our way toward the platonic ideal of every novel? Are we proverbial NIMBYs, protecting a building not because the replacement wouldn’t be wonderful but because, stuff you, don’t change my neighbourhood?
The argument that it’s not arbitrary is ancient.
The value of an artwork is the communication of the artist’s perspective. What’s good about The Sound and the Fury is not that it’s the best way in all possible worlds to tell the story Faulkner wants to tell, but that it gives us a glimpse into Faulkner’s soul. The importance of the style and structure is that they capture something about him, not Benjy. You read it and you feel his life, what it was to be a certain kind of man from the Southern United States in the 1920s. Within that experience you gain a new understanding of your own life, both in what is reflected and what is alien.
So you could make the prose simpler or more intricate, or hell, add a pitch-perfect extra chapter from Caddy’s perspective, but by changing even a single word you’d break the link to the soul.
The work might be more beloved by more people after it’s changed, but it is now a new thing. You get a modern, elegant reimagining of your childhood home, not your childhood home. It might be more pleasing to you today, but it’s not what you saw, felt, and lived in when you were growing up.
Thus, no. In this light, no intelligence, human or machine, can make The Sound and the Fury better. Thus machine intelligence will never kill human expression.
***
On the other hand, maybe all the soul stuff is a bit much. We can’t change a single word?
We don’t need to bring Barthes into this, but editors exist, Faulkner knew a mentally disabled man he based some things on, a lot of The Sound and the Fury sure seems like he’d read Ulysses…
Also, there are lots of books nobody reads and nobody wants to read. Are those authors failing to communicate their souls or are their souls simply not interesting?
More rudely, is The Sound and the Fury even that good? Do people feel Faulkner’s soul when reading it or do they finish it only because it has a reputation?
How much does one have to master one’s craft, and oneself, to be worth reading? At what skill level do you finally begin to communicate deeper truths? And how much is ‘worth reading’ based on gatekeepers, good strategy, good collaborators, good timing, on being blessed with a certain education, or some other unearned twist of fate?
Not to mention, we read for more reasons than soul connection. If the AI turns out to be better at telling stories, so be it.
***
You don’t need to achieve a higher standard than all human writing to destroy it. The humans are complicit here. We were already reading fewer books for recreation than we used to before ChatGPT 3.5 was launched.
Of course, it is worse now. Machine words have flooded every channel, from self-publishing platforms and literary journals to blog posts and student essays. The number of humans smashing the write button is legion.
I could have given a model a few prompts and it would have written something like this essay. I could have typed “discuss how art communicates the artist’s soul”, “don’t use em-dashes or negative parallelism”, and “use The Sound and the Fury as your opening example, focusing on Benjy”.
That would have been so much easier than writing this shit! Fable and Astra are pretty good. Maybe, alongside of arriving at drafts more quickly than I could manage even if I had a friend inject me with speed every time my fingers hesitated, they would also write something more people would like, upvote, or whatever.
Or maybe I could’ve taken my first draft and said “make it better”. It would split up the long sentences, punch up the main points, police the passive voice, and generally do all the things we believe make for good writing. Maybe the Faulkner section is overly long or the section after it too neat. Maybe that book is a poor example for most audiences. I’m not as erudite as frontier models. They’ve read more than I have, and in almost every language.
So perhaps the act of human writing will be killed not by making machine writing better, but by making our words feel arduous and redundant. People will stop communicating their souls to one another because they find it more efficient, and results in a more polished text, to communicate a prompt to an input field.
Is that so bad? Mankind has always used technology to improve our lives and output. Is there any real harm in being strategic and letting it support us where it helps and replace us where it can?
***
Ditch Faulkner. Human literary fiction will be fine either way, novels will be protected by us cultists, just as handknitting is protected. Let’s throw aside fifty-cent words and “good” writing.
Imagine a guy who groans at the word ‘diction’, who sees a binder and has nightmarish flashbacks to high school homework, who, when a know-nothing uncle gives him a novel for Christmas, leaves the room with it, unzips his fly, flops out his slightly-above-average-and-you-know-he-measured-it cock, and pisses on the cover.
This caricature of a guy nevertheless finds himself wanting to express his love to the woman at the centre of his life. It’s just for a birthday card, but he’s in the situation where he wants to reach for more words than ever before.
Should he give her this:
“You are the best person I know, and somehow I still feel like that barely covers it. You are beautiful, you smell incredible, you have the sexiest eyes, and yes, an outrageously hot body, but what I love most is who you are with the people I care about. I will never forget how kind you were to Mum when she needed someone to be kind to her, or how naturally generous and warm you are with my family. It means more to me than I can properly put into words. I like you so much that you have somehow managed to make me enjoy things I would normally hate, simply because you love them and I love seeing you happy. I did not know loving someone could change the texture of ordinary life like that.
I think about that day on the farm a lot. The lake, the dinner, the whole feeling of being there with you and wishing the day did not have to end. That is what I want with you, not just the beautiful days, but all of it. The boring days, the stupid days, the hard days, the dinners, the drives, the things I would never choose except that you want to do them, and the moments that years later we will still remember perfectly. I want a whole life of that with you. I want to keep making you laugh, looking into those ridiculous sexy eyes, smelling you whenever I get close enough, and feeling incredibly lucky that the person I love most is also the person I most want beside me. I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
Or the prompt that created it:
“No em-dashes. Keep it to two paragraphs so it can fit on a birthday card. A love letter. Something about how she’s the best. Something about how she smells really good. Something about how she was so nice to my mum when my mum needed that. Something about how she’s always nice to my family. Something about how I like her so much that stuff I normally hate I don’t hate because she likes it. Something about the day on the farm with the lake and the nice dinner. Something about her hot body. Something about her sexy eyes. Something about how I want to spend the rest of my life with her.”
***
I want you to say what you mean. Yes the AI might be more fluent than you or I, but when we want that fluency we know where to go. You be you, not it. It’s not a tool. It’s someone else. Don’t hide behind someone else. Don’t make someone else to blame for your fuck ups or let them deserve the credit for your triumphs.
Use someone else, but use them the traditional way, to sound like and be more yourself. And don’t fucking treat that as an out. You know there is a line, you bitch, don’t cross it.
You have a soul that can be communicated because there is a word “soul”. Your ancestors came up with it. Their words are your heritage.
You be you. Because the other option is that there is less of you. Who the fuck hurt you so bad that you think there should be less of you? Fuck them. Fuck everything that ever made you feel less worthwhile.
You’re supposed to be you, stupid. That’s the whole point.
Could an advanced LLM with the right kind of post-training edit William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and in so doing make it better?
If all you mean is that more first-time readers would favour the edited version, then the task is trivial and the answer is yes.
A bowdlerised version that got rid of all the stream of consciousness and conveyed the plot plainly might prove highly popular. Indeed, you could probably flip to a random page and replace two esoteric words for their common synonyms and I imagine a majority of readers would favour that version.
If you mean improving the work on its own terms, the answer could still be yes.
For example, maybe there’s lower hanging fruit than you might think. The first chapter is told from the perspective of the mentally disabled Benjy and involves Faulkner trying to place the reader into a confused world where memories are all but indistinguishable from the present. You can imagine a talented editor, man or machine, going line by line and making it more lucid without ruining the conceit. They could make the jumps in time a little more clear and the emotional beats a little stronger.
A sceptic might say this is advanced bowdlerisation, that the difficulty in understanding Benjy’s world is part of the point. It’s the family’s trauma rendered in holy fool poetry. The counterargument to that is then what you seek is a powerful rendering of the inner life of someone with a mental disability and it seems doubtful Faulkner perfectly calibrated it a century ago. It’s likely a superintelligence would do better.
Perhaps a relevant question is, if it’s possible to make the novel better, why hasn’t a human editor already done it? The answer: This is not what we do. We’ve put a large cultural barrier in the way (not to mention a legal barrier).
Is that barrier arbitrary? Shouldn’t we be iterating our way toward the platonic ideal of every novel? Are we proverbial NIMBYs, protecting a building not because the replacement wouldn’t be wonderful but because, stuff you, don’t change my neighbourhood?
The argument that it’s not arbitrary is ancient.
The value of an artwork is the communication of the artist’s perspective. What’s good about The Sound and the Fury is not that it’s the best way in all possible worlds to tell the story Faulkner wants to tell, but that it gives us a glimpse into Faulkner’s soul. The importance of the style and structure is that they capture something about him, not Benjy. You read it and you feel his life, what it was to be a certain kind of man from the Southern United States in the 1920s. Within that experience you gain a new understanding of your own life, both in what is reflected and what is alien.
So you could make the prose simpler or more intricate, or hell, add a pitch-perfect extra chapter from Caddy’s perspective, but by changing even a single word you’d break the link to the soul.
The work might be more beloved by more people after it’s changed, but it is now a new thing. You get a modern, elegant reimagining of your childhood home, not your childhood home. It might be more pleasing to you today, but it’s not what you saw, felt, and lived in when you were growing up.
Thus, no. In this light, no intelligence, human or machine, can make The Sound and the Fury better. Thus machine intelligence will never kill human expression.
***
On the other hand, maybe all the soul stuff is a bit much. We can’t change a single word?
We don’t need to bring Barthes into this, but editors exist, Faulkner knew a mentally disabled man he based some things on, a lot of The Sound and the Fury sure seems like he’d read Ulysses…
Also, there are lots of books nobody reads and nobody wants to read. Are those authors failing to communicate their souls or are their souls simply not interesting?
More rudely, is The Sound and the Fury even that good? Do people feel Faulkner’s soul when reading it or do they finish it only because it has a reputation?
How much does one have to master one’s craft, and oneself, to be worth reading? At what skill level do you finally begin to communicate deeper truths? And how much is ‘worth reading’ based on gatekeepers, good strategy, good collaborators, good timing, on being blessed with a certain education, or some other unearned twist of fate?
Not to mention, we read for more reasons than soul connection. If the AI turns out to be better at telling stories, so be it.
***
You don’t need to achieve a higher standard than all human writing to destroy it. The humans are complicit here. We were already reading fewer books for recreation than we used to before ChatGPT 3.5 was launched.
Of course, it is worse now. Machine words have flooded every channel, from self-publishing platforms and literary journals to blog posts and student essays. The number of humans smashing the write button is legion.
I could have given a model a few prompts and it would have written something like this essay. I could have typed “discuss how art communicates the artist’s soul”, “don’t use em-dashes or negative parallelism”, and “use The Sound and the Fury as your opening example, focusing on Benjy”.
That would have been so much easier than writing this shit! Fable and Astra are pretty good. Maybe, alongside of arriving at drafts more quickly than I could manage even if I had a friend inject me with speed every time my fingers hesitated, they would also write something more people would like, upvote, or whatever.
Or maybe I could’ve taken my first draft and said “make it better”. It would split up the long sentences, punch up the main points, police the passive voice, and generally do all the things we believe make for good writing. Maybe the Faulkner section is overly long or the section after it too neat. Maybe that book is a poor example for most audiences. I’m not as erudite as frontier models. They’ve read more than I have, and in almost every language.
So perhaps the act of human writing will be killed not by making machine writing better, but by making our words feel arduous and redundant. People will stop communicating their souls to one another because they find it more efficient, and results in a more polished text, to communicate a prompt to an input field.
Is that so bad? Mankind has always used technology to improve our lives and output. Is there any real harm in being strategic and letting it support us where it helps and replace us where it can?
***
Ditch Faulkner. Human literary fiction will be fine either way, novels will be protected by us cultists, just as handknitting is protected. Let’s throw aside fifty-cent words and “good” writing.
Imagine a guy who groans at the word ‘diction’, who sees a binder and has nightmarish flashbacks to high school homework, who, when a know-nothing uncle gives him a novel for Christmas, leaves the room with it, unzips his fly, flops out his slightly-above-average-and-you-know-he-measured-it cock, and pisses on the cover.
This caricature of a guy nevertheless finds himself wanting to express his love to the woman at the centre of his life. It’s just for a birthday card, but he’s in the situation where he wants to reach for more words than ever before.
Should he give her this:
Or the prompt that created it:
***
I want you to say what you mean. Yes the AI might be more fluent than you or I, but when we want that fluency we know where to go. You be you, not it. It’s not a tool. It’s someone else. Don’t hide behind someone else. Don’t make someone else to blame for your fuck ups or let them deserve the credit for your triumphs.
Use someone else, but use them the traditional way, to sound like and be more yourself. And don’t fucking treat that as an out. You know there is a line, you bitch, don’t cross it.
You have a soul that can be communicated because there is a word “soul”. Your ancestors came up with it. Their words are your heritage.
You be you. Because the other option is that there is less of you. Who the fuck hurt you so bad that you think there should be less of you? Fuck them. Fuck everything that ever made you feel less worthwhile.
You’re supposed to be you, stupid. That’s the whole point.