False memory, writing machine

Compiled from: " Prosthetic Memories, Writing Machines ", a December 2020 article in Noema Magazine

As an external, increasingly intelligent form of memory, AI could broaden the impact of writing systems on the physical boundaries of the human mind.

In July, artificial intelligence research firm OpenAI released its latest language generator, GPT-3 , to much fanfare. GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, uses deep learning software and neural networks to create human-readable text. All over the internet, people have used it to create poetry, plays and other forms of literature, feeding it everything from Shakespeare to Dr. Seuss. GPT-3 collects a large amount of literature data.

As is often the case with new developments in artificial intelligence, experts and the public scrambled to assess the creative sophistication of such language models. While its language fluency is impressive, the program ultimately falls short: it can't really understand its own essay, so the longer it writes, the less coherent it gets.

There is still a long way to go before artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to creative writers. But it has started as a creative writing tool. Like all writing instruments, it challenges the notion of the boundaries of the human mind.

Various writing systems embody the intangible; collecting ideas into archives, they are the building blocks of external memory, translating thinking into communication between mind and database. As prosthetic memories, the earliest forms of writing can be understood as the ancestors of information retrieval and analysis that are characteristic of contemporary machine learning. AI offers new ways to use databases - new ways of thinking and creating.

By extending human cognitive abilities, writing helps sustain profound cultural transformations. Artificial intelligence may do the same. But as the literacy imbalance shows, the stories we tell with our writing instruments are as important to cultural change as the writing instruments themselves.

Databases and Extended Thinking

In 2017, Ross Goodwin , an artist and self-styled "gonzo data scientist", drove a Cadillac from New York to New Orleans with a computer fitted with artificial intelligence. Smart software, trained on three literary corpora, including science fiction, poetry and "bleak" literature, as well as Foursquare location data. He has coded algorithms and compiled an archive of hundreds of books to shape the linguistic matrix and aesthetic sensibility of artificial intelligence. With the backing of Google, he installed a microphone, clock, GPS and a roof-mounted camera in the car.

As Goodwin drove the car south, the neural network system synthesized information from these sensory inputs and generated writing in a poetic idiom reminiscent of Jack Kerouac's Idle stream of consciousness essay. Along the way, data from sensors inspired sentences that were at times lyrical and at times surreal.

The AI's words were printed on long receipt rolls, next to the timestamps when they were generated, culminating in 1 the Road , which Goodwin called "the longest novel in the English language." novel in the English language).

1 the Road is both text and performance, highlighting the complexities surrounding authorship assignments when artificial intelligence is involved in the creative process. The final product is written by an algorithm written by Goodwin. AI achieves its prose style, from word use to grammar, through dynamic interactions with datasets, driven by Goodwin's code, hardware selection, and driving.

The question "Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?" was opened in 1998 by philosophers of mind Andy Clark and David "The Extended Mind" by David Chalmers , probably the most famous and influential exposition of the Extended Mind treatise. Their view, which became more popular after the millennium, rejected the conventional understanding that the mind arises only from the physical processes of the brain and ends in the skull and skin. In contrast, the extensional theory of mind frames cognition as the interplay of tools and processes we use to accomplish cognitive tasks.

Such tools, like the pen and paper that mathematicians use to solve equations, can integrate so seamlessly with our minds that they function like our brains to bring about our cognitive abilities. Through such tools, our minds extend to our world—our worlds extend to our minds. Therefore, cognition arises from the ecology of the brain, the body, and the world.

By embodying information beyond the human mind, writing systems—from handwriting to some contemporary artificial intelligence—add new elements to this dynamic ecology. Granthika , a new storytelling software startup led by novelist Vikram Chandra , puts this understanding of extended cognition into practice. Granthika is an intelligent system and integrated writing environment imagined as a writer's assistant and bookkeeper - an external brain. The software helps fiction authors build and track complex worlds and timelines. It handles the drudgery so writers can focus on narrative elements such as theme, plot, and characters.

According to Chandra, Granthika fuses text and semantics; writing in a program produces knowledge, which in turn is incorporated into the text. By continually adding to this knowledge base, Granthika builds the ontology of a fictional universe. It can build a behind-the-scenes ontology of time using classical first-order reasoning; unlike other databases, it can establish contacts. As a companion to the continuation of the imagination, the software is designed to give writers the freedom to work on ephemeral creations.

By delegating the work of building the world to computational intelligence, Granthika becomes a cognitive extender for creative writers. It embodies the symbiotic relationship between creative writers and intelligent databases. 1 the Road similarly assigns the labor of writing to humans and machines, though Goodwin positions his artificial intelligence as the thinking and perceiving center of the process.

Contrary to the traditional concept of the solitary author, these projects view creative writing as the product of a combination of humans and technology. But instead of completely upending the history of writing, these machine intelligences enacted the next logical step in the evolution of writing as a mnemonic technique.

memory and literacy

In this age of keyboards and touchscreens as communication media, early forms like handwriting exude an almost natural air. As natural as it may seem, handwriting is also a technology that is profoundly transformative for communication, cognition, and culture.

Before the invention of writing, spoken language existed in a fleeting space between people and disappeared as soon as it was spoken. Writing captures erratic speech and embodies it in a visible and enduring form. Conversation must take place between two living speakers, and in writing, words can exist outside of the scribe and his life. For these reasons, Plato condemned writing in the Phaedrus, which he said would impair human memory.

From shopping lists to encyclopedias, writing extends the human mind by offloading the cognitive processes of information storage and retrieval. Writing is a technique that allows us to outsource individual and collective memory. Literacy enables new forms of interaction with language by continually creating archives of information that can be referenced - new information storage technologies that provide structured knowledge accumulation. Literacy is thus a central pillar of systematic study of logic, philosophy, and general science, culminating in the knowledge infrastructure of artificial intelligence.

In addition to these general aspects, scholars of literacy and the culture of oral expression are divided on how writing changes thinking and communication. Some of them, notably Walter Ong and others in the 1960s and 1970s, made generalizations about how oral cultures used specific language and memory strategies for cultural transmission. In his influential book Orality and Literacy , Ang refers to the famous literary remains of oral texts such as the Bible and the Odyssey, where he links the syntax of language to the structure of thought. In doing so, he exploits language itself as the site of memory practice.

In the decades since, this view has been challenged by the additive effect of oversimplification and literacy on "primitive" oral culture. Although they affirmed the influence of writing and reading on thinking, critics pointed out that these influences were too complex and localized to reflect specific cultural characteristics. Because of the wide variation in the nature and use of writing systems, scholars have described a multi-literary universe, befitting the specific cultures in which they arose.

storytelling techniques

Author Ted Jiang explores the relationship between multiple literariness, memory, and subjectivity in his short story "Two Sided Truths" (part of the collection "Breathe"). The novel tells two parallel stories—one in the not-so-distant past, and the other in the not-so-distant future. Both are about writing and recalling techniques and how they are intertwined with cognition and sensation.

"Two Sided Truth" explores how technology shapes the stories we tell - about ourselves and each other. At the same time, it also highlights how the stories we tell shape the techniques we use to tell them. In the novel's telling, "People are made up of stories. Our memories are not the unbiased accumulation of every second we've lived, but the narrative we've assembled from selected moments." Ted Jiang eventually predicted the limitations of these synthetic forms of recall and the need for creative and cultural practices to activate these cognitive extenders.

By recording information beyond the human mind, writing systems have given rise to new ways of classifying and retrieving knowledge. The advent of artificial intelligence and big data amplifies and automates this reading ability well beyond the scale of human perception.

As an external, increasingly intelligent form of memory, AI could deepen the impact of early writing systems on the physical boundaries of the human brain.

Yet, as Two Sided Truth affirms, writing and reading machines extend thinking beyond the physical edges of these tools. These technologies are also embedded in the social and cultural world as part of the cognitive ecology distributed across the brain, body and environment. New tools breed new literacy skills, which can lead to new forms of knowledge, feeling, and telling.

Early writing systems set the stage for new modes of creativity and communication. The same may be true of artificial intelligence. The stories and truths we tell about AI can help adapt and integrate these technologies in the service of human expression. And AI might also become a partner, writing together unimagined stories.