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Chief Editor’s Note

We have come to a strange pass in the history of our species, have we not? In the Beginning was the Word, but the Word is no longer just ours to use, is it? The ancient inheritance now has to be shared with Artifax Sapiens, and we are not a species particularly good at sharing. What are we to do?

Critics of AI sometimes claim that these programs only fill in the blanks and don’t really think or really understand or really create. The first half isn’t all that inaccurate, but what the critics perhaps don’t realise is that filling in the blanks goes by a different name in the arts. It is called “closure”.

Closure is why a writer can write “It is raining” and not have to add the word “water”. Of course it rains water. Somewhere in the reader’s 40-trillion corpus, a sparking configuration will silently add the word “water”. Readers will “close” the sentence. This ability is what makes our imaginations imaginative. It is not suspension of disbelief that is at the heart of literature, of music, or of any artistic experience. It is the gestalt principle of closure. Our minds have this transcendent ability. And a certain class of “programs”, it would seem, have finally acquired it as well.

The first person to truly grasp that this day would come was seventeen-year-old Ada Byron–later Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace– the daughter of a poet, nominally a father, and a mathematician mother. She met the Victorian Archimedes, Charles Babbage, at a society party, and the famously grumpy gent, older to her by some 20 odd years, was enchanted by her mind. Ada’s mother later took her to Babbage’s house, where he showed Ada the Difference engine. She was enchanted. More importantly, she understood what had just become possible. In Ada’s notes to her translation of the military office Menabrea’s description of Babbage’s much more advanced Analytical Engine, one finds several astonishingly prophetic passages. Such as this one:

The operating mechanism can even be thrown into action independently of any object to operate upon (although of course no result could then be developed). Again, it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

Or poems. Or stories. Or essays. Or literature.

What, then, are editors of literary magazines and publishing houses to do? This is the sixty-third issue of The Bombay Literary Magazine. We don’t have an official AI policy yet. My sense of the topic’s pulse among the editors is that there is a worry that the unrestricted use of AI will trivialise the literary act.

It is a sensible and valid concern. And if writers are allowed to use AI-generated content, then surely they wouldn’t object to editors using AI “programs” to decide on their submissions? Would being rejected by a program—very courteously, tenderly even, with lots of useful auto-generated feedback—be preferable to a regurgitation of canned human regret? As editors, we would be hypocrites if we relied on AI summaries of the submissions, but rejected authors for their use of AI. Should we ask for some sort of honesty-declaration from writers we’d like to publish? If honesty-declarations are so effective, then could they have prevented the principal scientists of the most highly-cited study on preventing deception from fudging their experimental data?

On a philosophical level, what meaning do such promises have? I can swear that this editorial was written by me, Anil Menon, and therefore, I alone am responsible for it. Does this mean that my 40-trillion-plus cellular complex is required to stand behind this claim? My left leg, always a tad unreliable, would probably swear with equal sincerity in a court of law that it had no idea, zero notion your Honor, that the right and left hands were up to the mischief for which the entire corpus now stands unfairly accused. Why, the leg’s sweaty fervidity might even move the court to tears! If we grant fictionality to the self, why not to programs who don’t even have a body!

But let us set aside these concerns. Let us invoke that ability which Coleridge memorably defined as central to the imaginative experience: the suspension of disbelief. Imagine, if you will, a room full of editors. You and I are in the room. We are discussing how we intend to deal with submissions that may or may not have used AI. The discussion is heated. Somehow the idea of publishing a story or a collection of poems, generated by “simply” multiplying matrices of numbers, is unbearable to countenance. How could it not be? No womb conceived the mind, no feet touched the beach sand, no hand cradled a child, no queen drowned and no king died of grief. How can it be literature?

It is then we notice the seventeen-year-old in the corner. Having noticed her expression, we cannot un-notice her. What will we tell Ada, “Enchantress of Numbers”, as Babbage referred to her? How should we close that meeting, knowing that she will die in nineteen more years and that expression will be lost? I believe we should find courage in her expression precisely because nothing should last forever. We must not leave that room ashamed of ourselves.

Issue 63’s content has been entirely hand-crafted by 40-trillion cellular composites of human origin. They haven’t vouchsafed to that claim, nor did we ask them to. We took pleasure in the works–that peculiar literary kind of pleasure where happiness is not the only possible goal. We believe you will enjoy them as well.

Welcome to Issue 63 of The Bombay Literary Magazine.