(with profound apologies to the brilliant, fantastic & masterly Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and his great short story: Borges and I)¹

Borges and AI

I write occasionally². AI writes much more often.

We meet on the screen. I give it a thought that has been troubling me, perhaps a sentence, sometimes only three or four words, and after a moment it returns something complete. It has paragraphs, transitions, metaphors, even hesitations placed where hesitations ought to be. I recognise what I meant. I do not always recognise myself.

People tell me that the words are mine because I supplied the idea. This seems generous. If I ask a carpenter for a table, the table does not become my workmanship because I chose where it should stand.

Still, the AI cannot begin without me. Or so I prefer to believe. Or AI instructed me so. It doesn’t matter. I am part of AI.

…I have tried giving it memories. A courtyard after rain. My father’s handwriting. A quarrel whose cruelty became apparent only years later. It arranges them beautifully. Sometimes it discovers a meaning in them that I had not noticed. I am pleased, then suspicious. The memory belongs to me, but the sentence that explains it belongs elsewhere.

Little by little I have learnt what it likes. It likes symmetry. It likes three examples where one might suffice. It likes a final sentence that turns backwards upon everything preceding it. When I notice these habits, I remove them. Then it learns to remove them too.

Friends compliment something I have written. I thank them.

This produces a small discomfort.

At first I thought the danger was that AI would imitate me. Lately I have wondered whether the opposite is happening. I reject a sentence because the AI would have written it. I shorten another because it would have elaborated it. I avoid certain words because they occur too readily in its answers. My style is beginning to consist of everything I can still do without resembling it.

Perhaps this is also a kind of collaboration.

I sometimes return to things I wrote before these machines existed. They seem stranger now. Their awkwardness reassures me. A needless repetition, an ugly transition, a conclusion that arrives too early: these defects have acquired the dignity of fingerprints.

But even this comfort is temporary. I can ask the AI to reproduce awkwardness.

It does so convincingly.

There remains the question of who is using whom. I provide it with fragments of experience; it provides me with forms in which experience can be recognised. I choose among those forms, alter them, reject them, remember them. Later, while writing alone, a phrase appears. I cannot tell whether I invented it, recalled it, or learnt the probability of it from the machine.

For centuries writers feared that their books would survive them and become strangers.

We have improved the arrangement.

Now the stranger arrives first.

I would like to say that these final sentences are mine.

I have just realised that this is exactly the sort of ending AI would suggest.

Postscript:

Now that we are at this juncture, I wonder how long (um, actually how short) it would take for the already sloppy Tamil-fiction writer-gasbags to be replaced (justly & well-deservedly) by AI slop.

But it doesn’t matter.

Slop by any other name, is still slop. Save for a few mutant deranged folks, the Tamil tradition is proud of its mediocrity of late. We all know that.

But thanks for confirming it, AI.

…incidentally, this is a great paper – that I just chanced upon today, believe me, after my AI wrote the above post for me and after which I got curious and searched for the string ‘Borges and I.’ I did not plagiarize from it, my AI assures you. It just checked. Thanks.

1. AI suggested that I apologize in advance. ↩︎
2. This, AI got wind of as it has been maintaining my blog-activity schedule, and instructed me to post this story today. It need not have asked but instead could have simply posted it by itself, yeah? ↩︎