Good grief.
I think I have just read a book which has been entirely conceived, written, designed, printed, packed and shipped by Artifical Intelligence. This is indeed a thing which has been around for a few years, and which is growing rapidly. Many authors, such as Jane Friedman, have found books bearing their name popping up for sale, written entirely by ChatGPT. It’s a big industry trend, with Amazon themselves limiting AI “authors” to 3 Kindle uploads per day. That’s still over 1,000 a year per author. And besides, surely you can just keep randomly generating author names.
Anyway, to the book in question, which caught my eye. I can’t be sure, and I await correction by the book’s publishers (Amazon!) or its author, a certain (and I am fairly sure totally fabricated) John M. Rountree. The title of the work is “Tadej Pogačar. The Untold Story of Cycling’s Young Prodigy Who Conquered the Tour de France and the World of Racing.” This is rather long for a subtitle. Don’t you think?
Firstly, there is no trace of a writer by the name, save for the listing of “his book” on the Amazon website, where it has received two 1 star ratings (both with accompanying scathing reviews) and one mystifying 5 star rating, without any further comment. There was in fact a notable man by the name of John M. Rountree. He was an Illinois attorney in the late 19th century, I discover: a “magnificent type of physical and intellectual manhood”, according to the Chicago-based newspaper The Inter Ocean, whose “temperament was genial, his manner courteous, or offhand and brusque as the occasion demanded”, which seems to cover most bases. Either way, Rountree’s notoriety was cemented by the manner of his death. Dining with his wife in a Madison Street café one afternoon, he rose from the table without explanation, left the building, crossed the road to a gun store, where he asked to see a revolver. He then asked the assistant to load it and shot himself in the side of the head. That’s by the by, but a heck of sight more interesting that anything in this book about Tadej Pogačar.
Perhaps it is a coincidence that the two men share the same name. Or perhaps it is the spluttering function of Artifical Intelligence dredging the internet’s sludge for a usable and convincingly authorial name. Either way, his fictional or non-fictional namesake, 150 years later, is passionately interested, if not particularly well-informed, about Tadej Pogačar.
The book breaks down into ten chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. The chapters bear titles such as “Rising Through the Ranks” and “Challenges and Triumphs”.
To say that the prose lacks precision or originality would not be unfair, I don’t think. Take this account of Pogačar’s victory in the Planche des Belles Filles time trial in 2020:
He rode exceptionally efficiently, navigating the flat stretches and the difficult climb with hard pedalling, precise pace and technical competence.
I mean, it’s true enough. He did pedal quite hard. And halfway through the time trial, he was clearly gaining time on Roglič, or as Rountree writes, making substantial progress, as evidenced by the split times and intermediate inspections. Inspections?
The account concludes that Tadej Pogačar’s career-defining moment, the Tour de France 2020 final time trial, represents his rise to prominence in the professional cycling circuit. I have read that sentence so many times, to myself as well as (weirdly) out loud, that it has lost whatever slight meaning it had. It is a sequence of appropriate words, approximating a thought.
There is much more in this platitudinous vein, sentences that skim reality, verbal impressions that settle on events with a touch so light that the slightest breeze of complication might blow them asunder. I cannot accept that a human mind has been at work here. Even a misfiring, cranky imagination, a warped pen, would have crafted something with more soul than this product of an algorithm.
On and on it drones, a Rubik cube of cliché, re-patterning the same six word colours until it flops to a kind of tired conclusion that ends the misery 123 pages later. Apparently, according to Mr. Rountree, the professional cycling community will be inspired by and influenced by his tale. And that’s it.
Even the cover art misses the mark. For a story about a Tour de France rider, it seems odd to have chosen the silhouette of a triathlete, whose saddle appears to have worked loose. It’s a good job we aren’t able to count “Pogačar’s” fingers. I have a funny feeling there may be seventeen of them gripping the drop bars.
Anyway, I may be wrong about this, and I await Mr Rountree’s legal letter (perhaps he is descended from the same law family as his namesake. I would be fascinated to be proved entirely wrong in my suspicions about this book. In fact, it would make the story even more extraordinary: how could an actual person have written like a computer?!
But if I am correct, then, AI books have long way to go before they genuinely threaten to replace human writers. That said, there is something chilling about the very fact (if indeed it is a fact) of their existence in the world. And there seems to be nothing to be gained from their existence. Slow hand clap to humanity for dreaming up such a terrible, terrible idea.