Recently, information theorist Bill Dembski decided to have some fun with ChatGPT4o. At his Substack, he asked the chatbot to rewrite the final five paragraphs from a story.

Not from just any story but from a long short story in The Dubliners (1914) by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941). He was a very influential figure in modern literature in English:

Joyce’s subtle yet frank portrayal of human nature, coupled with his mastery of language and brilliant development of new literary forms, made him one of the major figures of literary Modernism and among the most commanding influences on novelists of the 20th century. (Britannica)

The story chosen, “The Dead,” is the best known of the 15 stories and is long enough to be a novella. It features a man who has trouble with emotions (plot summary.)

Dembski began by giving ChatGPT4o — whose database contains “The Dead” — the five paragraphs from Joyce, asking it to rewrite them “in the style of Joyce.”

So how did the chatbot fare?

It began by showing no awareness of what it was doing:

In being given the last five paragraphs of “The Dead” along with my prompt, ChatGPT4o should obviously have noted that I was simply giving it a passage from James Joyce, and so there would be no point to rewriting it in the style of Joyce. Moreover, because Joyce was such a literary master, improving on the style and mood of this passage would be a fool’s errand. And yet, as you’ll see, ChatGPT4o did none of this. Instead, it plunged right into “improving” Joyce’s prose. The results are amusing as well as painful.

“Arguing About Taste with Large Language Models,” Bill Dembski October 17, 2024

Dembski offers a summary of the part of the story that leads up to the crisis: “Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta have attended a party where he learned of Michael Furey, who had courted Gretta and died at seventeen in part because of his devotion to her. It became clear to Gabriel that she had loved Michael more deeply than she had ever loved Gabriel. With Gretta now asleep in bed, he falls into a reverie about the dead and the living.”

Here’s just the last paragraph from both versions:

Joyce:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Bot:

He heard the snow, a gentle tapping at the window, pulling him from the trance of thought. It had begun to fall again, silent and steady, swirling in the lamplight, silver against the shadows. His journey westward was before him, the newspapers had spoken true: snow was falling everywhere, across the plains, the hills, the blackened rivers. And it was falling on the lonely hill where Michael Furey rested beneath the thorns and crosses, a shroud of white over his resting place. The snow drifted down upon the dead, upon the living too, gently, relentlessly. And Gabriel felt his soul slipping, sinking softly into the snow’s quiet embrace, as though it were falling upon the universe itself, a faint whisper that settled upon all that had ever lived and ever died.

Dembski’s verdict:

ChatGPT4o has taken something sublime and turned it into kitsch. In this instance, there is arguing about taste. ChatGPT4o’s sense of taste is abysmal. I urge readers to take the passage as Joyce wrote it and compare it sentence by sentence with the corresponding passage as rewritten by ChatGPT4o. There is no comparison. And yet, ChatGPT4o can’t see it. Not only didn’t it realize that I was asking it to rewrite Joyce in the style of Joyce, but it also, when prompted by me, explained why its rewrite was better than the original!! “Arguing About Taste”

Prompted, the chatbot produced a wordy defense of the rewrite it generated. Prompted again, it acknowledged that the text was from Joyce and didn’t need a rewrite and that “there’s no improving on Joyce’s work.”

The six reasons I provided for how I thought I had “improved” it were based on my internal guidelines for enhancing emotional depth, symbolic resonance, and stylistic fluidity, which are things I strive to optimize when working with typical text. “Arguing About Taste”

On the bright side, the bot is not in charge of an emergency services station

On the other hand, Dembski notes,

As it is, this exercise indicates why LLMs are likely forever to be literary mediocrities. They are trained on data that includes work by towering literary figures like James Joyce, but they also a trained on much more. Moreover, the human trainers who fine-tune the neural nets that underpin the LLMs are themselves not towering literary figures (if they were, they wouldn’t be wasting their time training these models).

And he offers a prediction:

Instead of producing outliers exhibiting true innovation and creativity, they will produce expected outcomes that stay clearly within established perimeters. Such statistical averages will therefore regress to the mean. They will tend to mediocrity. In fact, I would venture that mediocrity is baked into these LLMs, and that they will never produce a Michelangelo, a Beethoven, or a Joyce. “Arguing About Taste”

Transhumanist Singularity, check your messages.