I realize that, with ready access to sophisticated chatbots, some students will use them to complete writing assignments rather than do the writing themselves. Since I no longer teach, however important that issue is, it is not a problem for me. I set it aside. That is not what this essay is about. I’ve got other fish to fry.
What opportunities does the existence of competent AI-generated literary texts present for teaching about the nature of texts? An obvious opportunity is to consider the difference between human-created and AI-generated texts. But that doesn’t interest me, not here and now. It’s too difficult. I am willing to take these texts at face value, giving them no favor or disfavor.
* * * * *
This is the first in a series of three posts in which I take up other issues. In this post I present five AI-generated sonnets based on the text of “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address” and deal with the question of authorship. In the second essay I am going to present a poem based on a humorous story that Pope Francis told in a recent New York Times op-ed. In the third and final essay I once again take up the issue of authorship, using a sonnet based on three paragraphs from Miriam Yevick’s A Testament for Ariela.
The Five Sonnets
A GPT is a user-created device that can be installed in ChatGPT so that it can generate specialized output. These sonnets are generated by a GPT known as FredTheHeretic, aka FTH. It contains a small collection of poems by Frederic Turner that is uses as models and templates.
Here is the prompt I gave FTH:
Give me a sonnet based on the following text:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Here are the five sonnets it generated:
The Battle-Field: A Sonnet
Upon this ground where blood and tears have lain,
A nation forged in liberty still stands.
These fields once drank the courage of brave hands,
Yet whisper now of loss, enduring pain.
No words of ours could sanctify this space;
The deeds of those who fell surpass our breath.
Their valor, richer than the soil of death,
Ensures that time cannot their work erase.
We bear the burden, those who linger here,
To finish what their sacrifice began,
To weave a union, broad and strong and clear,
Upholding freedom's light for every man.
Let not their purpose fade, nor courage wane;
That dream they died for shall not die in vain.
The Unfinished Work
Here lies the proof of freedom’s fragile dream,
A nation’s heart laid bare in sacrifice.
The dead, whose silent deeds beyond suffice,
Have sown with blood what words can only seem.
No stone can hallow what their courage sealed,
No tongue can add to what they’ve dared and done.
The work remains; their labor is begun,
And calls us now upon this battle-field.
Shall we, the living, falter in this task,
Or turn away from what their lives bestowed?
Or shall we bear the torch, their honor’s load,
And in their shadow, shed our timid mask?
A government, by us, for us, must rise,
Lest freedom fall and perish where it lies.
The Measure of Devotion
This soil, now sacred, drinks the weight of grief,
Where dreams of freedom rose, and soldiers bled.
Their bodies stilled, their daring spirits fled,
Yet in their loss, we find a firm belief.
These hills are quiet, yet they loudly teach,
For valor’s echo never fades with time.
The cost of justice, paid in blood, sublime,
Proclaims a hope no death could ever breach.
Now let the living take this heavy trust,
To build a future worthy of the dead.
A nation’s soul, from sacrifice is fed,
Its root secured in honor, firm and just.
So here resolve: their gift shall not expire,
But kindle freedom’s everlasting fire.
The Undying Cause
Beneath these skies, where solemn winds now tread,
The fields remember what the brave have sown.
Each life laid down, a seed of freedom grown,
Their sacrifice, the nation’s truest thread.
No stone, no word can match their holy fight;
The ground itself is sacred by their toil.
Each drop of blood became this hallowed soil,
Each breath they gave has turned to guiding light.
We carry forth their banner through the years,
Their dream of justice burning in our hearts.
Their courage binds what conflict rends apart,
Their hope survives in us, through doubt and fears.
Here, by their rest, we vow to see it through,
A freedom born again, enduring, true.
A Pledge on Hallowed Ground
This ground is steeped in valor’s solemn grace,
Its earth a shrine where dreams were fiercely kept.
The silent stones, the grasses where they slept,
Hold echoes of a struggle time can’t erase.
We cannot consecrate what they have made,
Nor hallow more this field of sacred strife.
Their blood, their breath, their forfeited young life
Have forged a cause that never shall degrade.
So here we stand, the living, bound by oath,
To guard the freedom born of their last breath,
To honor through our lives what passed in death,
And pledge to keep their dream alive in growth.
Let liberty endure, their will our guide,
A beacon lit by those who fought and died.
Are they great sonnets? No, and they don’t need to be. Mere competence is sufficient for my purpose.
Meaning is Elastic
The contemporary discipline of literary criticism centers on the activity of interpreting the text. Poems are often allusive and metaphorical. Since each of these sonnets is based on Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” could we say that that text is the literal meaning (a common term) of each of these poems? That seems a bit much. While each sonnet uses words, phrases, and themes from Lincoln’s text, there is a ‘distance’ between each sonnet and the speech. The sonnets are not synonymous with the speech.
If we examine the concluding couplets of each sonnet, we can see that they have different emphasis. The couplet for the first sonnet focuses our attention the dreams and courage of those who died.
Let not their purpose fade, nor courage wane;
That dream they died for shall not die in vain.
The second sonnet places an obligation upon us:
A government, by us, for us, must rise,
Lest freedom fall and perish where it lies.
In the third we take that obligation upon ourselves:
So here resolve: their gift shall not expire,
But kindle freedom’s everlasting fire.
And so again in the fourth;
Here, by their rest, we vow to see it through,
A freedom born again, enduring, true.
The fifth begins with an air of proclamation and concludes by acknowledging those soldiers to be a guide point.
Let liberty endure, their will our guide,
A beacon lit by those who fought and died.
One text, five sonnets. It could easily have been a dozen. And more. All within the compass of one text, no two alike, all attracted within the same gravitational field.
Death of the Author and Cultural as System
Now let’s take up one of the central tropes of structuralist and post-structuralist criticism of the 1960s and 1970s, the co-called death of the author. “The Death of the Author” is a well-known, and in some quarters infamous, 1967 essay by Roland Barthes. It has nothing to do with the fact that the authors of most of the canonical texts are in fact dead, nor does it represent a wish that the living authors should die. Rather, Barthes takes as his starting point the fact that, when faced with the need to interpret a text, it is the text itself that is present to the reader, not the author. The reader should not and cannot be bound by whatever he or she may know of the author.
Literary texts, like all texts, are created in accordance with cultural codes embedded in language itself. Authors, like readers, are bound by those codes, by that language. In a sense, it is not so much that the author creates the text that the text creates the author.
Three years later, in 1970, Barthes would publish S/Z, in which he analyzes a short story by Balzac. He examines the text, line by line, in terms of a series of “codes.” More modest examples of structuralist analysis include Roman Jakobson’s analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 (1970), and the somewhat earlier (1962) analysis of Baudelair’s “Les Chats” that he undertook with Claude Lévi-Strauss.
But it is Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, starting with his 1955 analysis of the Oedipus myth, “The Structural Study of Myth,” that seems most relevant here. Why? Because myths do not have authors, not in the usual sense of the word. They are traditional stories, passed down from one generation to the next. The myths have tellers, of course, and each teller will place their own “spin” on the story, but they will also insist that they are telling the story faithfully, as it was passed down to them. The “author” of the myth, then, is the cultural system. That’s how Lévi-Strauss analyzed myths, in terms of a cultural system.
This brings us to a recent article by Tobias Rees, “Non-Human Words: On GPT-3 as a Philosophical Laboratory” (Dædalus 2022). Early in the essay he notes:
I am thinking of the many critics who have rejected, often with vehemence, the idea that GPT-3 really has words. When I worked through these critics, I found myself struck by the recognition that, no matter how diverse their background, they almost all offer a version of a single argument, which roughly goes like this: no matter how good GPT- 3 appears to be at using words, it does not have true language; it is just a technical system made up of data, statistics, and predictions.
He then goes on to discuss this, that, and the other at some length before arrive at de Saussure’s conception of language as a system:
Put differently, language is a freestanding arbitrary system organized by an inner combinatorial logic. If one wishes to understand this system, one must discover the structure of its logic. De Saussure, effectively, separated language from the human.
You can see where this is going, can’t you? That’s right:
GPT-3, then, is arguably a structural analysis of and a structuralist production of language. It stands in direct continuity with the work of de Saussure: language comes into view here as a logical system to which the speaker is merely incidental. [...] GPT-3, in short, extends structuralism beyond the human.
And here we are: FTH, FredTheHeretic, has produced five sonnets on “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.” As a specialization of ChatGPT has absorbed a significant portion of human culture as written on the internet, tuned that on texts by Frederick Turner, and applied itself to a text by Abraham Lincoln, a text that has become canonical in the national culture of the United States of America.
Think about it.
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