Intellectual creativity, humans-in-the-loop, and AI: Part 2, Interpreting Jaws

This is the second post in my series, Intellectual creativity, humans-in-the-loop, and AI. The first post set the theme: On the boundaries of cognition in humans and machines. The idea is simple: These days LLM-based AIs are given specific tasks, which I’m thinking of as imposing a boundary on the underlying model within which a solution is to be found/generated. The most interesting situation, though, is one where there is no boundary set. Rather, the task is to discover a problem one can work on, which I’m thinking of as imposing a boundary in the space. Here’s my first case, creating a Girardian interpretation of Steve Spielberg’s Jaws.

I’m using that as an example because, a) I did my own interpretation a couple of years ago (February 28 2022), so I remember the process, and b) more recently I had ChatGPT interpret the film (December 5, 2022), though, to be honest, comparing two performances is a distant second to my recollection of my own procress. What’s important about ChatGPT’s performance is that I gave it both the “text” (broadly understood) to interpret, and the conceptual lens though which to make the interpretation, the ideas of René Girard. ChatGPT had a specific task to perform. By contrast, I had no intention of interpreting Jaws when I decided to watch it a couple of years ago. How and why did I decide to interpret Jaws? That’s the issue.

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By way of background, I’m trained as a literary critic and I have a long-standing interest in films. I all but majored in literature as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s, where I heard Girard lecture on mimetic desire and sacrifice, his central ideas. I also attended two university-sponsored film series while I was there, one on foreign films and the other on American films. I got a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo in the 1970s, where I also attended a number of film series.

Thus interpreting texts is my business. I’ve done a lot of it in the last half-century. It’s something my mind has been organized to do. And, while films and novels, not to mention plays and poems, are quite different kinds of texts, to a first approximation (which is sufficient to my purpose here), they are the same kind of activity. You need to identify two things, a suitable text and “a way in.”

What makes a text suitable? The fact that you have a way in. What do I mean by a way in? An “angle,” a point of entry, somewhere to apply some idea to the text in a fruitful way. I tend to draw my ideas from psychology, psychoanalytic and cognitive, and structuralism and semiotics. In this case, I chose the ideas of René Girard, though it might be more accurate to say that those ideas chose me (& Jaws). In any event, though I’ve been acquainted with Girard since the 1960s, this is the only time I’ve used his ideas in interpreting a text.

Watching Jaws

But, as I’ve said, I had no such thing in mind when I decided to watch Jaws back in 2021. I hadn’t seen it when it first came out (in 1975), but I knew it was an important film, the first so-called blockbuster. I decided it was time to watch.

I should note however, that as interpreting texts is my business, I’m always of the lookout for interesting texts. I have a series of media notes on New Savanna that dates back for May of 2010, almost the beginning of the blog, though the first post explicitly labeled as a media note didn’t go up until June of 2019. Any movie or TV program I watch could end up in a media note, and the occasional YouTube video as well. Media notes are, for the most part, quick dirty posts that I write up in an hour or so, sometimes less, occasionally a bit more. They’re not meant to be anything more. I never know when I watch something whether or not it will end up in a media note. And, as proved to be the case with Jaws, every once in a while I become really interested in something.

Keeping that in mind as deep background, I cued Jaws up on Netflix and watched it. Afterward I took a look at the Wikipedia entry. I do this for most of the movies I stream online, and for many of the TV series as well. I think of it as ‘calibration.’ I want to review the film and get a rough sense of what’s been said about the film. Jaws is such an important film that the entry was relatively large. There were a lot of comments by critics offering various interpretations of what the shark stood for, but the one I found most interesting was that by Fredrick Jamison, a well-known Marxist literary critic. He asserted it mean anything, everything, and nothing (in particular). I liked that.

But what I latched on to were the remarks about the sequels. There were three of them, all of them inferior to the original. I decided to take a look.

Now, I’m interested. I didn’t have anything in mind. But I like watching movies, so why not?

I like Jaws 2, but could see that it wasn’t quite as good as the original. I was unable to finish watching the other two sequels. Jaws 4 was especially wretched. In this process I’m sure I read the Wikipedia entries for those movies as well and re-read the entry for Jaws.

How did I arrive at those judgments? At this point I don’t recall, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t use any specific process. It was just intuitive judgements. How do we make those?

At this point I asked myself: So Jaws 2 is inferior to Jaws, why? I don’t know how long it took me to arrive at this conclusion, but here it is: the original film was tighter? What does that mean? Well, it falls into two parts. The first part is about 3/5ths of the film and takes place in Amity, with many people doing this that and the other. It’s pretty chaotic. The second part involves only four characters, three humans and the shark. It’s much more tightly focused. There’s no such division in Jaws 2, which involves many people through the entire film. The action is more diffuse.

The game is afoot

OK, so what makes the original one tick? I spent a good deal of time thinking about the three-way interaction between the shark, and two factions of townspeople. One faction wanted to close the beaches until the shark about been found and killed (or had been known to leave). The other faction wanted to keep the beaches open so that the town could rake in tourist dollars, which were central to the local economy. In the end, though, the town decided that they had to close the beaches and hire someone to kill the shark.

That brings us to the second part of the film. The town hired Quint, a disagreeable old shark hunter who agreed to do the job for $10,000. Sheriff Brody and Matt Hooper, a marine biologist and shark expert, went with him. I settled on one question: Why did Quint have to die? Why didn’t sheriff or Hooper die?

I’ve not yet decided to write an article, but I sense that I’m on to something.

At this point I’m thinking about story-telling conventions. Jaws tells a certain kind of story. In this kind of story the monster, or whatever, must be killed, otherwise there’s no point. Well, the shark was killed, but why Quint as well? One possible answer: Well, we can’t make it too easy. Someone has to die more or less on general principle. Why not Quint? After all, he’s a rather unpleasant character.

How does Quint’s death affect the ending? That is to say, in this kind of story we generally have a celebratory ending when the heroes return home after the monster was vanquished. Jaws didn’t have such an ending.

I’m in!

And then it hit me: Quint’s the sacrificial victim! Not the shark. Bingo! Girard, mimetic desire, sacrifice.

Crudely put, as best as I can remember, that’s how it happened. All these things came together at once. I had my way in, my point of conceptual departure. This is when I decided to write about the movie.

I made notes, read more about the movie, read some Girard, and consulted with my friend David Porush, who had studied with Girard in graduate school (a half century ago). I still had a lot of work to do, but it was all fairly tightly focused. I remember, for example, spending a fair amount of time tracking down scripts so that I could get the exact wording for Quint’s speech about being on the USS Indianapolis in WWII when the ship was sunk and lost half the crew to sharks. I wasn’t able to find a version with the actual words on the screen, so I ended up having to transcribe it myself. Why did I do that? Because it was about sharks and Quint, that’s why. Details. Interpretations are built on lots of details. Another detail: Sheriff Brody telling the mayor:

This summer’s had it. Next summer’s had it. You’re the mayor of Shark City. You wanted to keep the beaches open. What happens when the town finds out about that?

“Shark City,” and important detail. And so forth.

And that, more or less, is how I ended up writing about Jaws. I watched the film in 2021. I may have watched Jaws 2 at that time as well. I forget what brought me back to the film a year later. Maybe nothing in particular. I was just curious. I watched it again and curiosity became interest and interest grew into a written article over the course of two or three weeks.

I made my first New Savanna post about Jaws on Feb. 9, 2022. It was a long one, almost 5K words. My 3 Quarks Daily article appeared on February 28.

What kind of a process is that?

I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it depends on my education, interests, and decades of experience. What’s interesting is that it wasn’t until near the end of the process, after I’d watched Jaws three or perhaps four times, and Jaws 2 at least two times, and after I’d done quite a bit of thinking about the films, only then did I come up with a specific interpretive approach. The thinking that led to that was based on my knowledge of stories and conventions and my experience in reasoning about them.

It took all that to, in effect, place a boundary in my mind, a boundary within which I could conduct the detailed reasoning needed to produce a written interpretation. How do we produce an AI that’s capable to producing such a boundary? When I prompted ChatGPT to using Girard’s ideas to interpret Jaws, I gave it that boundary. I could then work within that bounded region to produce an interpretation, and even then I had to nudge it along here and there.

Roughly speaking, then, we have two very different intellectual processes. The first starts with me going about my everyday life, which includes watching streaming movies. I chose Jaws to fill in a gap in my knowledge of popular movies. Once I’d read the Wikipedia entry and decided, hey! I should watch the sequels, then I began an open-ended process with no specific endpoint. But I knew, from my years of experience, that one can learn things about texts by comparing them with other texts. That’s what I set out do to.

And so I began exploring a largish and loosely defined area of my “mindspace.” That exploration ended when I focused on Quint and Girard’s ideas about mimetic desire and sacrifice popped into my mind. I want to emphasize that point. Girard’s ideas came to me unbidden. I was not, for example, looking through my “inventory” of interpretive strategies, looking for a way in. If I’d done that, then I might not have looked at Girard at all, for I’ve never made such use of his ideas. Rather, they’re just some ideas that stuck in my mind from my undergraduate days.

This first process took place over a period that started in sometime in 2021 when I watched the film, probably three quarters of a way though (I don’t know the exact date) and lasted until late January of 2022. I certainly wasn’t thinking about the film during that whole time, but I may well have thought about it now and then until January, 2022, when I went at it. I took me, say, a week or two of work, every day or every other day, before Girard hit me. That’s when the second process took over. It was faster and more intense.

Once my mind had presented me with the connection between Girard and Quint, though, I knew that I had something worth working on. At that point I began a different kind of process, one focused on refining my interpretive hypothesis and gathering evidence for it. I went looking for Girardian materials on the web – my library is in storage, so the two books I own, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, and Violence and the Sacred, weren’t available. I read general articles, an interview or two, and some short interpretive pieces. That’s when I went looking for scripts of Jaws and articles about it. And that’s when I consulted with my old friend, David.

The contention in this series is that the current crop of AIs can undertake this second kind of process, but not the first. I don’t even know how we’d create a machine that can undergo the process. How do we endow a machine with the ability to make its way in the world, and then set it free to do that?