‘Electromagnetic fields’, the book that Jorge Carrión wrote ‘hand in hand’ with artificial intelligence | The weekly country

In 1920, just after the First World War, when it was most convenient to reinvent the world, driven by the innovative inertia of the avant-garde, André Breton and Philippe Soupault, convinced militants of the surrealist current, published a pioneering and daring book: magnetic fields, The first text entrusted one hundred percent to automatism, written without correction, dictated by the interior, free even from itself, a visionary, foundational book, the first experiment in automatic writing in history.

A century later, the Argentine publishing house Caja Negra has brought to light electromagnetic fields, the first book in Spanish written with four hands (or six, or eight) by an author and artificial intelligence, another open door to experimentation and the future. The promoter of the project has been the writer Jorge Carrión (Tarragona, 1976), always sensitive to the discovery of new languages ​​and the possible reinvention of the concept of authorship. On this occasion, his traveling companions have been a group of artists and engineers from the Estampa Workshop in Barcelona. Together they programmed and fed a GPT-2 artificial intelligence system and dialogued with another, GPT-3, in order to generate two literary texts: two exercises in speculative writing, at times surreal, at times disturbing, as well as an introduction and a epilogues signed by the writer that complete a volume that can be read as an essay on the theories and practices of artificial writing, which illuminates the past, present, and future of the link between aesthetic creation and automation.

“For two years we have trained a GPT-2 algorithm to type like me. But even though I manage my vocabulary and explore my topics, his world and his style are more like that of César Aira. It is very surreal”, says Carrión. And he explains that they linked the project to the historical avant-gardes and made the GPT-3 write a very free remake of The magnetic fields. The proposal of electromagnetic fields it is collective and can be considered an inflection. Unlike the founding book by Breton and Soupault, it is no longer a question of transforming a dimension of one’s psyche into literature, but of inviting our technological allies, AI, to participate in the old art of narrating and building beauty so that they can express themselves. with us and beyond us with his non-human writing.

I have the book in my hands. I open it. Nothing bites me. No other lights come on but mine. Nothing is heard that is not the rumor of the pages. I remember Joaquin Phoenix in love with Her, Ishiguro’s Klara fed by the sun. On the flap are all the authors with their biographies: JC, Taller Estampa and GPT-2 and GPT-3.

“For me it has been a lesson in humility”, confesses Carrión, “I have understood that they already know how to write and that soon they will be able to write. I don’t know if it will take two or twenty years, but they will end up creating texts with aesthetic value. The book will remain as a document of today. Like a very serious joke.”

Roc Albalat, from Taller Estampa, explains: “Emotions and feelings do not manifest themselves in technical systems. However, current AI systems are trained, configured and activated by a data set that comes from the expression of millions of humans around the world. This is how they generate texts based on our inclination to communicate sensitive experiences and they do it better and better. If the words combined by the algorithm find a home in a reader who believes in them, it is undeniable that there will be emotion and feeling in their writing.

All this leads us to evoke that second law of Arthur C. Clarke: “The only possibility of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little beyond them, towards the impossible.”