As an experiment (and in preparation for an upcoming discussion of reading with AI, in the context of reading The Savage Detectives), I thought I would ask ChatGPT a few questions about the book, and see what it came up with. You can find the transcript of the resulting chat here: https://chatgpt.com/share/69c7928a-1ac0-832b-a01f-d991cb125134. Note that, because I am on the free tier of ChatGPT usage (i.e. I do not pay for it), I was only able to ask it ten questions. I may or may not continue the experiment later.
In sum, in some ways I was quite impressed with ChatGPT’s responses. On the whole, in general terms, it came up with some quite plausible readings… though I would emphasize that these are readings, plural, in that when pushed it would change its tune, albeit without fully acknowledging its shifts in interpretation. Moreover, the more detail I asked of it, the more it seemed likely to make mistakes, or to hallucinate. Again, while the overall sense it made of the book was often reasonable, and sometimes even revelatory, it still made several basic errors, and continued to make errors even when I tried to correct it. To put this another way (and drawing on Dan McQuillan’s description of AI as a “bullshit generator”; see also Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit): it came up with some quite high-quality bullshit that, as is generally the case with bullshit, had more than a kernel of plausibility or truth, but when pressed it tended to contradict itself or even to start to fall apart altogether.
Of course, in that (as we know) ChatGPT cannot “read” a text in anything like the conventional sense of reading, it draws its interpretation from what others have already said. So it was perhaps equally worrying that when, at the end of the chat, I asked it for its sources, its response was somewhat vague and evasive, even though at the same time it did provide some reasonable avenues for further study. But the worry is that, on taking up elements of ChatGPT’s proposed interpretation of Bolaño’s novel, I would be inadvertently plagiarizing the work of some other scholar, whose identity the AI bot could not help me to locate. At the end of the day, after all, LLM AI applications constitute the large-scale capture of intellectual, cognitive, and linguistic labor, whose origin they (necessarily) obfuscate.
It is possible that some of the less helpful or more worrisome aspects of the interaction with ChatGPT could be mitigated by better attention to the prompts I was giving it. For instance, if I continue this experiment in the future, I am tempted to ask it both for specific references to the text to support its claims, and for references to secondary criticism throughout the process. This might encourage a more grounded (and more transparent) interpretative process. Alternatively, rather than asking it directly about the text, one might begin at least with a review of the secondary literature on which it is drawing. That might keep it (and me, as a reader of ChatGPT’s “reading”) more honest.
Briefly to go through the questions I asked it…
First, I asked simply for it to provide me with the novel’s plot. It did a pretty good job of this, albeit that it had more to say about the book’s narrative structure than about the plot per se. The plot, after all, is not told linearly, and yet it kept to the order of the narration (the “discours” in Genette’s terms), rather than helping to reconstruct the story’s “histoire.” Having done this, it went further (beyond, indeed, what it had been asked) to advance some proposal’s as to the novel’s overall meaning. But in general, just about everything it said in response to this question was pretty much reasonable and defensible, and to some extent what I would even call insightful: the notion, for instance, that in the broadest terms the book’s plot involves a failed or futile search for origins, followed by “dispersal and disappearance.” Similarly, the summary of the novel’s themes as “literary ambition,” “friendship and exile,” and “the mythology of the avant-garde” makes sense, even if it is not necessarily the whole story–but then what summary is?
I did, however, feel it a little odd that this plot summary omitted the role of Amadeo Salvatierra, who is a recurrent voice in Part II of the novel, and who is important for the plot in that it is he who provides Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano with the information about Cesárea Tinajero that motivates and enables the road trip to Sonora around which the whole book revolves. So second, then, I asked ChatGPT about him…
In response, the chat implicitly recognized its error in omitting Salvatierra by saying that “he plays a crucial symbolic and structural role in The Savage Detectives” and that “he is actually the hinge between myth and history in the novel.” I was somewhat surprised, however, that ChatGPT should in fact spend more time on Salvatierra’s thematic or conceptual significance than on his function in the story. Indeed, the more that the chat edged towards concrete description, the more likely that it flirted with outright error. Hence, although its broad claims continued to be defensible and even perhaps enlightening (if not altogether unarguable), when for instance it states that “Amadeo possesses (or remembers) the only surviving work by Tinajero,” this is at best misleading: Amadeo very definitely possesses the surviving copy of the journal in which Tinajero’s poem is published. This is not simply a matter of memory: he shows it to Lima and Belano, so they can read it for themselves. More fundamentally, the chat is simply wrong with basic details when it claims that “Amadeo is an aging poet whom García Madero, Belano, and Lima visit early in the novel.” García Madero does not accompany Belano and Lima in this visit. And to say that it takes place “early in the novel” is again misleading: the account of the visit is threaded through Part II (and does not come to an end until page 588), although to be fair we can reasonably assume that it takes place at some point during the time period of Part I, the final weeks of 1975 as narrated by García Madero… but he never mentions the visit, presumably because he is most likely unaware of it.
I then asked for more information about the fates of the novel’s key characters.
ChatGPT’s response about García Madero was mostly to the point, albeit again somewhat misleading when it said that “García Madero is almost never mentioned” in Part II. In fact, he is mentioned precisely once… and it is surely important to describe that sole mention, not least because it comes when the so-called expert on visceral realism denies that anyone with that name had ever belonged to the movement.
What it had to say about Lupe was also OK, and even insightful. Again, it is notable (and surely somewhat surprising) how quick ChatGPT jumps to interpretation, rather than description. Perhaps this is because it is drawing above all on interpretations in the secondary criticism? But its conclusion about her fate is fair enough, albeit that this is surely a fate shared with (rather than opposed to that of) García Madero: “Not just absence from literary history, but from the kinds of stories that get told at all.” Eager to please, ChatGPT also offered to expand this discussion via a “compar[ison] to women in other Bolaño novels (like 2666), where this question of disappearance becomes even more central and more disturbing.” This in fact sounds like an interesting direction for further enquiry (and it’s perhaps intriguing that ChatGPT should offer to take me down that route), but here I was sticking with The Savage Detectives…
It was upon being asked about what ultimately happened to Lima and Belano that ChatGPT really started falling apart. Its top-level (i.e. “bullshit”) analysis remained for the most part quite impressive. For instance, the notion that these two characters become transformed into myth, and that there’s an irony in the failure of their mission to track down (what we find out is) the all too material and corporeal Cesárea in Part III, which may indeed lead to the conclusion that “to pursue literature absolutely may mean vanishing from it.” This was one of the ideas that ChatGPT gave me that I quite liked. And yet again, there was the sense that the chat was weak on description and detail. For example, when it says that “At one point, [Belano] travels to Africa and is possibly present during a conflict,” this is at best wishy-washy, almost as though it didn’t want to be pressed on what exactly happened. (In fact, after all, it’s not just “at one point” that Belano is in Africa, but this is where he is last seen. And more than being “possibly present during a conflict,” he is discovered in the thick of the Liberian Civil War.) If we were to anthropomorphize the machine (and it’s hard not to), we might say that this is the answer of a student who has only a hazy recollection of the text and wants to hedge their bets with their answers.
And indeed, when I pressed it further for answers, ChatGPT really started to struggle. Projecting its own confusion onto the text, for instance, the chat said that Belano “travels to Africa (often read as Liberia or Angola, though the novel is oblique).” In fact, however, there is nothing oblique about it: we are told quite clearly that he is in both Angola (Luanda, to be precise) and Liberia (a short distance from Monrovia). With Lima, things got still worse, and ChatGPT started to make multiple errors, even when I tried to zero in on them.
It’s not necessarily worth detailing these errors, though it’s interesting, first, that the app’s tactic when pointed out its mistakes is to concede without fully giving ground. After I observed that it was wrong to a greater or lesser extent about the fates of both characters, it responded: “You’re right to push back—both of those ‘last sightings’ are more precise (and more interesting) than my previous answer suggested. Let me correct and sharpen things.” Yet it is not simply “more precise” to note that Lima is last seen not in Europe (as the chat had claimed) but in Mexico: it is right, where the chat was wrong. Second, moreover, as it made mistakes about the details it also started to make more obvious errors of general interpretation. For instance, in that Lima is located in Mexico City by our visceral realist expert at the end of Part II, it is simply not the case that “he simply fades out of the record altogether, more completely than anyone else in the novel.” There are plenty of other characters (most obviously perhaps, García Madero) who are more fully erased from the record… as indeed ChatGPT had already observed (when it said that, by contrast with Lima and Belano, he “undergoes a kind of negative initiation–into obscurity rather than legend”). The machine is by now contradicting itself, though unsurprisingly enough without acknowledging the fact.
After all, the chat’s tone remains consistent: it retains its aura of confident authority, so much more so that in reading it, one is tempted to doubt oneself… If I had not finished the novel only this week, I might easily have been more prepared to go along with its account, and to question my own memory rather than catching the app’s hallucinations.
For my next question (and by this time I was running out of my allocation), I returned to conceptual issues more than concrete details, in fact feeding it questions about length and endings that I had put to my students in class. Again I feel that its answers were illuminating even (if we can say this of a machine) “thoughtful.” These could definitely have been useful contributions to the discussion we had in class… I had a twinge of regret that perhaps I had missed a trick or two. Put it this way: if ChatGPT had been a student or (as a more likely scenario… and the worry of educators today) if a student had read out ChatGPT’s responses and presented them as their own, they would have been among the more insightful and valuable voices in class. I even like some of its turns of phrase. For instance, I like the notion that “If The Savage Detectives were shorter, it would be a story. If it were longer, it would be an archive.” This formulation is at the same time provocative and neat. Likewise with the notion that what we have here is “a myth of literature built out of fragments, ending exactly where it has to–at the moment when the search reveals that there was almost nothing to find.” In class, I said something similar, or at least similar enough–I put things differently, in that my suggestion was that at the end García Madero at least finds “nothing” in the more substantive sense that he touches and perhaps even falls (or jumps) into the void that lies beyond the “window” of representation. But still, there are some sentences and phrases in ChatGPT’s interpretation that I perhaps wish I had said or considered en route to my own conclusion, or which could usefully have been put to the students as alternative considerations. Could ChatGPT become a valued interlocutor in the classroom?
Yet by this point, seeing the chat’s weakness on points of concrete detail, to be honest I had started to lose faith or trust in ChatGPT altogether. Worse, this sense of distrust had become generalized: I no longer felt confident about either its reading or (to be even more honest) my own. After all, if my reading overlapped to some extent with that of a machine that had just shown some fundamental ignorance of basic issues of plot, then did that not cast shadow on my own interpretation, too?
So the last of my permitted questions was about its sources. I figured I would be better off looking to where ChatGPT was getting its “thoughts” than continuing to engage with the chat itself. Here, however, the app was both honest and unhelpful: “What I’ve given you is a synthesis drawn from general knowledge of The Savage Detectives, familiarity with Roberto Bolaño’s work, and the broad critical conversation around it.” In other words, the AI is drawing on a cloud of more or less established readings, without being able to pin down or lead me directly to who first established those readings, or what debates they had led to. It had, as it were, anonymized the critical conversation, obscuring the identities of those on whose intellectual labor it relies. To be fair, it did then provide some bibliographic references, and ended also with a note of caution that there are indeed “other strong readings that [it] ha[d]n’t foregrounded”… or even, if it were more truthful, mentioned at all. Its appropriation of intellectual labor, in other words, is selective and unequal. It’s notable, for instance, that it acknowledges that among the readings it had ignored were those inspired either by queer theory or by feminism.
And perhaps it would have been helpful if at the very start it had stated upfront that what it was “giv[ing me] is not the interpretation, but a coherent, recognizable strand within Bolaño criticism.” Though of course it had done all it could to make this “recognizable strand” appear to be all its own work, appealing to our technological fetishism that attributes to the machine the qualities of agency and intellect that more properly belong to those who feed it… which is, in the end, you and me.
