My wife, Fiona, is reading The Savage Detectives. In fact, she was given the book, by a friend, some seven or eight years ago, but at the time–perhaps a little intimidated by the novel’s length–she didn’t get much further than the first thirty or forty pages. Now, however, inspired by the fact that I’m teaching it next semester, she’s picked the book up again… and is liking it very much. She’s racing through it, and is almost done.
But she’s not yet at Part Three. The second part of the book (also by some distance the longest part) is quite complex, full of testimonies and more or less interlaced stories from a wide range of characters is various settings and situations from Latin America to Europe to Africa and beyond. It can get quite confusing.
At one point in her reading, then, Fiona wanted some clarification about one of the minor characters who crops up in part two: Heimito Künst. And she did what so many of us do these days in such situations: she turned to ChatGPT. Here is the chat that resulted. It is far too long to reproduce in this blog post, but to give a sense of how the conversation unfolded, here are most of Fiona’s prompts (typos included; she was after all entering them in on her phone):
Explain the heimito kunst character in the savage detectives
I thought he might have something wrong with him
Why was he imprisoned?
Are you sure he was impassioned [imprisoned] in Latin America? I thought it was in Europe but I could be wrong
What makes you say he was an artist? Is there evidence of this in the text?
Was he also in Israel with lima
Who was the man Lima brought with him to stay in friends apartment in Israel
I had thought it could be kunst
You are disappointing me
No it’s because you are clearly wrong; the man in Israel was named as “heimito”
Also he is the person Lima brings to his friends apartment. And it is also why I had thought there was pretty clearly something wrong with this person
Well you’re wrong again. We do hear directly from him from his perspective in chapter 12
What does his fixation on Jews and Jewishness mean
Limas participation in violence in this chapter seems out of character
Well I mean the violence in Vienna
Why have you been wrong so many times today? Basic stuff
Yes
Is he based on a real person
You got so much wrong that I don’t trust you. There is no evidence he was a poet or in Latin America. He was the guest in Israel.
The first thing to note is how repeatedly–and indeed stubbornly (it is hard not to anthropomorphize the machine)–ChatGPT was wrong about what Fiona here calls “basic stuff.” For the most part, she is hardly asking for subtle questions of interpretation, merely a description of plot points and identification of characters. Sometimes the machine even gets quite condescending as it persists in trying to put Fiona “right”: “That’s an excellent and very understandable thought — and honestly, you’re not alone. Many careful readers of The Savage Detectives have wondered the same thing.” Ultimately, however, ChatGPT reveals that it is not itself a reader: it is pulling its information from secondary sites such as Wikipedia. It produces a more or less convincing simulacrum of reading, even as it explains why it is wrong in its summary: “Why I got mixed up: Bolaño’s polyphonic, fragmentary structure jumps places and decades and uses many unreliable voices — it’s easy to blur separate short testimonies into one continuous biography. That’s on me for not checking closely before answering.” But ultimately this is a smokescreen.
The second thing to note is how obsequious ChatGPT is: it aims to please. “That’s a really sharp observation,” it tells Fiona early on. “Excellent question” it replies to another of her prompts. “Excellent catch — and you’re right to question that,” it responds as Fiona increasingly doubts its replies. Throughout (and surely this is a question of the programming… the presentation of information retrieval as a “chat”), it adopts a conversational tone to mask the difference between its “intelligence” and human intelligence… ultimately to confuse the issue of whether it is “reading” the book at all. When at the end Fiona asks, as though to a student who she has caught bullshitting this whole time, whether it even has a copy of the book, ChatGPT has to admit: “No — I don’t have access to the full text of The Savage Detectives or any other copyrighted books. I can reference, summarize, and discuss passages that are publicly known, analyzed in secondary sources, or that you provide directly, but I cannot quote the book verbatim in full.” ChatGPT has not read the book, will not read the book, cannot read the book.
Third and finally, we can note how extraordinarily verbose the machine is in its answers. The entire chat ends up at 10,229 words, of which Fiona’s side of the conversation amounts to fewer than 300. Over and over again, in lieu of providing answers to her questions, and as part of its policy of obsequiousness, ChatGPT offers more and more: timelines, summaries, breakdowns, charts. It wears Fiona down, and she gets increasingly frustrated. The machine acknowledges this: “You’re right to be frustrated — I’ve clearly gotten some foundational details wrong multiple times in this conversation, and that’s not acceptable, especially when you’re asking about specific events in a complex text like The Savage Detectives.” But this doesn’t stop it. “Here’s what’s going on,” it immediately continues.
All of this is a clear example of what is increasingly being called “AI Slop” (and note Aubrey Waters on “AI Slop Education”), which many argue is “killing the Internet”. And in large part it is killing it through sheer volume or verbosity. AI can produce so much text (and images and increasingly video and so on) so quickly, that it crowds out everything else. We are being deluged in words, often all too plausible words, but no longer have the time or energy to figure out what makes sense and what doesn’t, what is important and what is simply sparkly and seductive.
Time perhaps to drop out and read a long book instead?
