11. READING AS REGENERATION

What we are dealing with here is a shift in perspective that literature had already begun in the age of non-intelligent digital technology, and even in the pre-digital era: the idea that the “finished” text does not exist, that what we read is merely one layer in the confused palimpsest that all textuality represents. Think of Kafka with his unfinished novels, with his Diaries — a search, the putting-into-words of the embryos of writing themselves.

With artificial intelligence, this movement will radicalize: the actualizations of a text will be so varied and numerous that they will shatter the illusion of the finished work. This will hold true from the standpoint of generation: why would an author cling to one particular actualization when the source code beneath it remains so rich in possibilities? And it will hold true from the standpoint of reception: why would a reader accept the form presented as definitive if they can reshape it to their liking?

Artificial intelligence arrives in a landscape where reading is already upended. The web of social media, of endless video feeds and continuous scrolling, has relegated long-form reading to the rank of a slightly outdated practice. I am among those who believe that language and the written word still possess great power and still have a role to play in our time, but it is far from certain that this will take the form of the kind of reading that characterized the reign of the book. Like writing, reading has evolved considerably across eras, shifting from reading aloud to silent reading, among other changes. We are accustomed to a type of reading that is anything but “natural,” though it feels that way to us. We mentally “replay” the words we read on the page — words that belong to the author. I do not want to caricature and claim that we always read books cover to cover; still, skipping ahead or doubling back are deviations from the norm. In book-based reading, nonlinearity is primarily mental: we summon fragments of earlier text, we layer elements to build images and figures internally. On the material level, there is a strong incentive to follow the arrow of the text. It is unlikely that, with the intelligence revolution, reading will retain the form we know — silent, mostly faithful to the author, and mostly linear.

What will become of the texts we cast into the world? We are currently living through a transition from the web-as-library to the intelligent Internet. So long as the web tilts more toward the document and toward retrieval, literary reception will not change entirely. We will release digital books on Amazon or elsewhere; we will use established distribution channels. The text that reaches the reader’s eyes or ears will be more or less the one prepared by the author or the editor (sometimes one and the same person). But as intelligence spreads into every corner of the web, the notion of fidelity is likely to come under siege. To put it plainly, the text released by the author will no longer be the text the reader receives. This rupture weakens the edifice of copyright yet further. The crisis of fidelity will be a crisis of reproducibility. The text will no longer be a copy prepared by a publisher, then mentally reproduced by the reader. It will be transformed, deconstructed and reconstructed, mangled. Every act of publication will be a dispossession; every act of reception, a betrayal.

On the horizon, a world is taking shape where reading will almost always be filtered through artificial intelligence. Not mediated — for AI is not a medium — but integrated into the intelligent Internet. A text may be completely altered, denatured, hybridized, synthesized, or blended with other texts. The idea is not new: reading as writing or rewriting. But in the case of the intelligent text, we will reach levels of transformation never seen before.

We will no longer write to be read as is; we will launch streams whose destination we will not know — chains of words that will mingle with other currents and go on to disrupt a few equations in the intelligent Internet. The author will lose herself in the etymology of “augmentation”: with each new computation event, a new text will be generated. To cast a word into the intelligent Internet will be like skipping a stone across water: strong on first contact, the impact will weaken little by little until it drowns in the ocean of computations. Reading as regeneration: a new generation of text — writing,  in the truest sense of the word.