
“No sane person would sit down and write a novel,” said Cormac McCarthy, who sat down and wrote many novels touched by the searing genius associated with the luminously insane.
McCarthy wasn’t kidding. People who are possessed to agonize over art have probably had a daimon whisper in their ear. I don’t mean a demon. I mean the voice of a divine something, beckoning them to create, to do that thing only humans can do and no generative technology can because it lacks Promethean fire, snatched by “heavenward aspiration” and brought down through “heavenly portals.” Longfellow read that story as an allegory for the poet’s creative power:
All is but a symbol painted
Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer;
Only those are crowned and sainted
Who with grief have been acquainted,
Making nations nobler, freer.
In their feverish exultations,
In their triumph and their yearning,
In their passionate pulsations,
In their words among the nations,
The Promethean fire is burning.
That line always jumped out at me: “with grief have been acquainted.” There is always a price to pay. McCarthy knew that. So did his secret muse, Augusta Britt.
Until very recently, Britt’s identity had been a secret to everyone but McCarthy’s closest friends and family. Her influence on him was such that it is hard to see oeuvre looking the way it does today without the two of them ever crossing paths. We only know any of this thanks to
, author of . Britt confided in him alone her story, which is also McCarthy's, and a difficult and complex and therefore human one. It was published, after a half-century of silence, in Vanity Fair in the fall (Substack was kind enough to give him a platform to respond to the critics later), the season that confronts us with impermanence. Everything changes, like everything is changing now, with the rapid ascent of algocracy.Silicon Valley wants to build a computational god. They are calling it the Stargate Project, not to be confused with the secret U.S. government initiative of the same name that sought to investigate psychic phenomena for military and domestic intelligence applications. Larry Ellison of Oracle (there’s another curious reference to the supernatural) says that it will be able to create mRNA cancer vaccines using artificial intelligence “in about 48 hours.” He also said that “citizens will be on their best behavior” in the coming surveillance state. What’s not to love? Or fear.
I have an admittedly basic understanding of these things paired with a profoundly strong instinctive revulsion to them. Lucky for us, Barney is also very knowledgeable about AI and has a lot to say about how we got to this point, from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to LLMs, and the implications for art, the fruit of the “theft and the transmission” of fire—the spark that only humans can hold in their hands. No LLM will ever have a muse, let alone that spark.
I sincerely hope you listen to what Barney has to say. You can find him on Twitter here and subscribe to his Substack below.
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