by Holly Van Leuven

Artificial intelligence tools have been available to ordinary writers (and people in general) for about a year. The technology burst into the mainstream with the release of ChatGPT, a chatbot run by an algorithm trained on large swathes of data to sound human and intelligent, in November 2022. The public response to the technology since then has been mixed. The general consensus about it seems to be: “That’s interesting, but is it necessary? And isn’t this all a bit too creepy?”

Now, the new technology is meeting some serious critics. The Authors Guild and 17 high-profile fiction writers including Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult, George R. R. Martin, and George Saunders have filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. The Guild and the authors allege that the plaintiffs’ books, as well as many others, were used to “train” the large language model to return coherent and grammatical answers through the chatbot, without OpenAI seeking permission from or providing compensation to the authors of works used.

Saunders’ opinion echoed the other plaintiffs’. In a statement issued by the Writers Guild, he said, “I’m very happy to be part of this effort to nudge the tech world to make good on its frequent declarations that it is on the side of creativity. Writers should be fairly compensated for their work. Fair compensation means that a person’s work is valued, plain and simple. This, in turn, tells the culture what to think of that work and the people who do it. And the work of the writer—the human imagination, struggling with reality, trying to discern virtue and responsibility within it—is essential to a functioning democracy.”

At least one very prominent fiction writer is not troubled by the fact that ChatGPT has likely learned how to “speak” thanks to his novels. In fact, he’s not even suing. That author is Stephen King. He recently told The Atlantic, “Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.”

The argument fomenting in the upper echelons of American authordom echoes the range of opinions held by less famous (and less wealthy) writers. In fact, to a working writer trying to break through with a first or second book, who in theory should fear competition the most, AI may seem less threatening. After all, those writers know intimately how many people have been willing to write for little or no compensation. The problem is not that there is not enough writing: it’s that a small fraction of what gets written ever gets published, let alone published well.

It does not seem like the writing of bots, no matter who their literary models are, is going to make inroads into mainstream publishing anytime soon. According to the U.S. Copyright Office, machine-written work cannot be copyrighted, and machine-generated works that are modified by humans are only considered on a case-by-case basis. Add in the stigma that “AI writing” currently carries among the most successful authors of the Big Five houses, and there does not seem to be a strong business case for publishers to wade into the AI morass.

As The New York Times noted, “The [publishing] industry’s most pressing challenge is making readers aware of the books it does publish, a task that has gotten much more difficult in recent years.” To that end, humans still have the advantage. The responsibility of generating interest in a book falls most heavily on the shoulders of its author, who must pursue publicity opportunities and hold events. While the latter are time consuming and expensive, and often funded by the author, they are at least domains where AI has no foothold.

That’s not to say that Big Tech companies should be allowed to profit from creative work at the expense of authors. Whether texts generated by AI ever become valuable or not, OpenAI still stands to make billions of dollars from subscriptions to its chatbot and enterprise applications. However, chatbots like AI also take billions of dollars to operate due to the infrastructure needed for massive computer servers to manage the data. New research from the tech industry estimates that OpenAI used 185,000 gallons of water to keep its servers cool enough to train ChatGPT, and that every 10 to 100 prompts it answers for a user requires another liter of water. OpenAI is still many years away from being profitable or sustainable.

The Silicon Valley credos of “Move fast and break things” and “Ask forgiveness rather than permission” are antithetical to how the publishing industry and intellectual property laws work in the United States. Perhaps someday licensing an author’s work for use in large language models will be as valuable a revenue stream as foreign rights or multimedia rights. Maybe the American publishing industry itself will be saved by some version of the Big Five publishers becoming the Big Five language models, the sole proprietors of artificial intelligence tools we can’t even fathom yet, but that will rely on literary works. The Authors Guild lawsuit, then, may be an opening salvo, warning Big Tech that infringement is not the cheap and easy way to riches, and to think twice before exploiting authors and publishers further.

While it’s unfortunate that writers are getting introduced to this technology by virtue of needing to worry about their work getting exploited, authors may benefit from keeping an open mind about the good possibilities of AI. The New York Times also reports that enterprising authors are just starting to use AI “as a writing and editing assistant that can help them brainstorm, organize material, develop characters, or create an outline.”

What if the biographer could patiently comb through archives, photographing documents and making those creative connections and discoveries in the ways only trained humans can, while an AI algorithm organized their thousands of images, transcribed documents, synthesized information, and even helped remind them of items they saw five years ago, the way social media prompts users with “memories”—photos from years gone by—in the present day? What if AI gave biographers tools good enough to help them write six quality biographies in a career rather than two or three?

These musings are far from complete, and the Venn diagram of “artificial intelligence” and “crafting biography” will likely only continue to overlap as time goes by. What’s clear right now, though, is that the new technology is going to be a significant part of the literary conversation for years to come. We may as well keep an ear to the ground about both its pitfalls and its promises.

by Patricia Laurence

When Elizabeth Bowen’s typewriter—an Olympia Splendid 33—suddenly popped up on Twitter a few months ago, I paid attention. It was a squat, beige-colored model displayed at Doneraile Court in Ireland that I had never seen before. It inspired new questions for research, as I was piqued by a movement in biography that values the stories behind objects—“talking objects.” Objects and a person’s relationship to them are the focus of a new group of biographers and social scientists who assert their importance in animating hidden histories and life stories, changing the way we look at our subjects. An object can make a life more visible—particularly if there is an absence of written documents—that might otherwise be lost. Tiya Miles found a story of slavery in a sack containing a tattered dress, pecans, and a braid—objects given by a 19th-century enslaved mother, Rose, to her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, before being forcefully separated from her. Miles describes the story in All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.

My interest in the topic was developed by the “Object Lessons” column of The Atlantic, which features the hidden lives of ordinary things, and a Global Biography Zoom seminar out of the London School of Economics. Laura Almagor, of Utrecht University, one of the organizers, noted how vision is shifted when the biographer becomes interested in the inanimate and the subject’s relationship to it: a shopping cart, a stethoscope, a kaleidoscope, a bicycle, a cane, a dollhouse. . . . These significant objects in a person’s life become an extension and an important aspect of the person’s identity that we have perhaps ignored. Objects, I thought, are not the whole of the story but can illuminate hidden corners of a life, and I turned my thoughts again to Bowen.

Looking at her Olympia typewriter and knowing that she switched to it in the mid-1930s, I began to wonder what effect this had on her stories and novels. Did the stroke of the black and white keys throw a new coldness over her writing page? An estrangement? Perhaps she liked the distance from her hand. She told an interviewer that she typed slowly “at thought speed” and liked the “impersonality” of seeing a sentence in typescript on the page. How many typewritten drafts did she produce? Did she save them? And the sound of the keys—the clicks—were they an affirmation of the letters struck? What of the loss of the sweep and the rhythm of her hand across the page with her favorite Biro pen—through which she felt the visceral flow of her thought, through her body, to her hand, to pen and paper.

Virginia Woolf, I thought, for one, would not let go of these sensations and connections. She speculates in A Room of One’s Own that one could easily imagine how women became writers before entering other professions, for “you have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with pen in her hand.” Paper and a pen are cheap; women could write. It is important to note, however, that though coveting the pen, Woolf herself followed a two-step writing process: in the morning, she wrote by hand in her notebooks; in the afternoon, she typed her drafts and notes. At times, she exclaimed, “I hate the typewriter.” I picture Woolf standing at her upright desk—that her nephew, Quentin Bell, describes as “3 feet 6 inches high with a sloping top”—scratching in a rush her essays, letters, and diaries trying to catch up with her thoughts, as if, she said, following voices. In analyzing Woolf’s writing, the graphologist Lidia Fagorolo speculates that her ideas and passion took material form in the spaces between her words and her “forward slant, dynamism, and springing purple script” that you can observe in her Mrs. Dalloway notebook, now showcased in the current New York Public Library’s “The Polonsky Exhibition of Treasures.” The purple script, though difficult to read, has the rush of exuberance.

Bowen, too, was concerned with handwriting and worried about losing personality and individuality in adopting the use of a typewriter. She was a writer who had style—a way of expressing herself—in talk with a slight stutter; in entertaining; in attention to the fashion she wore; and the manners she adopted. Style also extended to her handwriting; she once wrote a worried note to her good friend William Plomer, an amateur graphologist and writer, who valued handwriting in an age that considered the typewriter indispensable. When Bowen learned to type in the mid-30s, she wrote apologetically: “After the extraordinarily nice things you’ve said about my writing—you once said it was stylish, which made a great impression on me—it seems rather a pity to type you a letter.” This was also the time when she was writing her wartime novel, The Heat of the Day, typing multiple drafts, I discovered—as did Woolf when writing Mrs. Dalloway. Did Bowen revise more when she switched to typing and what do the revisions reveal? And, was this now my post-biography quest?

Another typewriter of an earlier generation in the New York Public Library exhibit I perused is that of Mark Twain. At first he welcomed the “newfangled typing machine” in the early 1870s, a relief from leaky fountain pens and smudges. In a letter to his brother, he wrote: “[T]he machine has several virtues[.] I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page.” But after a year or two, he found—unlike Bowen and Woolf—that it degraded his character, “full of caprice, full of defects—devilish ones.” He gave his typewriter away twice, but it kept coming back to him.  Nevertheless, Twain himself came back to the typewriter to complete his 1883 book Life on the Mississippi. Yet he remained ambivalent and sent a letter to Remington, asking them to stop using his name as an endorsement of their product: “I don’t want people to know I own this curiosity-breeding little joker.”

The consideration of the object, in this instance the typewriter, has sent me on a zigzag and unpredictable post-biography journey to ruminate on the tools of writing and pursue questions about its effect on Elizabeth Bowen’s writing style. The relationship between writers and machines continues with the computer and its contribution to the ease of and, sometimes, the disappearance of revision (that some consider a liability). And now the technology of AI not only makes aspects of writing easier (yet with its own share of “caprices” that Mark Twain mentions), but may, magically, also make the writer marginal and, eventually, write for you.

Patricia Laurence publications include The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford University Press, 1992), Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (University of South Carolina Press, 2003), translated into Chinese (Shanghai Bookstore Press, 2008); and, Julian Bell, A Violent Pacifist (Cecil Woolf, 2005). Her biography, Elizabeth Bowen, A Literary Life, was published in the Palgrave Macmillan Literary Lives Series (December, 2019). Learn more about Laurence here. 

What is your current project and what stage is it at?

I am currently writing a biography of Eugénie de Montijo, the last French Empress (1826–1920), with a co-author, Petie Kladstrup. It will be published by an imprint of HarperCollins, Hanover Square Press, in the spring of 2025. We are in the last leg of researching and at the writing stage—the fun stage. It is so exciting to be the first two women to write on Eugénie, whose life achievements and character were misunderstood, not only during her long life of 94 years but also since her death in 1920.

What person would you most like to write about?

Marian Anderson, the first African American to perform with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. I discovered Marian when working on a biography of Leonard Bernstein. The editor then asked me if I would be willing to write about her. My answer was an enthusiastic “Yes”! Unfortunately, the publishing house was bought by a bigger one and the collection was cancelled. Since then, I have always kept Marian in the back of my mind.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

There are two exciting times when writing a biography. For a historical character like Eugénie, archives, the press, and memoirs from her contemporaries are great sources of information. What a joy when new information surfaces among yellowed letters or articles! There are also meetings with descendants who generously open their memorabilia and share recollections from their ancestors. The human connection over a deceased person is priceless and helps the biographer to better understand their subject.

What I enjoy most is writing for different types of readers. When working on Leonard Bernstein, my goal was to help French music lovers to better understand his importance not only as the composer of West Side Story but also as a conductor and an educator. The same applies now to our book on Eugénie. We are trying to make American Francophiles appreciate the role of Empress Eugénie as a ruler but also as a pioneer advocate of women’s rights in Europe.

 What have been your most frustrating moments?

I am a native French speaker with a rather good command of English (hopefully). My most frustrating moments are when I struggle to express myself in English as subtly as I can in French. Fortunately, for the book on Empress Eugénie, I’m working with a wonderful American writer, Petie Kladstrup, co-author of Champagne Charlie. Her experience as a journalist allows her to give a certain “tone” to the book. It is so helpful.

If you weren’t a biographer, what dream profession would you be in, and why?

A writer. I’ve loved writing, whether in French or in English, since I was a child. My first “writings” were short autobiographical pieces. Nowadays, I would love writing nonfiction requiring research and traveling, meeting people, talking to them, and trying to understand their world. International cultures are my passion!

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure and who are some of your favorite writers?

For pleasure? My first passion as a young woman was French and English literature. I never gave up and kept reading a lot of novels in both languages from various countries (France, England, America, Australia). My favorite authors? Balzac, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Jim Harrison, Robertson Davies, David Lodge, Alison Lurie, William Boyd, and Tom Robbins are the authors I always come back to. Right now, I read a lot of historical novels or general fiction about women. I enjoy the works of Annabel Abbs, Alexandra Lapierre, and Sara Fitzgerald—three women who write about overlooked or less-known women.

Learn more about Evelyne Resnick here.