Machine Voice: Programmer Fiction

In the early 1960s, a South African computer programmer experimented with one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the Atlas 2, to produce machine-written poetry. He was a keen reader of modernist literature, and was completing a Master’s degree on the work of Ford Madox Ford around the same time. Some of the work was published in the programmer’s native South Africa, including in an anti-Apartheid magazine. The experiments were ultimately short-lived, though. The programmer soon moved on to other pursuits, his exit hastened by concerns he had about the use of these Atlas computers for atomic weapons research. This programmer I am describing is J. M. Coetzee, who would become one of the most significant writers of the second half of the twentieth century. As scholars such as Rebecca Roach have described, Coetzee’s interaction with the early era of natural language processing influenced both his work and his conception of what it meant to write at all. Well after he had left computational research, Coetzee was still describing writing as a battle against language’s capacity to produce itself, meaninglessly. As he puts it in Doubling the Point: ‘Writing […] involves an interplay between the push into the future that takes you to the blank page in the first place, and a resistance. Part of that resistance is psychic, but part is also an automatism built into language: the tendency of words to call up other words, to fall into patterns that keep propagating themselves.’ This ‘automatism’, as he describes it, is recognizable to us today as the process by which generative AI produces language. It is in fact how large language models create sentences that feel as though they are natural. The question for Coetzee the creative writer, as opposed to Coetzee the programmer, was how to avoid the tendency of language to become derivative, and instead how to find a voice that was strikingly original. Across his notebooks and manuscripts held at the Harry Ransom Center, he insistently asks how his fiction will realize itself. Seeking to refuse the voice of the other – the voice of computation, the voice of apartheid, the voice of language itself – he composed for decades using pen and paper. He even created his own system of longhand composition and notation. As large language models put the concept of originality under significant pressure, I demonstrate how Coetzee’s struggle to find his own literary voice offers writers a way through contemporary debates about artificial intelligence. In the age of mechanized language, I suggest that it is still possible – in fact, ever more necessary – to speak for ourselves, but through creative and critical engagements with the technology in which we are embedded. This is a significant departure from current conversations about artificial intelligence, which tend to pit generative AI against an apparently non-technological history of writing.