The Nine Lives of Book Lovers and the Endangered Art of Human Writing in an Age of AI

Thoughts and Trends · Opinion

By Taofeek Ọlálékan Ògúnpérí

“Books are so special even God had to instruct the world through them” is a statement I have said to different people at different times. Each time, I always hoped to impress upon my audience, whether it was an audience of one or more, the importance of books as cultural items, even when religious too. To read a book is to come to the magic of human intellect, and to love books is to see the transcendentalism of such intellect as books, anchored with fine writing, and to love it.

In fiction, you enter a world of plausible human experiences, ones that may take you many lifetimes and over to familiarize with, were you to experience them by yourself. There is often a reaching out of hand, an embrace, that what you the reader might be or might be experiencing, might be interested in, is common with one (real or imagined) person, if not more. In poetry, you encounter the evocative power of more in a few words. In nonfiction, history lurks around, knowledge is recorded, philosophy is communicated, to name but few. These are important, immaterial, sometimes transferably material, knowledge that are key to human survival, sustenance of personal dreams and wonder. But that is on the reader's side, after the work of crafting and recrafting of books are already done by writers.

To be a writer is a lot of work. That sounds cliche, but it was true five centuries ago, as it is even now. The 2017 winner of NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature late poet Ikeogu Oke spent 27 years writing The Heresiad which won him the Prize. The epic was written—not to mention personal struggles and seasons—out of a curiosity about the execution of a writer in 1988, as Oke said. Before Ikeogu Oke, there was Fyodor Doestovesky who lived life through the downs, once nearly executed, before committing much of his time to writing fiction that continues to attract audiences. That is writing: an art that demands to be felt, seen, and lived through, even if vicariously, by the author and the readers.

While writing, the indispensable organ of books, has not been often favored, it has nevertheless ensured so much for human civilization. All the greatest intellectual and scientific innovations have had to be documented in writing, sometimes in books. The philosophical contributions of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Karl Marx, among others, could not have made it to modern times without the agency of writing and books. The same goes for the most defining political and scientific theories across human ages. Without books, much of what we depend on for structured societies and advancing humanity would have either been forgotten or preserved as myths and lores. Even the technorati that continue to undermine artistic originality would not have existed, at this scale at least (I will come back to this point later).

Mythologizing and lore creation happen when evidence disappears, when vacuum takes the place of evidential understanding. So, even though Platonic Ontological Structure rated writing below speech, writing as recorded in books and publications, is what has preserved Plato and his philosophy till date. Jacques Derrida turned things around with his development of Deconstruction as, for the sake of this article, a non-practice practice of resituating meaning. The very act of creation in writing, even in far less creative writing like political and economic texts, is an artistic end in itself; one that speech, as we have seen, may not replicate. As I write this article, my brain functions in a way that I am less given to have it when I am engaged in speechmaking.

In language classes, one of the taught courses introduces students to the four Language Acquisition Devices (LADs): Speaking, Listening, Writing, Reading. While speaking and listening are primary and more easily acquired, writing and reading have to be learned and practiced, at least in an arguably more formal, more rigorous way. Books tend to be the fertile ground where the two can be honed—writing, through creation; reading, through cognitive interrogation. It is therefore a given that every time I write, and read what others have written, I am engaged in an art of self-development.

The self-development is at least about two things. On the one hand, I have the refinement of my thought process and the expansion of my worldview, perception and epistemic awareness. On the other hand, there is the establishment of a sense of connection with the world beyond my temporal and other limited existential, personal capacities. Writing, and invariably reading, books ensures a universalism of being—and more importantly the originality of thoughts. That much is now in ruins—or nearly so. The technorati who are behind Large Language Models are effacing that agency for refinement and connection in ways that portends personal erasure and societal displacement. (And I wonder what Plato would have had to say about this.)

In the life of a book, the writer, because of their needs to create, gazes and participates at life and events, observes, researches hands-on, and conditions their mind to artistic, if not always imaginative, exercise to write, so that readers may read. In doing that, writing as an art is pushed beyond its existing boundary. It is why Beowulf could read differently to The Heresiad, why The Canterbury Tales reads differently to Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad. The same is true of The Federalist Papers and Timeless Tai. But the author now suffers a personal erasure with Large Language Models: with a prompt or more, what used to be an open, sometimes even near-spiritual, exercise of creating with words become non-creative, aggregated and rote product of an AI.

In other words, my week-long research, reading and strategising for this column which took me through different subjects, epochs, views and arguments (many of which did not make it to this final version but which nevertheless sharpened my view and enriched me to write) would have been alienated from me, added nothing to what I knew or forced me to revisit my conclusions where necessary, just because of an AI prompt. My personal development is the first thing to go as a writer, but society loses more. What is written is for an audience, even if that audience is just one person, even if that audience is the same person who writes it.

When writing is not original, books cannot be original, and that is a limitation too costly to respect. Ludwig Wittgenstein, to paraphrase, rightly foretold it when he said that the limit of one's language is the limit of their world. When a writer relies on AI to generate their writing, what I call the nine lives of the readers, the endless possibilities of authentic experiences, are in jeopardy and the world is dangerously limited. At best, it becomes one little life of mechanical, emotionless experience. Transformative actions, ones undertaken knowing that a human being has conceived an idea to propel, to ask, to urge, and written in such newness as not by the words but by the unique imprint of relational, conscious being (not text generation), become rarer. That is not to mention the dangerous democracy of outsourcing decisions of word choices, mood control, etc to a non-human, non-committal agent that AI is.

Books can be read as styles and styles are never completely the same, not even in two different books by the same author. With AI, there is no Soyinka, there is no Achebe, there is no Wordsworth, there is no Shakespeare, there is no Murakami, there is no Atwood, there is no Chimamanda, to read across spatio-temporal experiences of craftsmanship or idea conception and maturation. The worst part is that there is no Claude in Claude writing, there is no ChatGPT in ChatGPT writing. I am in this writing, say for instance, in the way I have chosen to instantiate authors which is a reflection of a subconscious process of priority setting (that I wasn't even aware of until I put these words together).

An attempt to critically read this article as an evidence of my style as a writer may conclude that the authors I have mentioned are those that I have read and aspired to match in craftsmanship. That is not the case—I only want to be myself—but the possibility of anyone making that conclusion is erased when no attribution can be made to me with what I have written. That means that the second part of self-development that comes with writing, as identified earlier, is removed. Imagine that Karl Marx relied on AI, what connection between his economic thoughts and the human race could we possibly align to? What originality could Louis Althusser, for example, build his variant of Marxism on? Or, let us take it a bit farther, imagine that at the time when Shakespeare wrote his plays there was AI, how more could his excellence be doubted now? Imagine AI and Beethoven; imagine AI and Leonardo da Vinci.

On this Book Lovers Day, perhaps the more worrisome thing to be concerned about is the distance between the reader and the book. Not only has economic vulnerability made book lovers—readers—enstranged to reading, which is a point I made with one of my former university professors. It has caused a migration to the digital space where AI rules the algorithm and decides what you see and how much you see. Readers are leaders, the popular maxim goes, but how much of a leader is the reader who asks an AI to "assist" them to read? What love do you have for books when you tear them apart and feed them to AI? True book lovers are currently at risk because human writing is at risk, and because human writing and book lovers are at risk, humanity is at risk. We are not just the inventions we make or the ease that they bring us, we are also what we choose not to give up, what we choose to love—humans, places, habits, books etc.

In conclusion, as I cheer to all book lovers the world over, I have this except from a ₦2-, 16-page booklet Life and Death of the Late Papa Awo (published in 1992) which I found on the street yesterday: Life to me, by my training, by the books I read on philosophy and mysticism and all the rest of it, is an eternal continuim. So I believe in that continuim of life. And I believe that we all have a purpose for our creation in this world. The purpose of books is not to just hold, they are to show human progress in the continuum of life, even when mystic. That is how books should be loved.

Views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of OBSERVERSMAG.