Were George Orwell and William Faulkner, two giants of anglophone literary Modernism, actually driven by demons, whether literal or metaphorical?
It’s taken quite a while, because AI is a slow learner, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Pynchon. But the algorithms of social media have finally woken up to the fact that I’ve been writing a book.
It’s not the first time I’ve written a book. The draft I’m currently nudging slowly to completion is or will be the sixth, actually. Of these, three are already in print, and another one is contracted for publication already. The remaining two are both literary fiction, for which the equally mountainous task of seeking representation has begun to loom before me.
And suddenly, social media has begun throwing quotes at me about writing, despite years of my best efforts to throw it off my scent. What socials I possess, and most were obtained reluctantly in spite of my own inherent Luddism in this regard either for work or else to remain in easy contact with friends scattered across the planet, were formerly easily duped.
So I would often see adverts for things like gold lamé trousers, or Jesus onesies, Volodymyr Zelensky “collectible” action figures or electric self-pleasuring devices. All of these are absolutely real incidentally. I write fiction, but I’m not that outrageous.
Perhaps I became complacent when the algorithm began to desperately hurl adverts for ever more preposterous items, be it a vaginoplasty or electric sheep shears or insurance for full security extraction from war zones. It knows me not, I felt.
But I perhaps ought to have known that through a process of endless sleepless attrition, eventually I’d inadvertently seed enough genuine data about my activities and interests to allow the algorithms to close in on my actual activities.
So very recently the algorithm has been chucking motivational quotes from authors at me about the process of writing itself. What interests me is not what those authors have to say, though perhaps that should. When you’re used to receiving turds in a box, eventually you cease to value the boxes, even if they start arriving filled with diamonds. That’s simple Pavlovian response.
What interests me is that some of these quotations do not appear to be real. Are algorithms hallucinating quotes by Modernist novelists, or is it something only slightly more insidious? Are they instead passively collecting them from the hive mind sewer of the internet and passing them on gullibly as truth to almost equally gullible people?
There are two quotes in particular that raised my suspicions, largely because they both contain the same notable phrase. The first, “attributed to William Faulkner” according to one sloppy academic article, runs as follows: “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.”
The other, widely clothed in the hallowed gown of Orwell, states: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
Once upon a time, I was a professional researcher, and before that I was a trained academic and before that again, I was a national newspaper reporter. This means I have a certain process when it comes to encountering information of most kinds.
In a quotation that seems false but is actually verified, the former football manager Sir Alex Ferguson once said “When an Italian tells me it’s pasta on the plate I check under the sauce to make sure. They are the inventors of the smokescreen.” I too like to check under the sauce to make sure. And when I went checking these quotations, something strange occurred. I couldn’t find them in any of Orwell’s or Faulkner’s work.
Where I did find them was all over the internet, on fan content sites like Good Reads, and offered for discussion on Reddit, as the poster-type memes designed for social media attention spans which had been spammed to me, but not (except in one instance) in the kind of places one expects to find genuine author quotes, that is in academic articles about those authors.
Now perhaps I missed something. It’s certainly possible. But it seems strange that such notable phrases haven’t emerged in the works of these authors I possess electronically (and therefore quickly searchable), nor do they attract attention among scholars either, as searches of JStor and Google Scholar revealed. There was one guy, but I’m not going to shame him. I hope he comes to realise that “Attributed to” is not a sufficient citation in future.
I can’t be entirely sure of the process. I suspect what’s happened is that someone somewhere has created them. Unless things have already degenerated to the point where AI has begun rewriting the Modernist canon, I have to assume these quotes originally came from people. I wonder about why they’d do that. Perhaps, as unrecognised writers themselves, they wanted to see if something they wrote could be passed off as the work of someone famous.
But where did that key phrase come from, really? We see it almost identically in the 1992 title of a song on Pantera’s best-selling thrash metal classic ‘A Vulgar Display of Power’. But it goes back further, to Alan Moore’s run on the comic book Swamp Thing in the early 1980s which made his name as an author. That’s my best guess at the lineage here. And while both Pantera and Alan Moore are estimable artists in their own rights, they don’t quite have the cachet of Modernist literary giants of a century past.
So I wrote this in the rather vain hope that if someone else should decide to check under the sauce of these particular quotations, they might just find this post and realise that it’s not pasta at all. It’s just more slop, created by trolls and propagated by AI algorithms.
This is obviously not important in the great scheme of things but it does serve as a cautionary tale. CHECK EVERYTHING that comes to you online. We are now fully immersed in Baudrillard’s age of the fakes. The lies come at us incessantly now, in all forms, by demons driven.
