Some A.I. Slop
Failber
A brief pendant to the previous post, on Walcott’s poem. I had drafted that piece, and was posting it to Substack, when I checked out the official Faber page, thinking to pull a cover-image to stand at the head of the post. But I was taken aback by the summary Faber provides:
Bearing in mind that Omeros is Walcott’s most famous work, the book that (it is generally agreed) clinched him his Nobel Prize in Literature, that it is widely read, studied and taught, this is shocking stuff, wrong in almost every salient. The poem is in seven books, not five. It is linearly told, not circular. Its title is the Modern Greek for Homer, not the ‘Greek’ (the Ancient Greek for Homer is Homeros). It’s about characters on St Lucia: fishermen, other island inhabitants, the poet himself: it is not about (a relatively brief digression in book 5 aside) “the tribal losses of the American Indian.” It is not about “the suffering of the individual in exile.”
I assume this is AI slop. Really quite shocking. Checking the book’s Amazon page, and its Waterstones page, I see it has been copied wholesale over there. So it is that poison spreads through the system. In the end I was so repelled I didn’t lift the cover-image from Faber directly, but took a photo of my battered old 1991 paperback. Poor.
Very shocking to hear, and worrying that it seems to be a trend rather than an aberration.
I work in the book trade, and I've recently had a worrying number of customers who have asked ChatGPT for book recommendations before coming in to the shop to find the book. Surprise surprise, the book is usually completely different from how ChatGPT had been describing it.
I repeat, they are not asking me, the bookseller, for recommendations, they are simply asking the A.I. and then getting snappy when they find out the book is not how it was pitched to them. It doesn't shake their faith in ChatGPT though, I wonder why.
Book sellers (and poetry websites) which can’t even be bothered to write their own copy depress me immensely. Not only because when I got my degree in English this was pretty much the job I imagined I would have!