Modernity is beginning to look a lot like the world of the Golden Age. Even books fly towards the greats, with the unfortunate circumstance that the greats of today do not feel the obligation to sponsor creators
In chapter VII of the first part of Don Quixote, Alonso Quijano’s mistress and niece try to convince him that his library has disappeared by magic. It was “the devil himself,” says one, and the other assures that no, it was “an enchanter,” a witch, who entered the room and flew him away. There are many things that fly in literature; things and people, as Luciano de Samósata – a pioneer of science fiction – and a disciple of his and good friend of Cervantes, Luis Vélez de Guevara, also knew, whose famous protagonists of ‘El diablo Cojuelo’ They fly from here to there, discovering the “cake” of the world with its great “variety of rational vermin.”
And there is something of that, of flights, cakes and vermin, in what is happening these days with an aspect of technology and its effect on the book, understood here as an example and metaphor of artistic creation in general. It all begins with a stratagem similar to that of walling up a library, burning its contents and later justifying it with a story consistent with the disorder of the injured party; in fact, it would be identical if the fire were replaced by theft and the solitary victim by a civilization.
Two thousand years ago, Lucian was already flirting with the idea that magic is indistinguishable from “any sufficiently advanced technology,” in the words of Arthur C. Clark (‘Profiles of the Future’) and, of course, he was not short on satire. on account of a concept with which the same thing happens: that of God or the gods, which the European Council of Writers recently recalled in its campaign against generative AI. Indeed, even the marketing of the product in question betrays the underlying intention, because it is true that the very definition of Artificial Intelligence, “thus, in the singular,” places it “on a false superhuman level, a kind of unique god” ( Brussels, 2023).
Now, the great magic that kidnaps libraries could not found its paradise without necessarily founding a hell, which for the moment is inhabited exclusively by the victims of the milestone: the people who create the kidnapped works, distributed throughout the nine circles of Dante with their novels, collections of poems, songs, illustrations, scripts and more, which the new “technological sector” usurped and continues to usurp without prior request or any remuneration so that their god stops babbling. It would be a bad divinity if it only produced “millions of senseless cacophonies, verbal farrago and incoherence” (Borges, ‘The total library’); bad divinity and bad business, because this always consists of feeding the desire of believers and imposing a religious structure that charges for its services and controls the thinking of the supposed beneficiary.
As can be seen, what at first seemed like a problem limited to creators and, therefore, foreign to the concerns and perhaps the interest of the majority, is a social problem of the first order, with potentially catastrophic consequences. However, it is unlikely that the creators will be able to defeat the new Leviathan on their own; The loss of influence of artistic creation is not a thing of today; the lack of communication between the different cultural sectors, neither and, while companies are laying off thousands of professionals around the world to produce even cheaper works, generative AI has gained the imaginable support of millions of people who dream of being George Grosz or Mayakovski by the process of pressing a button, so to speak.
No one will leave that party with questions related to who’s expense or what, although perhaps others should be asked so as not to sin “of being innocent and, perhaps, of being fatuous and conceited,” as Antonio Machado defined certain characters from the Spain of the Regency (letter to Unamuno, September 1921); among them, what will happen to many publishers, media or authors maintained in this way if the owners of the god obtain an excessively dominant position: until now, the service of the priest and the barber from which Antonia Quijana’s witch came from is the one that has been provided since centuries ago through a figure who has been called “ghost writer” and was previously called “black” or “literary black”, as Blasco Ibáñez or Alejandro Sawa well knew, to name two of the most famous ghosts of our literature, and the fact that they do not receive recognition for their work nor, of course, collect royalties for it, does not mean that that cannot change.
I suspect that the process that has just begun is going to be less placid than the executives of the brand new supreme being believe; but they have already managed to get several States to approve the massive theft of works and, not content with this, to grant licenses to continue stealing without cultural workers having the possibility not only of refusing, but of knowing what has been stolen from them. ; There is even talk of future remuneration that will not be collected – or will end up in the hands of the management companies – for the same reason that translators have not usually seen a cent in rights for decades: because intellectual property law is systematically broken and, since the State washes its hands of it, there is no way to know things as basic as the actual data on print runs or the accuracy of annual settlements, if they are received.
Modernity is beginning to look a lot like the world of the Golden Age. Even books fly towards the greats, with the unfortunate circumstance that the greats of today do not feel the obligation to sponsor creators. Along this path, do not be surprised if, in the end, when there is nothing left to plunder, the witches return to a custom from the 17th century: that of steal authors, so serious that Lope de Vega himself felt obliged to draw up a list of their works (see ‘The Pilgrim in His Homeland’, from 1604) and point out in the prologue: “Do not believe that those are my comedies, even if they have my name.”
#god
