I felt the sting of remorse. This face I had stollen for my own, now looked haunted and here I was to pay witness to its end. An end I had brought him to. Oh, I could rationalise it all I wished. Claim that I had never asked him to pretend to be me. Never ask that he take my stead and keep my honour… But it was I who had stolen his face. It was in the end that act and that act alone that had brought him to the noose. More so than any of his, for none of this would have happened had not I first committed my larceny of countenance.  

    From the as yet unfinished ‘Lucifer Mandrake and the Hanoverian Proxy

I don’t as a rule publish excerpts, even single paragraphs form the first draft of an unfinished novel. There are good reasons for this, of which the ‘three drafts’ rule is the most pertinent. That being I don’t let anyone read a new work until at least the third draft. This exert however I am using to illustrate the point behind this post, as it is just about the perfect example of my point of view when it comes to people ‘authoring’ books with AI. A subject that has brokered much discussion of late, and one such discussion on face book lead to this post.

Here in essence is my subjective point of view on novels, short stories and anything else for that matter, ‘authored’ using AI. It is in essence this, no AI would ever use the phase ‘larceny of countenance.’

The algorithms of AI, which sample huge amounts of fiction (seldom, if ever, with the actual authors consent) would not have written the last five words in that paragraph, to wit ‘committed my larceny of countenance’. An AI would have written ‘stolen his face’ instead. Both turns of phase mean the same thing and the latter is by far the more likely to crop up in the endless sampling of written work the programmers of AI’s use for their algorithms. How common, why I use those three words in the same context myself earlier in that same paragraph… Where as ‘Larceny of countenance’ probably doesn’t crop up anywhere.

I am reasonably sure this is the case simply because to the best of my knowledge no one has ever used the phase ‘larceny of countenance.’ before and I only wrote it this morning. In the context of this paragraph it’s a perfect phrase. Given the context is the first person narration of an occasionally pretentious Victorian mage who says things like ‘larceny of countenance’. It is a phraseology unique to that character, and unique within the as yet incomplete manuscript of my current work in progress. It is highly probably that the phase will never be used again by anyone… Myself included. Unless Lucifer Mandrake uses it again at some point in the story, because none of my other characters in other novels , nor myself in a third person narrative, are ever likely to use such a phase. Hannibal Smyth doesn’t talk like that, nor do I on account of my not being a Victorian trans man, who uses magic to present as the gender of their choice, and uses pretension to deflect from their insecurity… Lucifer Mandrake is a unique character with his own voice*.

*Mostly his voice, on occasion her voice as Luci Drake is still in there and the magic being employed by Lucifer is a complicated way to assume the gender of your choice. Occasionally Lucifer reverts to Luci. This is problematic and challenging for me as a writer, because gender, identity and importantly, hormones switching about, in your main character makes things complex. But that is also in part why I wanted to write this character, easy characters are dull…

My point here is that AI can only write, and will only write, by mimicry. AI is not actually intelligent, its an algorithm regurgitating word soup. If you tell an AI to ‘Write a story in the style of Mark Hayes’ its going to struggle, as I don’t have a style… Not as such. I write in many styles, and none. Often I write in 1st person narration, but the style then is the style of the narrator not myself, even if the narrator is a mere self aware consciousness observing events. 3rd person tends to have more of me in it, but even then it is the me that is telling the story. I guess you could tell an AI to write a Hannibal Smyth story, and feed it first with all the Hannibal novels and short stories. But it still would not write Hannibal, it could not affect his self-loathing or the lies he tells himself before he even begins to tell the reader. His inner Id is just as complex as Lucifer’s.

No AI would ever use the phase ‘larceny of countenance.’ Because until this morning, when I wrote that paragraph, neither would I. This doesn’t mean what I have written is some form of higher literature. Its a line in a fairly pulpy Victorian urban fantasy novel that explores some complex issues of gender, identity, between trips to dark fairylands and mocking cricket. All it means is no AI would write what I have written, because I am widely unreliable and tend towards the intuitive in my writing.

But I write the kind of things I want to read. And what I want is to read are books by other people who make up things as ridiculous as the phrase ‘larceny of countenance.’ and agonise about doing so because getting such a phase just right is what they feel the universe needs to happen, despite it being three words in what is currently a 57k manuscript that will almost certainly never be read by the vast majority of humanity. And even the infinitesimal percentage of humanity who read the finished novel will probably never remember reading those three words.

The point is ‘larceny of countenance’ over ‘stole his face’ is where the blood is. Which is why I have no interest in AI written novels. I want the blood, the viscera , the truth of another author, when I read. Not some watered down facsimile of humanity regurgitated without soul or consequence. I’d sooner read a James Paterson novel than anything written by an AI… This is not to say I care only about turns of phase, my point is not that my rather pretentious narrator chooses strange phasing. It is that I want honest stories, discovered by writers as they wrote them. Because the art of writing is just that a fucking art. And are requires a soul.

Not some AI’s attempt at a larceny of countenance…