Literature Machines
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, Institute Of Information Management Professional Fellow, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador and Editorial Adviser at News Updates.
He is a recipient of International Award/Recognition For Excellence In Data And Information Management.
More about him here: https://independent.academia.edu/ChidiAnthonyOpara
cornelius...@gmail.com
https://www.google.com/search?q=Literature+Machines
Chidi likes facts ( and some fantasy too) : Poet is priest , so you agree
with the idea that The typewriter is holy - me
I’m thinking of Wole Soyinka’s nostalgia
for his dinosaur Olivetti
Maybe also the good old days
of colonialism & the missionary’s mystery trinity
(“when holy water slapped our cringing brows”)
You get my drift Chidi, witchdoctor & priest?
I’ve been listening to preacher man Professor Lumumba
Going on and on and on and on about corruption in Kenya
and lastly about South Africa leaving the Union of Africa
One word to describe all this : Ominous
This is an AI with endless possibilities ( like Cleopatra's “infinite variety”
But can AI ever do away with or replace
another trinity?
Or some of the great storytellers - William Shakespeare - Charles Dickens - Joseph Conrad,
Isaac Bashevis Singer? Of course there are many, many others..
As dear Kenneth Harrow said, more than once, “ it depends on who is telling the story”
Under the benign influence of AI, I suppose that it’s still somebody or a combination of some bodies telling the story ( except that AI cannot be said to be “ inspired” so there’s no way that AI can cook up a couple of fabulations, replete with miracles, people walking on the oceans as if walking on dry land and so forth, works, little one without wings, flying in the night sky etc and say “This is the word of God” - this “is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” etc…
So Chidi you agree that it’s less interesting for the readership to read, let alone digest and believe. if it’s not revealed through human agency…
imagine that AI feeds all that date, all the big grammar from Soyinka & Achebe, all the vocabulary crammed into the head of this eight-year-old Ghanaian walking dictionary , the hybridity of the various masks and complexities behind that single (I almost wrote simple) human personality and perspective - more likely AI gestating multiple human personalities and perspectives , the multi-ethnic polyglot - ( schizophrenia - somewhere Norman Mailer said that the Jewish Princess uses her neurosis as a “ sexual charm”) and the language - apart from personal dictionaries - imagine the word of god coming directly from some holy automated self- typing Olivetti typewriter ..
And then there are the endless possibilities with the other side of poetry : music - with hearing aids for our Beethovens and all that new piano jazz coming from the conservatories and music academies in Moscow. Thank God that the Mariinsky ballet troupe ( St. Petersburg) , though angelic, will remain human.