What struck me was that, although this is definitely a better facsimile of Bram Stoker than earlier iterations of the game included, it still describes absence and stasis. The narrator is trying to avoid a “course of reflection” through “constant activity,” but can’t find enough to do to occupy his mind. The Count is nowhere to be found, leaving the narrator to walk through empty corridors where he hears “no sound but the wind in the chimney in the hall.” Not all of the fake samples contained this degree of emptiness, but a sufficient number did to suggest that, though Claude can generate imitations of famous public-domain authors—ones that are good enough to fool the vast majority of even discerning readers, though not all of them—it still can’t reliably have those characters do much of anything. No amount of additional cue cards or feedback could fix this problem; the second I asked it to make things more active, the stunted and more easily identifiable A.I. prose kicked in again.
I hesitate to claim that this is the great tell, because it sounds, well, far too literary, or even corny—I am a bit too bashful to fully indulge in what it might mean that the robots cannot quite bring a scene to life. I will leave that to the poets and the anti-clankers. My only humble submission in this dialogue: the art of fiction relies, in heavy measure, on the reader accepting these descriptive, atmospheric passages that Claude seems to favor as what the literary critic James Wood has called “a camera’s easy swipe.” Wood has argued that an author’s choices, both big and small, always push up through the surface. A.I. makes choices, too, not by drawing on its personal reveries about, say, a street in Paris at dusk but rather by lifting from pretty much every word that’s ever been written. If Claude prefers to write these passages in which nothing seemingly happens and the hallways are always empty and the characters do nothing except idly touch nearby furniture, it’s because we do, too.
Claude, I am sure, will soon be able to have one of these characters at least fire up a stove or drive a buggy to Norwich, and all of this will just feel like a weird hiccup. Still, I am ultimately heartened by this silly experiment in robot mimicry, because at no point did I or any of the test-takers conclude that we wanted to read literature written by A.I., nor were we left with the revelation that reading and writing were no longer necessary.
Whenever I start thinking about this technology and all the possibilities it holds for replacing us, I remind myself, almost as a matter of mental hygiene, that the top grand masters have not been able to beat the best chess computers for two decades, and yet hundreds of thousands of kids now follow chess influencers on TikTok. We still value the human process of chess, how the game makes our brains move. The superiority of the machines is irrelevant when it comes to why we play, even if computers have had a lot of influence on human strategy.