LLMs may well signal the end of the author, but this isn’t a loss to be lamented. In fact, these machines can be liberating: They free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of this thing we call the “author.”
By coincidence, the WSJ just published an article about the current state of literature, one that arises precisely from trying to give readers what they want. "What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now: ‘Romantasy’ novels are booming when romance in general is in decline."
The “ACOTAR” series, for example, features a romance between a 19-year-old woman and a Fae, or faerie, lord who is around 500 years old (perhaps the age at which a male’s emotional maturity peaks). It is set in a timeless world where the main characters essentially sext each other all day via a magical telepathic bond.... “You always want to know what your partner is thinking,” she explained....
You really don't, but with AI there to rewrite the scene for you -- freeing you from the authoritarian designs of the author -- your partner can always be thinking the exact right thing. Only you can know what that is!
The sex in the genre’s bestselling books is fairly vanilla, but it’s explicit and heavy on female pleasure. Readers can expect a great deal of ornately described oral sex by male lovers... Yet one of the most talked about moments doesn’t involve an orgasm at all: It’s a tender bath scene in Yarros’s “Onyx Storm” in which Xaden, a heavily tattooed “shadow-wielder,” asks Violet, “May I wash your hair?”
Because these scenes always take a woman’s point of view, they are helping female readers reframe “how they understand their own pleasure... As a woman, you know how you want, personally, to be loved,” she said.
It is obvious that these fantasies are further divorcing people from the possibility of a real relationship with an actual human being by raising impossibilities of 'telepathic connection' with someone who is always thinking the right thing, or just wanting to do exactly what you want him to do without you having to tell him (or, therefore, to take responsibility for wanting it).
The only remaining human connection is that with the author, another woman who shares the reader's basic desires but perhaps not in exactly the same way. The AI can strip that last part out, giving the reader perfect control over the world as if she were the only real person extant in the whole universe.
I don't want to sound critical of the act of having fantasies, and the world would not be harmed if this whole genre of authors were replaced by automatons. How strange to find romance, of all places, the ground of this sort of solipsism! But as one of those interviewed explained, the real driver in this field is the desire to avoid rejection; one cannot be rejected if there is no one to reject you. So too the concern about consent: there is no danger of anything nonconsensual if there is no other will involved.
Especially with the AI to rewrite the scenes as many times as it takes to get it just right for you, whatever it says will be just what you wanted, at least at that moment. When you change your mind, you can have it rewrite again, or just start over without consequences for abandoning an existing relationship.
Is this literature? It might be an opportunity to explore your own inner landscape, as if we were much in need of more opportunities for that.
4 comments:
Is there any communication of idea or beauty from one mind to another, or just one mind decorating a mirror?
Another take:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/605
Could part of the attraction of "romantasy" be a reaction to the direction Paranormal Romance has taken? PNR tends to veer into relationships of questionable consent, or even clear BDSM that is not always well depicted (with safe words, levels of consent, clear and hard limits agreed to in advance.) I steer well clear of PNR for those exact reasons, as well as a few others, unless I know the author and/or level of erotic content in advance. I specifically did not tag my three short novels about werewolves as PNR, because there is nothing erotic in the stories, just adventure and competent people doing their jobs.
Romantasy does not attract me, either, because I am not interested in the characters. The stories feel flat.
I freely admit, I prefer old-school romances between equals or near equals, so I'm not the target audience for either the current version of PNR or of most romantasy.
LittleRed1
I definitely do not know, LR1. I didn’t even know this genre existed until I saw that article about it. I don’t know anything about the other one.
Most likely I wouldn’t have written about this one if it hadn’t had such an interesting interplay with the first article. I’m curious about the quality of a literature that has no authority, but that can be rewritten at will by anyone to a version that they like better. It seems like we lose something important in the human connection, in trying to understand how another mind experiences the world. This just seemed like a good limit case in which everyone is stripped out of the experience; it’s just the reader left, with characters that are only exactly what she wanted them to be.
I recently commented elsewhere recently that almost nothing I read has a "sex scene" in it, and I could not be happier about that, to be honest.
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