Some of literature’s most powerful inventions

Not to be glib, but this reminds me of days spent reading TV tropes.

I think the author is stretching a little to say noone considered this since Aristotle. Not only is there a lot of overlap with meme theory, people have been doing literary criticism forever.

Nice article though.

Absolutely, it's weird isn't it–talk about an elephant in the room! I'm not sure what would be weirder, if the author never heard of tvtropes.org, or they know of it but write as if it doesn't exist. The author seems to live in some parallel universe, very strange. I think you're too kind though–it makes the article entirely ridiculous.

And then... I read this[0], which talks about the author's work. He's got degrees in literature and neuroscience. And the Smithsonian magazine article was advertising for his book, so he's hardly gonna mention the rabbit-hole that is Tv Tropes or people will never get around to reading his book... So I almost didn't post the above first paragraph.

But that page also says "His most recent work anatomizes the fundamental difference between computer AI and human narrative intelligence; a sample can be found in his 2021 proof in Narrative of why computers will never be able to read (or write) novels."

Ok well...that, I thought, sounds 99.99% likely to be total nonsense, so I had a look.[1] The paper's called Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature: A Logical Proof and a Narrative..

"In this article, I'll provide a definite answer. And that answer is: never. No computer, no matter how immense its circuitry, will ever be able to extract the know-how from a fairytale that can be gleaned by human children. No machine-learning algorithm, no matter how futuristic its software, will ever author a sonnet or short story. The reason for this is simply that literature encodes a great deal of its thought-stuff in narrative, a mode of communication that requires causal reasoning to process. And while the ability to do causal reasoning is embedded in the architecture of the human brain, computers are hardwired to perform a method of thinking—symbolic logic—that is fundamentally incapable of grasping cause-and-effect."

I found it hard to read.. "As we saw above, this process of scientific learning does not yield absolute truths, and in fact, when we make the mistake of conflating science with truth (in the way that "Enlightenment" thinkers from Thomas Macaulay to Steven Pinker have done) we can veer into smugness, imperialism, and other habits antithetical to the curiosity, open-mindedness, and bias awareness necessary for effective science." (sample paragraph)

Anyway, at the end he gives his proof – although he seems to have changed it, somewhat significantly, from "Will Never" to "Cannot"! :

A Logical Proof That Computers Cannot Read (or Write) Literature

1. Literature has a rhetorical function.

2. Literature's full rhetorical function depends on narrative elements.

3. Narrative elements rely on causal reasoning.

4. Causal reasoning cannot be performed by machine-learning algorithms because those algorithms run on the CPU's Arithmetic Logic Unit, which is designed to run symbolic logic, and symbolic logic can only process correlation.

QED: Computers cannot perform the causal reasoning necessary for learning to use literature.

I imagine by "Cannot" he means "Cannot now, and won't ever" - at least, the title and the abstract say that.

This all strikes me as total garbage.[2] And thus the garbagey flavour of the Smithsonian article, not surprisingly, doesn't seem an isolated aberration.

[0] https://projectnarrative.osu.edu/about/current-research/rese...

[1] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/778252

[2] Sorry I don't have more time or the inclination for more than this shallow dismissal. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Ok thanks, I'm glad it's not just me! :-)

This is the discussion you mean, I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127165

Yes, many instances of modern literary criticism come to mind, such as Ben Jonson's commentary on the works of Shakespeare, his friend, producer, and cast member; Cervantes' analysis embedded in Quixote and Sheridan's analysis embedded in Tristram Shandy; Tolstoy's What Is Art; etc.

My impression remains that during the period between Poetics and, oh, Canterbury Tales, the great thinkers didn't publish anything about Narrative.

Thanks for the Northrop Frye tip!

None to add to that, though I was more thinking (as another child post) of poets and thinkers who were clearly self-referentially aware of what they were doing and what was going on generally with literary narrative (Swift and Coleridge come to mind).

Edit: oh that child post was you :). Yeah there was for sure a gaping lacuna before Chaucer, and even then you may be right that there was nothing as explicitly on the nose until the 20th century.

TV tropes and Mr Smithsonian are still late to the race in the scheme of things but nearer the pointy end than my original post may have given credit.