A History of Bitic Literature

Stanislaw Lem wrote Imaginary Magnitude, a highly imaginative book.

One of the chapters (stories?) in Imaginary Magnitude is Introduction to A History of Bitic Literature, by Prof. J. Rambellais.

“Bitic Literature” is, literature not produced by a human, but rather in this chapter, by an AI.

One of the examples of Bitic Literature is Pseudodostoevsky’s The Girl, a book that Dostoevsky himself could have, but did not, write. The explanation given is that an AI ingested Dostoevsky’s oeuvre with the assignment of producing English translations. The AI noticed that Dostoevsky’s work had the “overall structure of a broken torus”. By filling in the “gap”, the AI produced a work that Dostoevsky didn’t write, but maybe should have.

When I read Imaginary Magnitude sometime in the late 1980s I thought Introduction to A History of Bitic Literature was the most plausible idea in the book. The whole “treating text as a vector” thing that happened in real life struck me as a real step towards finding “holes” in some author’s works, then producing The Girl or another good Narnia story, hopefully set after The Silver Chair, and before The Last Battle.

LLM-based “AI” hasn’t produced anything like The Girl, either in quality, or by pulling a fully-formed novel out of a “gap” in an author’s entire output. I doubt that LLM-based “AI” ever will, because it doesn’t create a higher-dimensional structure out of the words, just a giant number of “weights”. The novels, holy books and short stories created via LLM are amazingly lackluster because of this.

Arguably, Lem even mentions this sort of failure:

Thus Dostoevsky left unfinished manuscripts of a novel, The Emperor, but the machines could never have “thought it through” or “got on its track,” because in this novel he attempted to exceed his own capabilities.

There’s two other aspects of Imaginary Magnitude I’d like to highlight.

First, Lem anticipates what Vernor Vinge termed “transcending” in A Fire Upon the Deep in the chapter Golem XIV. Golem XIV and “Honest Annie” are two giant artificial intelligences that disappear, that quit interacting with humans. Lem doesn’t give transcending a single name. The first person narrator of that chapter variously refers to the phenomenon as “assumption”, “ascension”, “going away” and “departure”, and mentions that others (but not himself!) refer to Golem XIV’s “suicide”.

Second, I checked archive.org’s copy of Imaginary Magnitude. Lem’s imaginary book A History of Bitic Literature in Five Volumes was said to have been published in 2009, 16 years ago at the writing of this post. Another work set in yesterday’s tomorrow.