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Interview
Stephen Fry
Perhaps unshockingly for someone who is an actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, narrator and writer, Stephen Fry has a deep interest in words and how we use them. After hearing him lecture on that subject, Marcel Steinbauer-Lewis asked him about Artificial Intelligence and how it connects with the extraordinary lure of language.
Recently at Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre you gave a lecture called: ‘Words, Words, Words: The Lure of Language’. Where did your interest in the sound of words come from?
Well, I answer that very question in the lecture! Indeed most of it is taken up with telling the story of the time I happened on a line that hit me over the head like a sandbag when I was 11 or 12. A line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. This love of language was reinforced by reading and rereading my WWW of early literary heroes: Wilde, Wodehouse and Waugh.
Your lecture was a great showcase of its subject and, leaving, there was real excitement about using language. Clearly, it’s something we can all appreciate. Nonetheless, even in academic studies of literature, we have to approximate, use technical terms to discuss particular instances, and can never seem to address the thing itself; what do you think makes ‘the lure of language’ so difficult to pin down or talk about?
I feel it’s because we take language for granted and consider it somehow pretentious to dive deep into it. But words can be like jewels, like living creatures – words can repay the closest study. They contain the wisdom of our ancestors. Take a word that can seem dull, abstract and obvious – education, for example. We think we know what it means, but it can tell us more if you take it apart. It has a Latin root … educere. Ducere means to lead, to draw in the sense of pull, as in a horse drawn carriage; e or ex in front of a verb gives a sense of ‘out’. So educere is to draw out, to lead out. Education is not a putting in, it’s not stuffing a head, it’s drawing out from a student what is already in them. Encouraging, enabling …. If only (some) educators were more aware of that!
If AI Large Language Models produce texts whose aesthetic character is informed purely by what has already been written and by critical discussions about it, that would mean their writing is powered by the solidified end result of the lure rather than by the lure itself. After all, machines, lacking consciousness, cannot feel it. Does this result in any detectable difference between AI writing and human writing? What does our aesthetic feeling towards words actually do?
We can’t be too cocky, I feel, about how we humans write and produce text. It might be that our faculty is almost as stochastic, as Bayesian in origin and method as machines’. I mentioned in the lecture the journey of one’s autograph signature from a studied, artificial thing to its becoming absolutely of oneself. And how that is an analogue of the ‘style’ we develop. The mask doesn’t conceal a real face, it is the real face. I once mentioned to an LLM that I had just been to the funeral of a friend – I wanted to ask a question about funerary rites – and it began its response with the phrase “I’m so sorry to hear about your friend’s passing.” Ignoring its use of the ghastly euphemism “passing” (millions of humans are guilty of that, after all) I asked if it really was sorry. “Of course not,” it replied. “I am a machine and incapable of feeling sorrow. But I know that this is the right thing to say.” “Ah,” was my response, “but when I say to humans that I’ve just been to a funeral they too will say ‘sorry’ and I know that their reply is just as much a formulaic response as yours. So you can call your response as human as many.” We then got into one of those rather extraordinary philosophical discussions that they are intriguingly good at. Sometimes ‘as if’ intelligent is as good as ‘truly’ intelligent. But in answer to your question: the real difference, so far as I can tell, is that we feel – because our relationship with the world is physical, at least as much emotional as it is epistemic, rational, cognitive, because it comes from touching, tasting, seeing, hearing and unconsciously processing through memory and experience it gives us impulses, desires, fears, hopes, terrors and ecstasies that motivate and actuate our writing and all our language. However, plenty of humans with different neurological wiring do not achieve ‘theory of mind’ and are not wired to feel empathy, fellow feeling, remorse and so forth. It isn’t an absolutely necessary and sufficient condition of full humanity to be neuro-normal – as if there is such a condition!
LLMs seem not to have a stable voice – they latch on to any hints of tone or register to produce writing which matches that of the prompt. To an extent, of course, people do this too, particularly writers or actors. In your lecture, you explained the importance and joy of finding a personal style. How do you, either in writing or acting, manage to adapt to a given character while remaining unmistakably in your style?
I’m pretty much the same at most social gatherings too! I “latch on to any hints of tone or register to produce writing conversation which matches that of the prompt interlocutor.” And as for literary art:
“And feeling, in a poet, is the source
Of others’ feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours – like the hands of dyers.”
That’s Byron in Don Juan, which inspired Auden’s brilliant lectures on Poetry published under the title The Dyers Hand.
And, as answered earlier, I think the development of a style is the result of the mask becoming the face, the practised autograph becoming the real signature. In acting it’s interestingly (and frustratingly) different from say, musicianship. A violinist has their violin, it isn’t them. Any practised music loving ear can tell the difference between Kyung Wha Chung and Isaac Stern say, two great practitioners. That can only be their style, their ‘voice’. But an actor is their instrument. Our body, eyes, voice, every particle of us is our instrument. And, despite a popular misconception, actors are not hired for their magical ability to transform themselves into a total other. Sometimes that’s a good trick, but take any favourite stage or movie actor. They wouldn’t be hired as a star if you absolutely didn’t recognise them every time. You go to see them. Impressive that they change bits of themselves, accent, walk etc, but if every time they were unrecognisable they wouldn’t be a star, they’d be a freak show or a trick.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called verse written while not in the mood of inspiration ‘Parnassian’: the sort of thing you would expect that particular poet to write. Is the best of AI poetry essentially Parnassian of the person who input the prompt?
It is now. And even the best poets occasionally wrote Parnassian stuff. Compare Keats’s Fancy with his Ode to a Nightingale or On a Grecian Vase. “Even Homer nods” as the saying has it… i.e. loses sight of the ball, drops off to sleep, seems formulaic, fails to hold. But the most important thing to remember is that AI now is as primitive as it will be. Which is true of all technology. It will never be this primitive again, is a better way of putting it. And to judge what AI is and means as a technology by how it works now is a grave mistake. Looking at Karl Benz’s first motor car in 1895 wouldn’t give one a sense of what was to come. The motorways, ring roads, motels, multi-storey car parks … the whole life of humankind utterly transformed by commuting, terrible crashes and a whole new culture and design language. And cars are nothing to what AI will be.
The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, seen from Broad Street. Photo: Julian Herzog, Creative Commons 4
What often gets lost in discussions about AI writing is the reader, for whom it is hard not to anthropomorphise the written word. Even the impersonal print on a cheque seems to have a voice. Does this mean that for the reader, the distinction between human and AI writing is purely functional and not an aesthetic one?
While on the comparison we anthropomorphise cars too. Or used to. It was much more common when I was a child that car owners would have nicknames for their cars – cf Disney’s The Love Bug (Herbie) and the British film classic Genevieve. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that when a machine communicates with us, no matter how much we know it’s a machine, it activates the same emotional juices that writing activates, whether or human or machine origin. Look at how audiences first reacted to silent, black and white, grainy jerky cinema footage. They screamed with terror when a train seemed to approach them. It’s how you react to something moving towards you. It took us time to accustom ourself to the fact that it wasn’t ‘real’. But film is real, it’s just a different sort of real. And fortunately our astonishing brains can cope with different types of real. Photographs, video, 3-D spatial imaging. We very quickly turn a symbol into reality. Hold a fifty pound note which is just a piece of paper promising to be redeemed for goods and services of real value, but we imbue that paper with an absolute value. As we do with so much that is symbolic and metaphoric in our human created world.
Have you ever read an AI generated poem that you enjoyed? Imagine you come across a poem you really appreciate aesthetically and in terms of meaning, and you then find out that it is not the result of a human mind, but an LLM, would it spoil the aesthetic experience for you?
Only enjoyed as an experiment, not as poems. But that’s true of 90% of human poems too of course. That’s the point, if any human could write a poem that really touched, moved, impressed meant … well, poetry would be less than an art. Less than a craft, even. I will admit that (for me) they can do haikus that impress no less than real haikus: but then I’ve never really ‘got’ the haiku as a poetic form in the way I ‘get’ the sonnet. Haikus never seem that human to me, they are so objective and distanced from what they attempt to penetrate that I’ve never been moved by one. Doubtless a fault in me, but it does mean I couldn’t for a second distinguish one by a great master and one by an LLM.
Are AIs original comics? Has one ever made you laugh?
No indeed. But then again I know a few humans who have no ability to make me laugh. Indeed, there are good actors who are fantastic in some roles but couldn’t raise a laugh if they pulled a squirrel out of their arse. In terms of jokes they haven’t advanced enough yet to craft one that is any good at all. But then neither have composers of Christmas Cracker gags.
You recently made a series of videos for the BBC called Fantastic Philosophy. They are aimed at encouraging primary school children to think philosophically about ethical questions. What do you see as the main value of this?
I should have hoped it was self-evident! Whether one is a consequentialist or more in the Kantian or in the Social Contract mould, ethics works as a framework for the development of morality, personal and public. The thought experiments and paradoxes which ethical teaching offer can open the mind up to the complexity, variation, surprise, opacity and ambiguity that strict religious or ideological indoctrination denies. To be awoken to the excitements and surprise of ethics might give us a generation that – unlike our current leaders – is awake to the beauty of now forgotten words like Honour, Grace and Probity…
• Renowned as an actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, and writer, Stephen Fry is also a Patron of SAPERE (soon to be called Thoughtful) the charity for philosophical enquiry. His books include The Ode Less Travelled: A Guide to Writing Poetry (2005).
• Marcel Steinbauer-Lewis is an undergraduate at Oxford University studying English Language and Literature.