Sean Michaels examines the tense relationship between artists and AI in new novel
Marian Ffarmer is a unique and formidable character. She's 75 years old. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from New York. She's tall, talented and fictional. She's the protagonist in Sean Michaels's third novel Do You Remember Being Born?
But like many poets, Marian is broke. She desperately wants to help her son buy a house. So when a big technology firm calls and wants her to collaborate with a new poetry AI bot named Charlotte, she puts aside her skepticism and accepts. And from there, the book follows along with Marian during her seven days with Charlotte and what it all means for the values of poetry, technology, work and family.
Michaels was born in Stirling, Scotland and moved to Montreal, where he currently lives, when he was 18 years old. His first novel, Us Conductors, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2014 and was nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Kirkus Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels is also the founder of the music blog Said the Gramophone.
Michaels spoke about his latest novel with Ryan B. Patrick on The Next Chapter.
The main character, Marian Ffarmer is a very interesting person. She's a remarkable woman. Looking at the book synopsis, it's clear that she's based on the real poet, Marianne Moore. So what was it about Marianne that kind of inspired you to create Marian?
Marianne Moore was one of these true public intellectuals at a time when that really had a certain cultural currency. I was particularly tickled or provoked by this one episode in Marianne Moore's life in 1955 when she was this famous elderly grand dam and she was approached by Ford. The car company and Ford had just released the Thunderbird and they were working on their new car and they were asking Marianne Moore if she would help them name it.
And rather than spurn them and walk the other way and turn her back and say, 'No, I'm a woman of art and poetry.' She was really excited by the invitation. And she spent months corresponding with someone at Ford sending various name ideas for their car.
I started imagining a poet of a similar stature who might too be tantalized into waltzing with a machine.- Sean Michaels
Ford ultimately ignored them all and named the car themselves the Ford Edsel. But I thought there was something really interesting about a woman of so much power and dignity and imagination still being lured into a dance with capitalism and with a certain kind of technological advancement.
And those thoughts intersected in interesting ways with some of the thinking I'd been doing on AI technology. So I started imagining a poet of a similar stature who might too be tantalized into waltzing with a machine.
How challenging was it for you as a fiction writer, as a music journalist, to write poetry in Marian's voice?
It was very tough. Poetry seemed instantly one of the most important aspects of the book. And I am not a poet. I am not a fiction writer who dabbles in poetry. So at first I thought, 'Do I have to include any poetry in the book at all, or can I just describe the writing of it?' But I realized that was sort of ridiculous. So I thought, all right, Marian is going to be sitting down with this AI called Charlotte. They're going to be writing poetry together and we need to see some of it.
I thought of it a little bit as writing fictional poetry. It's not poetry from my own heart. It's the poetry written by characters. And that liberated me a little bit- Sean Micheals
And what was strange is that I thought of it a little bit as writing fictional poetry. It's not poetry from my own heart. It's the poetry written by characters. And that liberated me a little bit, but also was sort of a source of deep insecurity throughout the writing.
It's good to share your writing with other people. And the people I most wanted to share my writing with this time around were poets. Because I was like, 'Does this even work or is it laughable?'
What was your take, in terms of tapping into that zeitgeist and thinking about how technology and AI impact you as a writer?
I began working on this book in 2019. I'd stumbled across this much earlier version of the technology that underpins ChatGPT and the AI stuff that's all in the news and already entering into our lives these days. And it was this little website made by a coder in Toronto, where you could type a few sentences and then it would continue what you had written.
I just stumbled across this and I was immediately disquieted by what it was doing — because here suddenly was technology that would join the dance of writing with me, but that for the first time, unlike any of similar tools or things I'd seen over the years seem to be able to capture, from time to time, bits of that almost unnameable thing that I spend most of my days concentrating on.
How would this technology disrupt that? How would it change it? And then how could it also challenge us to think more creatively about art making and about our relationships with other artists around us?- Sean Michaels
So from time to time it would offer up something that was beautiful or delightful or interesting, and other times it would just be bland or dull or confusing or meaningless. But that was new, that aspect of delight, and I found it very, as I say, disquieting.
Suddenly I saw a future in which this would provoke all kinds of questions, not just in terms of the economic questions that we're talking about so much these days, but creative questions.
In a world where we determine the value of an artist by this notion of solitary genius — you're only a great artist if you work completely on your own and pull everything completely from your own imagination, — which is itself, in my view, a bit of a mirage. How would this technology disrupt that? How would it change it? And then how could it also challenge us to think more creatively about art making and about our relationships with other artists around us?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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