Finnegans Wake

"The latest iteration of OpenAI’s powerful text generating language model, completes James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), first using the initial sentence of the original as a prompt, then working from the final words. 

"Cunningly, the third version of the opening picks up the unstopped ending, endorsing the standard view of the Wake’s circularity. 

"As I argue in Artefacts of Writing, the final words can also be read as opening onto the blank space remaining on the final printed page, leaving room for us, or GPT-3, to continue in our/its own way. 

"As cunningly, the final version (8) of the ending takes us back to the beginning, mimicking version 3. In my view, version 7 is the most moving, given the way Finnegans Wake actually ends —with ALP contemplating death as an joyceanic release from a difficult life. 

"That said, version 4 is also a pretty good description of what a bio-cultural intelligence might ideally think after reading the Wake (see What is creative criticism?)."

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