Correspondence

Regarding Paul J. Griffiths’s essay (“Ghosts and Dolls,” Lent 2025), I am inclined to say that only a professional writer—I almost said writer and thinker before reminding myself of his arguments—could feel “eager” to read the literary works of “large-language generative artificial intelligences.” I will admit that I found the final two paragraphs, in which he lays out a comparison between A.I. compositions and extraterrestrial biology, more convincing than I would have expected to, but as long as I am reading literary works as literary works (rather than as material for an investigation into the formal qualities of xenoliterature), I will unreservedly and without shame stick to those produced by our own “Linnaean species,” to adopt Griffiths’ alienating phrase. With an un-philosophical day job and small children, I struggle to find the time to read even the books that sit on my bedside table, such as Dante’s Purgatorio. As long as that one continues to gather dust, ChatGPT will have to forgive me for failing to match Griffiths’s enthusiasm for reading what is colloquially referred to as “A.I. slop.”

Griffiths’s argument rests heavily on the widely shared feeling that a blanket refusal to read literary works by women is dishonorable, which he says should also apply to works by L.L.M.s. But people freely make similar judgements all the time with little opprobrium—for instance, they may resolve to read only female novelists for a year or look with suspicion on works in which white authors dramatize the experiences and inner lives of non-white characters. More generally and more to the point, any individual might decide that given his or her interests, it is simply not worth the time and effort to delve into, say, Norse sagas, Soviet poetry, or a million other genres of literature. No universal prejudice or theory of taintedness is necessary to ground such a judgement; all it requires is a set of personal interests, concerns, and beliefs and some limit on one’s time. My choice of what to read rests on factors that are thoroughly contextual and relational. Beyond his verbal felicity and the substance and argument of his work, my interest in reading Dante relates to his position in cultural history and Christian thought, and, at the end of the day, a desire, however engendered, to encounter the person behind the text.

Changing the topic: When I ask ChatGPT to fill in the next word in the phrase “large-language generative . . .” it chooses “model.” Griffiths repeatedly and apparently deliberately completes the phrase with “artificial intelligences.” Even going by colloquial usage, I find that people are much more likely to say that computer programs “think” than that they are truly “intelligences,” despite the ubiquity of the term A.I. If they are truly “intelligences” in any normal sense of the word, then we have another reason to exercise caution before descending into their fictive worlds.

Joshua Dill
Cheverly, Maryland

The author replies:

My thanks to Joshua Dill for his thoughtful comments. He’s of course right that books are many and life short, and that it’s reasonable for all readers to make prudential and practical decisions about what we’ll read and what we won’t. My argument isn’t directed at decisions of that kind. It’s directed instead at in-principle claims that writings produced by some or another category of writer (women, Catholics, artificial intelligences, white men) are not worth reading because of the nature of writers of that kind. These positions are inevitably phrenological, and it seems that Dill has no trouble with my critique of them. So: More power to him in his reluctance to read writings composed by artificial intelligences. I hope, though, that he won’t find himself attracted to dubious theories about intelligence, thought, consciousness, meaning, etc. as a way of giving his practical decisions theoretical legitimacy. I don’t watch American football, but that isn’t because I have a theory that makes it not a game.

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Joseph Epstein’s “Done In by Time” (Lent 2025) offers an insightful look at novels and literature in the modern age, though I was rather depressed to realize that there is, in fact, no modern novelist whose work I eagerly await. I don’t say no artist—I still have hope for some musicians. Since there are no individual artists whom the author admires enough to keep an eye on, what art forms does he think might be up and coming, either arts emerging for the first time or “low” arts ready to be raised? New technologies bring new media, and nature abhors a vacuum. It seems that if the old arts are fading, then something new will rise (or is rising) up to replace them.

Hannah Currie
Ann Arbor, Michigan

The drama critic Walter Kerr predicted in The Decline of Pleasure that the Broadway theater was fading away because it had decided to lecture its audience rather than entertain it. When reading Joseph Epstein’s review of Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, it occurred to me that Kerr’s criticism of the play as a form might apply to the novel as well. The novels cited in Epstein’s review remind me of university reading lists. And, quoting Epstein, “Just now, for example, in the realm of high art, we are going through a low period.” The picture sketched in Epstein’s review seems rather dispiriting.

Since I read fiction for pleasure, I would like to offer the names of a few authors who have entertained me and a large audience over the last century or so. To be brief, I will attach but one title to each author’s name: Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard; Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest; François Mauriac, Viper’s Tangle; Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter; Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited; Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory; Paul Horgan, Everything to Live For; Edwin O’Connor, The Edge of Sadness; Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin; and Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy. A sign of their attraction, it seems to me, is that almost all of them are still in print.

Jim McGlone
Boonton, New Jersey

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Seminary training in the 1970s was not for the faint-hearted, if indeed it ever was. All of a sudden there were few European and North American recruits to the missionary congregation I aspired to join. I was among those who left before ordination, due in some degree to cussedness on my part but also to an authoritarian resistance to beards not dissimilar to that endured by Vincent Strand’s uncle of many generations back, Father Link (“He Was a Priest,” Christ the King, 2024).

It was difficult to accept the superior’s assertion that beards were “unpriestly” when all the portraits of the founder of the society showed him wearing a beard, and my previous house of formation, in another country, had allowed the novices to grow facial hair, as many of our missionaries did in Africa. My beard sprouted after a road accident in which I was propelled from the passenger seat through the windscreen of another father’s V.W. Beetle. Shaving became a delicate operation.

It was not wise to express one’s doubt of the validity of Father Superior’s position, and there were other follies which did not generate the desirable understanding between us, but those need not detain us here.

Pope Francis’s numerous calls for seminaries to encourage openness between students and formators came rather too late for me to finish my training, but what have I to complain about after forty-four years, and counting, of marital bliss?

Maurice Billingsley
Canterbury, England