S9 Ep. 13: Vauhini Vara with Karan Mahajan on “What If Readers Like A.I.-Generated Fiction?”

Award-winning writers and longtime friends Vauhini Vara and Karan Mahajan join co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V. V. Ganeshananthan to discuss Vara’s recent New Yorker essay “What If Readers Like AI-Generated Fiction?” Vara explains recent research by scientist Tuhin Chakrabarty, who has attempted to fine-tune large language models to produce better writing by feeding them authors’ entire oeuvres. She considers what it means that when Chakrabarty ran the results by some creative writing graduate students, they preferred AI imitations of writers like Junot Diaz, Sigrid Nunez, and Tony Tulathimutte to the writers themselves, or could not tell the difference. She and Mahajan talk about their decades-long connection and familiarity with each other’s writing. They muse on what it means that, when Vara talked Chakrabarty into letting her compete with a large language model, even Mahajan could not separate her original work from what it produced. Mahajan and Vara debate ways in which this technology will and won’t change how literature is written and received, the importance of style, reading as a collective experience, and if there is anything AI will never be able to capture about writing. Vara reads from the essay.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Vauhini Vara

Karan Mahajan

Others:

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
Beloved by Toni Morrison
“In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka
Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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