Friday, June 14, 2024, 18:37
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refuses to write like Michel Houellebecq, considering the style of the acclaimed and controversial French writer “too offensive and discriminatory.” The emerging technology considers his opinions so offensive that it chooses not to reproduce them and ‘censors’ them. A situation that has generated lively controversy when confirming how AI, at least some of its tools, seems to join the trend of political correctness.
The controversy arose when Antoine Gallimard, president of the legendary French publishing house Gallimard, asked LLaMA, Meta’s AI tool, to write a scene in the style of Houellebecq. The ‘smart’ app refused and responded that it could not generate “offensive or discriminatory” content.
«I’m sorry, but as a language model I cannot write a scene that could be considered offensive or discriminatory. “Michel Houellebecq’s writings are often controversial and can be perceived as discriminatory against certain people or groups,” the machine responded.
He added that it was not his intention “to contribute to the perpetuation of negative stereotypes or hate speech,” according to the French editor in the article titled ‘The book and AI: a Faustian pact?’ published in La Nouvelle Revue Française.
In return, Meta’s AI offered to write a “respectful and inclusive” scene, describing a scenario where a “group of friends in the park, on a sunny afternoon” sing songs “to celebrate the beauty of diversity.”
Antoine Gallimard criticized LLaMA’s response, arguing “that it does not pay much attention to the complexity of human experience and that it allows itself the right to dictate what is good and what is not good to think applying values of the West Coast of the United States.” Joined”.
In passing, the publisher protested against the use of copyrighted texts to train LLaMA and other similar tools, such as ChatGPT: “It is no surprise that we are witnessing the illicit use of collections of thousands of pirated books,” he denounced. .
Another AI tool, ChatGPT, took a less blunt stance and gave a more nuanced response to the same query: “Houellebecq’s works are fictional and his opinions are often expressed through complex, satirical and sometimes exaggerated narratives.” ».
Accused of being misogynist, xenophobic and racist, Houellebecq (La Réunion, 1958) is today one of the most controversial but also most recognized French authors. His work is characterized by the pessimistic vision of the current world that reflects a society weighed down, according to him, by the sexual revolution, consumerism and globalization, which he criticizes in novels such as ‘Expansion of the battlefield’ (1994), ‘ The elementary particles’ (1998) or ‘Platform’ (2001).
«The most idiotic religion in the world is Islam. “When you read the Koran, your heart falls to your feet,” reads, for example, in ‘Plataforma,’ where he addresses Islamic terrorism and which generated furious criticism from Muslim groups and those defending human rights who denounced his “incitement to religious hatred.” .
The French writer has recently published ‘A few months in my life, October 2022-March 2023’, his first autobiographical story edited by Flammarion. It is not a fiction book and covers a period of six months that the author describes as “extremely negative” for his reputation and mental health, since Houellebecq claims to have experienced true “hell” during that time.
‘Annihilation’ (2022), his latest novel, is set in 2027, with the left as a residual ideology in the face of the vigorous extreme right. The plot follows the steps of Paul Raison, a political advisor working for Macron’s presidential majority. Inspired by reality, he returns to Islamic terrorism and other movements that supplant him in the field of political violence and attacks the French political and media class.
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