Julian Barnes: Author discusses his ‘final’ novel Departure(s), living with cancer, and the future of fiction
Even though he is giving up publishing novels, Barnes will continue to write journalism, and tells me “I decline to be pessimistic about the future of the novel”, referencing the new and diverse generations of writers being published.
He also backs efforts to ensure writers’ works aren’t scraped by artificial intelligence without being compensated.
Ahead of the interview, I’d asked an AI chatbot to write an opening paragraph in the style of Julian Barnes. It began:
“He had always believed that memory behaved like a courteous guest – arriving when invited, leaving when ignored – but lately it had begun to loiter, hands in pockets, humming tunelessly in the corners of his mind.”
The real author describes it as a combination of plagiarism and banality.
“If I’d written that sentence, ‘He’d always believed that memory behaved like a courteous guest’, I’d stop there because all the stuff about ‘loitering hands in pockets, humming tunelessly in the corners of his mind’ is just crass”.
Overall, he says the AI paragraph “doesn’t make you laugh and it doesn’t make you cry. It doesn’t move you. It’s just a pastiche.
“They need to have some sort of law which says you can’t just scrape things and then publish it as an original work.”
