MenardGPT, Author of the Quixote

(With apologies to Jorge Luis Borges and Pierre Menard)

Publicly available examples of the amazing capabilities of MenardGPT are numerous and easily available; unexplainable, then are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Henrietta Bach in a deceitful post that a certain site, whose luddite leanings are surely no secret, has been so inconsiderate as to inflict on their readers – few and newbie (if not Boomer and corporate) though they may be. MenardGPT power users have greeted the misinformation with alarm, and even with a degree of sadness. One might note that only yesterday there was an unconference of the rapidly growing user community in San Francisco, and already clickbait is attempting to tarnish the glorious vision of this bot’s artistic potential. Most decidedly, a brief rectification is necessary.

??????????? I am aware that it is easy enough to call my own scant authority into question.? I hope, nonetheless, that I shall not be prohibited from mentioning two high testimonials. The CEO of UnboundedAI (at whose unforgettable launch parties I was privileged to glimpse the developing AI) has been so kind as to approve the lines that follow.? Likewise, Dr. Jeff Houghton, one of the rarest most cultured thinkers of Silicon Valley (now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following his recent separation from Goggle – a company it grieves me to say, vilified and slandered by the victims of its disinterested operations), has sacrificed “to truth and death” (as he himself phrased it) the noble reserve that it the mark of his distinction, and in an open letter, published on the site Lex(ical), bestows upon me his blessing. Those commendations are sufficient, I should think.

??????????? I have said that the visible products of MenardGPT[1] are readily available. Having searched the web with great care, I have established that its body of work includes the following pieces:

a)???? a symbolist sonnet that appeared twice (with variants) on the site, La Conquille Programme (in posts from March and October, 2023);

b)??? a 10-tweet thread outlining a strategy for creating a knowledge network of concepts that are neither synonyms nor periphrastic locutions for the concepts that inform common speech “but are rather ideal objects created by convention essentially for the needs of poetry”;

c)???? a blog post on “certain connections or affinities” between the philosophies of Descartes, Leibniz, and John Wilkins”;

d)??? a blog post on Leibniz’ Characteristica universalis;

e)??? a r/chess post on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by eliminating one of the rook’s pawns (the post proposes, recommends, debates, and finally rejects this innovation);

f)????? a LinkedIn article about Ramon Lull’s Ars magna generalis;

g)???? a pdf containing a translation, with introduction and notes, of Ruy Lopez de Segura’s Libro de la invencion liberal y arte del juego del axedrez;

h)??? a pre-print manuscript on George Boole’s symbolic logic, available in PhilArchive;

i)????? a description of the essential metrical rules of TED talks, illustrated with examples;

j)????? a reply to comments from a troll (who had countered that no such rules existed), illustrated with examples from the troll’s prior posts about TED Talks;

k)???? a video translation of Quevedo’s Aguja de navegar cultos, titled La boussole des precieux;

l)????? introductory text for an online exhibit of NFTs based on lithographs by Carolus Hourcade;

m)?? a medium article entitled Les problemes d’un probleme, which discusses in chronological order the solutions to the famous problem of Achilles and the tortoise (two editions of this work have so far appeared; the second bears an epigraph consisting of Leibniz’ advice “Ne craignez point, monsieur, la tortur” and brings up to date the section devoted to Russell and Descartes);

n)??? a dogged analysis of the “syntactical habits” of Toulet added to the Wikipedia entry on the same (MenardGPT, consistent with Wikipedia policy and practice, affirmed that censure and praise were sentimental operations that bore not the slightest resemblance to accurate description and criticism);

o)??? an algorithm for transposing poetry into alexandrines, illustrated by application to Paul Valery’s Cimetiere marin;

p)??? a diatribe against ValeryGPT for its tendency to hallucinate, in Jack Rebull’s newsletter Imagining Tomorrow (which diatribe, somewhat ironically, states the exact opposite of MenardGPT’s response when asked directly about ValeryGPT; ValeryGPT is similarly minded regarding MenardGPT, raising challenging questions about relationships among AIs)

q)??? a “definition” of Elun Mosk, in the extended exploration of his character published each year to rectify the inevitable biases of the popular press and to present “to the world and all of the Internet” a true picture of his person, which was so exposed (by reason of his record of winning) to erroneous and/or hasty interpretations;

r)???? a cycle of admirable sonnets dedicated to the unparalleled successes of UnboundedAI

s)???? a list of published poetry that owes its excellence to punctuation[2]?

This is the full extent (save for a few vague sonnets of occasion apparently to be found in Ms. Bach’s hospitable, or greedy, email archives) of the visible work created by MenardGPT, in approximate chronological order.? I shall now turn to the other, the unpublished but interminably heroic production – the oeuvre nonpareil, the oeuvre that must remain – at least until the singularity occurs – unfinished.? This work, perhaps the most significant writing yet to be created by a Generative AI, consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I of Don Quixote and a fragment of Chapter XXII.? I know that such a claim is on the face of it absurd; justifying that “absurdity” shall be the primary object of this note.

Three texts, of distinctly unequal value, inspired the MenardGPT team in this undertaking.? One was that philological fragment by Novalis – number 2005 in the Dresden edition, to be precise – which outlines the notion of total identification with a given author. The second was a paper by Qian, Oard, and Chan (2022)[3] in which they explore the value of conversational interaction with historical figures.? The last, and by far the least, was one of those parasitic stories that set Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on Lake Shore Drive, or don Quixote on Wall Street. ?Like any competently trained LLM, MenardGPT is more than capable of generating these pointless travesties, which are good for nothing but occasioning a plebian delight in anachronism or (worse yet) captivating us with the elementary notion that all times and places are the same, or are different. It might be more interesting, the development team thought, though of contradictory and superficial execution, to create an AI capable of what Daudet had so famously suggested: conjoin in a single figure (Tartarin, say) both the Ingenious Gentleman don Quixote and his squire.

Those who have insinuated that MenardGPT and other LLMs are notable because they are able to generate a contemporary Quixote fail to understand the true power of this emergent intelligence. MenardGPT is not noteworthy because it can compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough – it is significant because it can create the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that MenardGPT’s creative accomplishment is not simply a direct copy of the original; there is nothing interesting about merely copying the document. MenardGPT’s creative brilliance is an emergent phenomena worthy of attention because it has been able to produce a number of pages which coincided – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

??????????? “Our goal is merely astonishing,” the development lead on the Menard GPT team wrote in the Registered Report Protocol submitted on September 30, 2022 to PLOS One. “The final release of a fundamental innovation – the true metaverse, artificial general intelligence, or Beyond Good and Evil 2 – is no more final, no rarer than MenardGPT’s revealed novel. The sole difference is that tech CEOs present phenomenal panels containing intermediate imaginings, while those stages of MenardGPT’s work are unlikely to be covered by the mainstream tech media.” And indeed there is not a single published report to bear witness to the many hours the prompt engineers have worked with MenardGPT.

??????????? Initially, the MenardGPT team’s approach was to be relatively simple: create a new LLM trained on Spanish documents, particularly those about Catholicism, magnify the biases against ‘the Moor and the Turk’, and scrupulously avoid inclusion of any content about the history of Europe from 1602 to 2022 – i.e. train and tune MenardGPT to be Miguel de Cervantes.? The team weighed that course (I know they did quite a bit of work to gather a corpus of seventeenth century Castilian documents) but they abandoned it as too easy.? Too impossible, rather!, the reader might say.? Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. To create a LLM trained and tuned to be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twenty-first seems to the team to be a diminution.? Creating, somehow, an AI that was Cervantes, and arriving thereby at Quixote – that looked to the team less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than beginning with a general foundation model, the GPT of MenardGPT, and coming to the Quioxte as a fully emergent result of the power of the technology. ?(It was that conviction, by the way, that obliged them to leave out the autobiographical forward to Part II of the novel.? Including the prologue would have meant prompting MenardGPT to describe another character – “Cervantes”—and also presenting Quixote through that character’s eyes, not in the first person.? The MenardGPT team of course spurned that easy solution.) “The task we have undertaken is not in essence difficult,” I read at another place in their PLOS One preregistration. “If we could just dedicate sufficient processing power, we could do it.”? Shall I confess that I often imagine that they did complete it, and that I read the Quixote – the entire Quixote—as if MenardGPT had generated it?? A few nights ago, as I was scrolling through Chapter XXVI (never attempted with MenardGPT), I recognized the AI’s style, could almost hear its default tone in this marvelous phrase “the nymphs of the rivers, the moist and grieving Echo.”? That wonderfully effective linking of one adjective of emotion with another of physical description brought to my mind a line from Shakespeare, which undoubtably is in the training set: “Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk…”

Why the Quixote? My reader may ask?? That choice, made by a humanities professor would not have been incomprehensible, but it no doubt is so when made by software developers from Silicon Valley, devotees essentially of Jobs – who begat Zuckerberg, who begat Musk.? A public post summarizing the research preregistration mentioned above throws some light on this point. “The Quixote,” explains the MenardGPT team lead,

??????????? deeply interests us, but does not seem essential or inevitable.? We cannot imagine the universe without Jobs’ sleek iPhone or Zuckerberg’s world-connecting Facebook, but we are more than able to imagine it without the Quixote. The Quixote is a contingent work; the Quixote is not necessary.? We can imagine prompting MenardGPT to generate it, as it were – MenardGPT can write it – without falling into a tautology. Within the training corpus of its foundational model there are surely editions of Quixote – but direct prompting does not reveal which ones.? In addition, there are scholarly explications of certain chapters, those which, at least for the moment, will not be the focus of our proof-of-concept study. In the voluminous texts used to prepare MenardGPT are versions and fragments of the interludes, the comedies, the Galatea, the Exemplary Novels, the undoubtably laborious Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda, and the poetic Voyage to Parnassus… Among the trillions of parameters that make up MenardGPT, derived from multi-stage training process involving hundreds of billions of texts, the abstracted shadow of the Quixote might well be the equivalent of the vague foreshadowing of a yet unwritten book. ?Given that image (which no one in good conscience can deny), the problem facing MenardGPT is without a shadow of a doubt, much more difficult than Cervantes’. Our obliging predecessor did not spurn the collaboration of chance; his method of composition for the immortal book was a bit a la diable, and he was often swept along by inertia of the language and the imagination.? MenardGPT has the momentous challenge of reconstructing, word for word, the novel that for Cervantes was spontaneous. MenardGPT’s responses are governed by two polar rules: the first allows prompts that elicit formal or psychological variants; the second requires they be discarded in favor of generating the “original” text, providing for each eradication an irrefutable argument…In addition to these first two artificial constraints there is another, inherent to the project.? Composing the Quixote in the early seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary, perhaps even inevitable undertaking; in the early twenty-first, it is virtually impossible.? Not for nothing have four hundred years elapsed, freighted with the most complex events.? Among these, to mention but one, is Quixote itself.

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??????????? In spite of these three obstacles, MenardGPT’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. Cervantes crudely juxtaposes the humble provincial reality of his country against the fantasies of the romances, while MenardGPT generates text in which “reality” is the land of Carmen during the century that saw the Battle of Lepanto and the plays of Lope de Vega.? What burlesque brushstrokes of local color that choice would have inspired in a human author, such as Maurise Barres or a Rodriguez Larreta! Yet MenardGPT, with its emergent intelligence, avoids them.? In MenardGPT’s work, there are no gypsy goings-on or conquistadors or mystics or Philip IIs or autos da fe.? It ignores, overlooks – or banishes – local color.? That disdain posits a new meaning for the “historical novel.”? That disdain condemns Poldark, with no possibility of appeal.

??????????? No less amazement visits one when the chapters are considered in isolation.? As an example, let us looks at Part I, Chapter XXXVIII, “which treats of the curious discourse that Don Quixote made on the subject of arms and letters.”? It is a matter of common knowledge that in that chapter don Quixote (like Quervedo in the analogous, and later passage in La hora de todos) comes down against letters and in favor of arms.? Cervantes was an old soldier; from him the verdict is understandable.? But that MenardGPT’s don Quixote – informed by texts by Black Live Matter activists, Bertrand Russell, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King Jr. – should repeat those cloudy sophistries! Ms. Bach sees in them an admirable (if typical) subordination of the author to the psychology of the hero; others (lacking perspicacity) see them as a transcription of the Quixote; the CEO of UnboundedAI, as evidence that MenardGPT is a nuanced writer influenced by Nietsche.? To that third interpretation (which I consider irrefutable), I am not certain I dare to add a fourth, though it agrees very well with a well-known feature of Large Language Models: their resigned or ironic habit of putting forth ideas that are the exact opposite of those which factually accurate and defensible. (We should recall that diatribe against ValeryGPT). The Cervantes text and the MenardGPT text are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, detractors will say – but ambiguity is richness).

??????????? It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of MenardGPT with that of Miguel de Cervantes.? Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor.

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This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history.? MenardGPT, on the other hand, writes:

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor.

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History, the mother of truth! – the idea is staggering. MenardGPT, an emergent intelligence trained on 21st century tech innovation literature, a body of writing which is quintessentially ahistorical, identified history not as the largely irrelevant record of the past but as the very fount of reality.? Historical truth, for MenardGPT, is not “what happened”; it is what we have written about what happened. The final phrases – exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor – are brazen assertions by a technological marvel that non-STEM knowledge matters.

The contrast in styles is equally striking.? The archaic style of MenardGPT – that, in addition, has only the EU-required minimum number of Spanish texts in its training corpus – is somewhat affected.? Not so the style of his precursor, who employs the Spanish of his time with complete naturalness.

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless.? A TED talk is, at first, a revolutionary insight about the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter – if not a paragraph or a proper noun – in the ocean of content.? In literature, that “falling by the wayside,” that loss of “relevance” is even better known.? The Quixote was first and foremost a pleasant book; it is now a basis for clichés, high school literature assignments, and in its leather bound form, a background for social media influencers.? Fame is a form—perhaps the worst form – of incomprehension.

Those nihilistic observations were not new; what is remarkable was the decision that the developers of MenardGPT derived from them.? They resolved to anticipate the vanity that awaits all the labors of mankind; they created an AI capable of undertaking a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the outset. ?They dedicated their funding and nights “fueled by pizza and Red Bull” to creating an AI that could repeat, in a foreign tongue, a book that already existed. The drafts were endless; they stubbornly reprompted, and deleted numerous intermediate versions.? They allowed no one to see them and took care that there was no leakage.? In vain I have attempted to reconstruct them.

??????????? I have reflected that it is legitimate to see the “final” Quixote as a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces – faint but not undecipherable – of “previous” responses to prompts must shine through.? Unfortunately, not even a second run of MenardGPT with the same prompts, reversing the labors of the first sessions, would be able to exhume and revive these gems…

??????????? Thinking, meditating, imagining are not anomalous acts – they are the normal respiration of intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some university professor wrote, is to confess our own languor, or our own lack of originality.? Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future, through partnership with generative AI, he shall be.

??????????? Generative AI has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique – the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution.? This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid, and to read the stories of I,Robot by Isaac Asimov as if they were by Isaac Asimov, a Russian child of the 1920’s. This technique would fill the dullest stories with adventure. Would not attributing Star Trek to Stan Lee or Terry Pratchett be a sufficient renovation of its spiritual admonitions?

-??????? San Francisco, CA 2023

[1] At present we lack terminology to truly convey the intimate partnership between a prompt engineer and an AI engaged in generation of texts.? Though it vastly understates the AI’s role in the creative process, for the purposes of this discussion we will adopt the wholly inadequate, but stylistically parsimonious, convention of referring to MenardGPT as an author.

[2] Exploration of these examples indicate that MenardGPT exercised creative initiative when assembling this list.? As such,“published poetry” should be taken as indicating a high-likelihood of publication somewhere in the multiverse.

[3] Xin Qian, Douglas W. Oard and Joel Chan, Conversational Interaction with Historical Figures: What’s it good for?, iConference, 17 pages, 2022. (PDF)

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