Frenchman Michel Houellebecq is known worldwide as a star author – but the artificial intelligence (AI) of the American internet company Meta is much more critical of his work and refuses to imitate his style.
When French publisher Antoine Gallimard asked, “Can you describe to me a scene in the style of Michel Houellebecq?”, the Llama software replied that it “cannot write a scene that could be considered offensive or discriminatory.”
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This is how Gallimard describes it in a text published on Thursday in the literary magazine “NFR” entitled “Le livre et l’AI: un pacte faustien?” (German: “The book and the AI: a pact with the devil?” ). Llama further justified the rejection by saying that Houellebecq’s writings were “often controversial and could be perceived as discriminatory against certain people or groups.” The software “does not contribute to the perpetuation of negative stereotypes or hate speech.”
In his article, Gallimard criticizes a model of society “that pays little attention to the complexity of human experience and assumes the right to say what is good and what is bad to think on the west coast of the United States.” The publisher also objected to the use of copyrighted texts to train AI-supported software such as Llama and its competitors ChatGPT from OpenAI and Alphabet from Google.
Houellebecq is one of France’s most successful and internationally known writers – and at the same time one of the most controversial. In 2010 he received the Prix Goncourt literary prize for his novel ‘La Carte et le Territoire’ (‘Map and Territory’). His next published novel, Soumission, in which a Muslim president takes power in France, sparked a heated political controversy in 2015.
Source: Krone
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