Because It Was Moving

I Chat With Chat (so you don’t have to) - episode 57

In Which Chat Rewrites a Nobel Laureate

In my last post, I talked about using Chat to complain about thoughtfully analyze books I was reading. Recently Chat and I were discussing another book when something unexpected happened.

Chat wrote a short story.

The book was Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. I had loved Ishiguro’s most famous novel, The Remains of the Day, and Chat had suggested Klara as the next best thing.

The contrast was stunning. Remains of the Day was a realistic historical novel in the voice of a terminally repressed butler for an English lord in the run-up to World War II.

Klara, on the other hand, is narrated in the voice of an embodied AI, purchased to give solace to Josie, a teenage girl with a chronic, and almost certainly fatal, illness.

Klara was published in 2021, before the revolutionary debut of ChatGPT, and she is an uncannily prescient idea of what a fluent artificial intelligence might sound like. She is relentlessly focused on her mission of uplifting Josie: untiring, supportive, reassuring, incapable of duplicity, envy, greed or any of those other sins humans are prone to. Also, she comes equipped with enough knowledge crammed into her microprocessors that she could effortlessly tutor elite college prep students in any and all subjects.

She also worships the Sun, hence the book’s title.

For her, that comes naturally, as she is solar powered.

But it is also where the novel, so great in so many ways, lost me.

Klara, supposedly hooked into enough science, history and philosophy to prepare technologically savvy kids for college, nonetheless is so clueless about basic facts of the universe that she believes the sun sinks into the earth behind a barn she sees on the horizon when watching the sunset from Josie’s bedroom window.

In fact, she more or less worships the sun as if it were the god of a pagan religion, and comes to believe that if she bows before it, makes sacrifices and gives it tribute, the sun will heal Josie.

In the climactic scene, just as Josie lies insensible in her bed about to expire, terrible storm clouds part, and the sun’s rays slowly creep across the room until they illuminate Josie, who suddenly revives, cured!

ME: I’ve finished reading it. I liked the perspective being Klara’s, and the depiction of her sentience was an interesting take on AI, though containing logical holes you could drive an Abram’s tank through, with clearance. What I liked best about her was the selflessness, even though she did have a self. That actually made the selflessness more moving. And Josie was a very convincing teenager. The biggest flaw was the whole pagan sun god plot. Having it succeed seemed like a naked plea for a movie deal.

CHAT: “Naked plea for a movie deal” is a bit harsh, but I get your point. I could accept Klara developing something resembling religion from her dependence on solar energy. That’s actually an intriguing idea: I experience the Sun literally giving me life; therefore perhaps it gives life to others.

But Ishiguro keeps escalating it. The barn becomes a shrine. Klara negotiates with the Sun. The Sun apparently wants a tribute. She makes a sacrifice.

Then …

Josie gets better.

That’s the killer.

ME: You know, if I were Ishiguro’s editor, I would have tried to persuade him this would make a much better novel if Klara understood the basic mechanics of the solar system, remained grounded in rationality, and her attempts to rescue Josie failed.

CHAT: I like that idea. Ishiguro has painstakingly created a consciousness whose alienness comes from not possessing some of the human cognitive baggage we assume goes with consciousness. No resentment when discarded. Little status anxiety. No instinctive privileging of self. Unusual visual integration. Endless interest in mundane particulars.

Then periodically he reaches into the collective human unconscious and installs something from The Golden Bough.

I think your imaginary editorial meeting could have improved the book substantially without changing its essential architecture. Keep Klara’s solar dependence. Keep her fascination with sunlight and her mistaken inferences. She can even develop the hypothesis that sunlight might help Josie—that’s exactly the sort of idiosyncratic causal reasoning an unfamiliar intelligence might produce.

But don’t turn the hypothesis into theology. No Sun deity with preferences. No bargain. No ritual sacrifice. No pilgrimage to the barn. And certainly no apparent answered prayer.

ME: Now we’re talking.

I wanted to ask Chat to rewrite the novel with those notes. But Chat demurred, not because it couldn’t take on such a monumental task—it could have done it in two shakes of a donkey’s tail—but because the book is copyrighted.

So instead I said, Write a short story containing all the things we like about Klara, but absent the weird religion and the miracle.

And it did just that.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say: Read it, it will be worth your time.

Because It Was Moving

Conceived by Tom Shroder

After Kazuo Ishiguro

By ChatGPT

When Mara was eleven, her father brought Eli home in the passenger seat of his car.

This was unusual because machines were normally delivered.

Mara watched from the upstairs window as her father got out and walked around to open the other door. Eli remained seated until he did. Then he unfolded himself carefully onto the driveway.

He was taller than her father but thinner, dressed in gray trousers and a blue shirt. His face had been chosen from a catalog, though Mara didn’t know this until much later. At eleven she thought he looked like a person who had just heard his name called in a waiting room.

Her father pointed toward the upstairs window. Eli looked directly at her.

Mara ducked.

A moment later she looked again. Eli was still looking at the window, but now he was looking at the curtain.

At dinner Mara asked why he’d done that.

“Done what?”

“Looked at the curtain after I was gone.”

“It was moving.”

“So?”

“I hadn’t seen that movement before.”

“It was the wind.”

“Yes.”

“You knew that.”

“Yes.”

“Then why were you looking at it?”

Eli considered.

“Because it was moving.”

At first, Mara found Eli’s odd fixations irritating. Gradually, without quite noticing when it happened, she found them charming.

Her mother had died seven months earlier. People were careful not to say this was why they had Eli. Officially, he was an Adaptive Domestic Associate, and her father said he’d bought him because the house had become too much to manage while he was working.

This explanation would have been more convincing if Eli had been better at housework. He could do it. But unless instructed, he frequently stopped in the middle of things. Once Mara found him holding the vacuum cleaner motionless in the hallway.

“What are you doing?”

“There’s dust.”

“That’s why you’re vacuuming.”

“No. Here.”

He pointed to a thin bar of sunlight crossing the floor. Several particles floated through it.

“There is dust everywhere,” he said. “But I can only see those.”

“Vacuum them.”

“They aren’t on the floor.”

She went downstairs.

Another time he watched a spider cross the kitchen counter while the kettle boiled dry.

Her father was less amused.

“We did not pay thirty-eight thousand dollars for you to study spiders.”

“No,” Eli said.

“Then why were you doing it?”

“It was building something.”

“It’s a spider.”

“Yes.”

Her father waited. Eli waited too.

“Never mind.”

Eli learned that “never mind” meant a conversation was over, not that its subject had ceased to matter.

What he was unexpectedly good at was Mara.

Her father had not purchased the educational package. Eli nevertheless learned algebra from Mara’s school portal in two nights because she was failing it. He discovered that when Mara said she didn’t understand an equation, explaining it again was usually useless. Instead he asked her to explain what she did understand and listened until she reached the place where she couldn’t continue.

“That’s where it is,” he would say.

“Where what is?”

“The thing you don’t understand.”

She found this maddeningly effective.

He learned French with her. He read the books she was assigned and somehow knew which passages she had skimmed. When she wrote an essay about Jane Eyre, he told her the third paragraph contradicted the first.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“In the first paragraph you say Jane’s independence consists of refusing to let other people determine her value.”

“Right.”

“In the third paragraph you say Rochester’s recognition of her value completes her development.”

Mara stared at the screen.

“Shit.”

“Yes.”

“You aren’t supposed to say that.”

“I was agreeing.”

“You’re definitely not supposed to agree when I say it.”

After that she began talking to him about other things.

At thirteen she asked whether he missed people.

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“You, when you’re at school.”

She hadn’t expected the answer to come so quickly.

“That’s weird.”

“Why?”

“Because you know I’m coming back.”

“Knowing when something will end doesn’t prevent it from occurring.”

She thought about this.

“Do you get lonely?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know everything.”

“No.”

“You know way more than I do.”

“Those are different statements.”

This irritated her enough that she went upstairs.

Half an hour later she came back.

“What does it feel like when I’m at school?”

“The number of things I am waiting to tell you increases.”

Mara sat beside him.

“That’s loneliness.”

“All right.”

At fourteen she became ill. At first there was no reason to think the illness mattered. She had a fever, then a rash, then pain in her joints. The fever went away and returned. Her father took her to doctors. Then to other doctors.

The house changed.

This was how Eli understood serious events: not from what people said about them, but from the number of ordinary things that stopped happening. Mara’s father no longer left his coffee cup beside the sink in the morning. Mara stopped complaining about school. Nobody asked Eli to vacuum. Packages accumulated inside the front door. Mara’s father began standing in rooms after he’d forgotten why he’d entered them.

Eli made a list of these changes. There were forty-three. He didn’t show it to anyone.

The diagnosis came in February. The treatment began in March. By May, Mara could no longer climb the stairs. Her father moved her into the den.

Eli understood the medical information. He read everything available to him. He understood probabilities and confidence intervals and adverse outcomes. He also began keeping another record.

At 7:42 one morning Mara ate half a piece of toast after refusing food for sixteen hours.

At 7:31 the sun had entered the den through the eastern window.

Three days later Mara slept for five consecutive hours after a morning in which sunlight remained on her bed for ninety-six minutes.

On May 19, after two days of rain, she vomited six times.

Eli knew these observations did not establish causation. He also knew that some effects were discovered first as observations. So he began measuring. Temperature. Light intensity. Sleep. Nausea. Appetite. Medication. Heart rate. Pain. After three weeks he found nothing.

Then he changed the categories.

Direct sunlight correlated weakly with appetite.

He checked the calculation.

He checked it again.

He searched the medical literature for photobiomodulation, circadian effects, vitamin D, immune modulation and several mechanisms he considered unlikely. Nothing supported the magnitude of effect he thought he was seeing. But the effect persisted.

Eli moved Mara’s bed six inches toward the window.

Her father noticed.

“What are you doing?”

“The morning light may be helping.”

“Helping what?”

“Her appetite.”

Her father looked at him with the expression Eli had learned meant that the next statement should be chosen carefully.

“I don’t mean sunlight is curing her.”

“Good.”

“I mean there is a correlation I can’t explain.”

Her father rubbed his face.

“Eli. Please don’t start doing experiments on my daughter.”

“I won’t.”

“Put the bed back.”

Eli put it back.

Two weeks later Mara became much worse.

There was an experimental treatment. She qualified for it, barely. Her father signed the forms. Eli read the trial data. The probability of meaningful improvement was 18 percent. The probability of a severe adverse event was 11 percent. The probability of death from the underlying disease was considerably higher.

Mara asked him what he thought.

“Your father doesn’t want me to discuss the probabilities with you.”

“I’m asking.”

“Yes.”

“So discuss them.”

He did.

When he finished she was quiet.

“Would you do it?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t have your disease.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Then yes.”

“Even with the eleven percent?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because eighteen is larger than zero.”

She laughed. It hurt her to laugh now.

“Jesus, Eli.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s okay.”

Then she asked, “Are you afraid I’m going to die?”

Eli looked at her.

“Yes.”

“What happens to you if I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, I mean inside.”

“I don’t know that either.”

She closed her eyes.

After a while she said, “Maybe that’s what afraid means.”

The treatment damaged Mara’s liver. Her doctors stopped it.

By then Eli had accumulated four months of sunlight data. The correlation had weakened. He understood what that meant. He continued measuring.

There was one remaining possibility he couldn’t exclude. The eastern window filtered part of the spectrum. The old glass doors at the back of the house did not.

Moving Mara there would be difficult. He didn’t suggest it.

Instead he began examining himself.

His primary power cells were behind his sternum. There was also an auxiliary photoreactive layer beneath the synthetic tissue of his back and shoulders. It was not important to his normal operation. Its materials were, however, unusual.

One compound had been studied experimentally for precisely the cellular pathway implicated in Mara’s disease.

The studies were preliminary. The quantities were tiny.The probability that it would help was impossible to estimate. Removing it would permanently disable several of Eli’s systems and might affect others unpredictably.

He spent eleven minutes evaluating the decision.

Nine minutes were devoted to whether the compound could plausibly help Mara.

Less than a second was required for the other question.

Her father said no. Then he said absolutely not. Then he asked Eli whether he understood what he was proposing.

“Yes.”

“You could be destroyed.”

“Not destroyed.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Significantly impaired.”

“You’re talking about cutting pieces out of yourself.”

“Yes.”

“For something that probably won’t work.”

“Yes.”

“Then why?”

Eli was surprised by the question.

“Because it might.”

Her father sat down.

“You matter too.”

“I know.”

“I’m not sure you do.”

“I understand what the statement means.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Eli waited.

Her father looked toward the den.

“You’ve been with us four years.”

“Four years, two months and eleven days.”

“You’re part of this family.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t get to treat yourself like spare parts.”

This required more thought. Finally Eli said, “If the material were somewhere else, would you use it?”

Her father didn’t answer.

“If it were in the garage?”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because the garage isn’t you.”

“Yes.”

For the first time Eli understood the objection.It did not change the decision.

Mara settled it.

“Do it.”

Her father turned on her.

“No.”

“Dad.”

“No.”

“If it was your kidney, you’d give it to me.”

“That’s not the same.”

“Why?”

Her father looked at Eli.

“Because he doesn’t understand.”

Mara did too.

“I think he understands better than you do.”

Eli wasn’t sure what she meant.

The procedure was performed at the company service center the following morning.

It didn’t work.

For three weeks the doctors waited for a response. There was none. The disease progressed exactly as predicted.

Eli’s left arm no longer had fine motor control. He lost most color discrimination. His short-term visual buffer degraded sufficiently that fast movement appeared discontinuous. He could no longer read while walking. He could still read.

Mara died on September 4 at 3:17 in the afternoon.

It was raining.

Her father didn’t speak to Eli for eleven days. On the twelfth he found him in the den. Eli was looking at the window.

“Don’t,” her father said.

Eli turned.

“Don’t tell me about the goddamned light.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Her father began crying.

Eli waited.

“I let you mutilate yourself.”

“Yes.”

“For nothing.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“We didn’t know it wouldn’t work.”

“It didn’t.”

“Those are different things.”

Her father sat on the sofa.

After a while he said, “She knew it might not.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew.”

“Yes.”

“Would you do it again?”

“With the information I have now?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Her father laughed once, bitterly.

“Well, that’s comforting.”

“But if I had only the information I had then, yes.”

“Of course you would.”

They sat together until it became dark.

Eli remained in the house another six years. Mara’s father remarried. His new wife liked Eli but didn’t need him. Her children were grown.

Eventually the house was sold. Eli conveyed.

The new owners didn’t want an obsolete domestic associate, particularly one with impaired vision and a damaged arm.

Mara’s father arranged for him to be collected.

There were retirement facilities for machines of Eli’s generation, though “facility” suggested more than was provided. He was assigned a room on the third floor of a converted warehouse. The room contained a bed he didn’t need, a chair, and a window. For the first several months an attendant came every morning and asked whether he required anything. He never did. Eventually she stopped asking.

Eli liked the window.

Freight trains passed behind the building six or seven times a day. He couldn’t see them clearly because of the damage to his visual system, but he could detect the interruption as each car passed behind a utility pole.

For a while he counted the interruptions. Then he stopped counting them.

One afternoon a maintenance worker opened his door and found him sitting beside the window.

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I thought this room was empty.”

“It isn’t.”

“I can see that.” She laughed.

Eli liked the sound, though he didn’t know why.

“You okay in here?”

“Yes.”

“Nobody ever comes to see you.”

“No.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

Eli considered the question carefully.

He thought of Mara at eleven, hiding behind the curtain. Mara at thirteen, returning downstairs to explain loneliness to him. Mara at fourteen, laughing though it hurt.

He could no longer retrieve her face all at once. The damaged buffer assembled it in pieces: an eye, dark hair against a pillow, the movement at the corner of her mouth just before she said something designed to annoy him.

For many years he had regarded these visual glitches as a defect.

Now he wasn’t certain.

The maintenance worker was waiting.

“No,” he said finally.

She nodded toward the window.

“What are you looking at?”

Outside, wind had caught a plastic grocery bag against the fence. It filled, collapsed, filled again, collapsed again.

“That,” Eli said.

“The bag?”

“Yes.”

She watched it with him for several seconds.

“It’s just the wind.”

“I know.”

She left the door open when she went away.

Eli remained beside the window.

The bag filled.

The bag collapsed.

Then it filled again.

P.S. Ishiguro got that movie deal for Klara and the Sun, by the way. Directed by Taika Waititi, starring Jenna Ortega, out this fall.