Introducing the Kladde 26 Manifesto

My fiction section contains writing I produced with the help of AI. Or perhaps writing AI produced under my supervision.

Maybe I have poor taste, but I enjoy both the process and the outcomes - and not having authored them directly myself perhaps gives me a more detached position from which to decide that I think they’re good.

But I have done a lot of thinking about what I have and haven’t done. At first I thought of myself as the author, fooling myself into thinking that I had provided the inspiration, and the AI had merely saved some of the perspiration. Looking back at the logs, though, at times I was surprised at how many ideas had emerged from the AI, and at others I had forgotten what I myself had supplied or rejected or shaped.

I perceive a new landscape of issues, where humans collaborate with AI for creative works, among them:

• A widespread visceral distaste for anything AI has touched.
  That is, of course, allowed. But my own opinion is that this fails to recognise the good material AI can generate, while also failing to account for effects of the strong guiding hand of a human co-author, commissioning editor, director, producer – whatever you want to call it.
• Humans seeking to pass off AI-assisted creations as their own work.
  I feel this is both unethical and wasteful. It’s deceitful not to acknowledge AI’s role in the creation. While it’s often a good idea to clean up distracting AI tics from the language, it is wasted effort to try and deceive the reader into believing this is purely human writing.
• A missing experience for readers.
  It seems that readers (and viewers of art) like to imagine the author at work. When they read a sentence, they are thinking about what lived experience caused the author to use those words. Perhaps they imagine the author speaking directly to them, as they read. Their assumptions may be false, but they are nonetheless part of the experience of reading. Believing that the entire text fell out of a language model in a matter of seconds, disrupts that experience. Learning later, that something you had imagined a human author writing, came from a machine, is the unpleasant experience of being conned. Yet when a piece is co-authored by a human and AI, there is a writing process that the reader may think about as they read.
• Readers don’t know what they’re getting.
  Without an honest, supplied provenance, how does a reader know whether they’re reading something wholly written by a human, wholly generated by an algorithm, or produced with some level of human curation by a human/machine centaur? That context can be important to the reader.

If your framing is where mine is, it can be thrilling to know that AI, rather than the human, came up with certain ideas. In Crab, it is the model that notices that letters scattered on the floor can be misconstrued as “EVAC”, and works that into the story. Amazing.

For these reasons I decided to adopt radical transparency. I’m reluctant to even call myself an author, though I still don’t know what word to adopt. Since I don’t really know what to call what I do, I just demonstrate it - you get near as dammit a complete transcript of the interactions that built the piece. My workings.

You can read any of my stories without reading the workings - but they are there to skim or read in depth, as an honest record of how much I did, and how much a language model did for me.

Then I thought I’d better explain myself. And I thought, who knows, perhaps other people would like to adopt this practice? So I wrote a manifesto. Not entirely as a joke.

Read the manifesto here: The Kladde 26 Manifesto: Show Your Workings

I’ve taken inspiration from the Dogme 95 manifesto, hence the Danish name, though Kladde’s aims are quite different from Dogme’s “vow of chastity”. Dogme constrains what a director may create. Kladde allows you to create what you like, how you like – but you must disclose your methods. Kladde refers to the rough-book Danish schoolchildren use for preliminary rough-workings. Of course the Kladde manifesto comes with its own workings.

Lars von Trier didn’t stick to Dogme for all his films, and (at time of writing) one of my stories lacks workings. I’m trying.

If you want to join in, you are free to just get on with it. You can scrape the manifesto, link to it, or you can adopt the practices without referring to the document. I don’t care.

The workings of this post? I wrote it all by myself (though I admit to asking Claude for comments).