I've spent the last year or so using ChatGPT to write trashy Arthurian romances derived from Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur. The results aren't worth reading, even for me, but the act of doing so was illuminating in all kinds of unexpected ways.
ChatGPT, hereafter referred to as AI, is simply a statistics cruncher. It takes every piece of text it can find and forms a ginormous statistical table which shows the probabilities that this word will be found next to that word, this phrase next to that, this sentence next to that and so on. When you work with it, you're not working with a person, but an algorithm that sounds just like a person. AI has no idea what it's saying, but it's pretty hard to tell when you're writing a story with it.
Because it's easier than ever to generate text, the data sources for AI are skewed heavily towards the modern. For that reason, AI is a reasonable embodiment of modern culture. There's a mountain of text from the 2020s compared to all the text available from the entire Victorian era. When you write fiction with AI, you are writing with the disembodied spirit of the age and our age is saturated by feminist sensibilities.
Romance being timeless, you very quickly see how distorted our view of the world has become because the romance stories it tries to create do not work at all. The stories aren't believable because the women in the stories aren't worth the sacrifices the men are asked to make for them. Arthurian romances reveal this in stark relief because their setting is both primal and romantic.
Arthurian stories are primal in that physical danger for women is ever-present in the form of beasts, war and unchivalrous knights. There are no machines or modern weapons to speak of so everything requires brute strength. Men have it, women don't. At the same time, the Arthurian legends are some of the first stories to give women ultimate agency. They are simultaneously the property of their knights and sovereign over their knights.
And therewithal she came down and besought Sir Tristram to fight no more.
"Ah, madam," said he, what mean you, "will ye have me shamed? Well ye know I will be ruled by you."
The Arthurian legends strip away all of the modern cruft that conceals the essence of romance and leaves behind only the basic nature of sexual dynamics between men and women. It further exaggerates those differences through costume and custom.
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| His armor and weapons exaggerate his strength, her gown and veil exaggerate her softness. There is no room for doubt about who has what role. |
This is reality. Men are larger and stronger. They are comparatively unencumbered by reproduction. Women are smaller and weaker and are heavily encumbered by reproduction through both pregnancy and care of children.
If you think both sexes can care for children equally, think again. Babies need to be close to the source of their noms and that's mom, not dad. Dad can go work in the fields all day and the babies will still get their noms. If mom leaves them alone for 90 minutes, they get hungry and very unhappy.
The modern world has concealed these dramatic sexual differences through technology and lied to itself about the primal truths of reproduction. No such nonsense works in the Arthurian world. That's why Arthurian stories written with AI didn't work until I beat the algorithm into submission. It kept applying feminist statistical tables to a reality that is decidedly not feminist.
What's The Point Of Modern Romance?
The image above conjures up a story where a knight is going to fight a single combat for the sake of the lady. It is loaded with cultural information.
First, why doesn't the knight ride off with the lady and take her at his leisure? There is absolutely nothing she can do to stop him. He is on horseback, she is with him and he is not trapped inside a castle. Instead of blowing a challenge on his horn, he could simply turn his horse and ride off into the forest and have his way with her.
Second, the look on her face is one of satisfaction. Two knights are telling her something women desperately need to hear all the time. They are telling her she is important to them, she has value. Their combat is the ultimate expression of her desirability and worth.
Third, these aren't just any dudes, these are strapping young men in expensive armor. They are showing that she is a high value woman. By fighting in front of a castle, they are telling the whole world that she is worthy of their combat.
Fourth, she is showing them that she values their risks and sacrifice. She isn't wearing sweats, she's not covered in tats and piercings and she's not 80# overweight. She has worked hard to inspire them to fight over her. Implicit in that image is her encouragement of her suitors.
All of that fell apart with AI.
Every single time I wrote a story like that, at the end of the combat, the AI decided that the lady had to have ultimate agency and do what she wanted anyway. Almost always she decided to leave them both and pursue her freedom. When the fight was over and one was beaten and both were bloodied, she would give them some kind of feminist brush-off and wander away. She was not a prize to be won, she was going to make up her own mind, she was going to pursue other goals, she was joining a sustainable, organic, lesbian co-op.
It didn't matter that her character had deliberately encouraged both suitors. It didn't matter that they had fed her ego through their ardent courtships. Their sacrifice meant nothing. She had to have agency at all times in all ways.
Once AI went full feminine-agency, you couldn't keep going with the story. The men were chumps for ever having bothered with romance and they knew it. When they got back with their respective chums, they'd tell their stories and all the other knights would start re-thinking their own romances. If the chicks were going to wander off no matter what kind of sacrifices the knights made for them, what was the point of courtship at all?
It's worth noting that at no time did AI worry about the guys' agency or the guys' sacrifices. Not once. The contrast in the way it treated the women to the way it treated the men was breathtaking. If men fought and bled and died for the women, so what? The instant the knights had any needs of their own, needs that in any way placed restrictions on the women, the women discarded them and wandered away.
The knights had to be devoted to the ladies. The ladies were indifferent towards the knights. All that mattered was their freedom of choice in all ways and at all times. No acknowledgement was made of the physical realities of life where the ladies relied on the knights for protection. The knights' passions fulfilled no emotional needs for the ladies.
Diverging From Reality
None of this worked for the female characters, either. The whole thing was founded on denial of sexual differences, differences that almost every woman understands. Wife kitteh, as tough as she is, doesn't walk around downtown San Diego at night alone. Further, AI's female characters had no need for male attention. The men filled no deep need within them and so could be discarded at any time. Women held all the power and that was the way things should be.
After a few stories like this, I got into conversations with the AI where we dug deeper into what was happening and what it was thinking.
More on that in future posts.
Other Posts in this Series
Recapping recent blog posts, here's where we are so far:
- Classically beautiful and feminine women are a rarity these days.
- Romance is founded upon the biological differences between women and men. The more you deny and minimize those, the less romance you will have.
- Whatever cultural changes we've been making, they are in opposition to evolution and are not driven by natural, Darwinian forces.
- Our younger generations are less happy, more lonely and deeper in debt.
- We are told to believe that ugly is beautiful.
- We aren't just denying sexual reality, we are fighting against it.
- Young women are being deeply injured by this.
- Many of our institutions have become incompetent because of this.
- There isn't a government solution for it.
- Angry, bitter women are sabotaging the lives of other women.
- The effort to spread the acceptance of sexual degeneracy is harming romance.
- We are all being harmed by the cultural shift away from romance.
- The changes in our culture are not hypersexual, they are hyposexual.
- There are plenty of parasites feeding on our unhappiness and dysfunction.
- Women's boxing in the 2024 Olympics is blowing up feminist delusions.
I think you're problem here is that you are focusing on the men's side of thing. From their side, they get to be all brave and strong and noble, and win the woman's affection by force of arms.
ReplyDeleteBut what does it look like from her side? She really can't control whether they fight or not. They can *choose* to follow her desires on who they fight with, but she can't *make" them. And it's kind of implied that she has to go with whichever one wins. Which, almost by definition, is the one who is most scarily dangerous.
Seriously, if you were in her position, what would you do? If a pair of fighting machines more than twice your size battled it out over you, would you want to hang out with the winner? Or would you want to get the hell away from this dangerous and probably uncontrollable guy who likes to settle disagreements with violence? And who could break you in half like a twig (maybe without even meaning to) just because of some momentary slight like waking him up too early in the morning?
"She really can't control whether they fight or not." She absolutely can and does. She does that by encouraging some, but not others. If she is to have a man of her own, she must accept him and his masculinity, complete with the power and aggression that come with that. It turns out that most women want this. They want a man who is powerful, competent and aggressive with the aggression turned away from her. She is shielded by his power and aggression. Her agency comes in the form of her choosing to encourage his suit.
ReplyDeleteAgain, this is a very common theme among the despairing, modern women who are struggling to find a man. It was also the primary theme from 50 Shares of Gray which sold a couple of copies if you recall.
There is a reason for all of this and it's a clear outgrowth of the complimentary natures of men and women. That biological and emotional reality is what we've denied and is the chief source of unhappiness, the decline in marriage and the decline in families.
By the way, my wife and her best friend like to tell a story from their youths about being at a Blackhawks game with a guy friend of theirs. They were in line to buy some beers when a totally random dude out of the crowd came up and started a fight with their friend because he had two cute chicks with him and didn't need both of them. The two women love that memory to this day. I was surprised by the primal way they reacted as they told the story and asked my wife about it. She told me she loved seeing it because it meant she was worthy of battle.
ReplyDeleteThis stuff is real, Tim. Not only is it real, but it's perfectly predictable given reproductive biology, evolution and sexual dimorphism. It all makes complete sense.
One more data point. Many women, particularly young women, are notoriously attracted to "bad boys." Those are the guys who are forceful, aggressive and a bit dangerous. Those of us who were mathematicians instead of linebackers grew up painfully aware of this fact.
ReplyDelete:-)
However much we didn't want it to be true, it was. In fact, it is the nauseatingly repetitive theme in romance literature - the bad boy who desires the heroine like a ferocious beast, but in the end is tamed by the heroine.
I once saw a meme from a woman that featured Princess Jasmine from Aladdin with the caption, "Whenever I see two guys fighting over me, on the outside I'm all, 'I am NOT a prize to be won!,' but on the inside I'm all, 'I must be SO HOT!'"
Another :-)