So-called “artificial Intelligence” is on everyone’s minds these days. And no wonder we’re all thinking of it: it’s everywhere we look.

Case in point: the other day, I stumbled across a website about Finnegans Wake that appears to be entirely composed by AI, including AI-generated “podcasts” that feature AI voices summarizing someone’s notes about the Wake. These “podcasts” are presented as YouTube videos that accompany this inane droning with AI slop images.

It’s hard for me to express sufficiently my contempt for this sort of thing. I struggle to imagine anything more anathema to the Wake‘s celebration of humanity than the abomination of chipper robot voices reading the book line by line and summarizing the annotations while peppering them with trite phrases (“Okay, now let’s unpack that…yeah, did you hear the circularity there?”). It’s uncanny, creepy, and pointless. I want to hear an actual person’s embodied experience with the text, not a lifeless, thoughtless machine. What is someone getting out of listening to robots, who have no experience and perspective and humanity?

This “artificial intelligence” is of course misnamed because there’s nothing remotely intelligent about a computer program that merely predicts the next likely word. They’re not “intelligent.” They’re generative large language models. They’re a glorified autocomplete that has eaten the internet and can quickly regurgitate mediocrity in the form of the statistical average.

And don’t think it’s lost on me that these pathetic, mindless robot programs have been trained to some extent on my own writing, as well as the writing of other devotees of the Wake, who put our work out there into the world in the hopes of instructing and delighting, and who are rewarded by having our efforts swept into the maw of a hideous funhouse mirror that apes what it means to be human.

I take comfort in the fact that these generative systems are still so bad at what they do and produce material far inferior to what a thinking human can. Seeing this so-called “AI” everywhere and shoved into everything makes me wonder if the self-styled geniuses pushing this technology are getting desperate. So much money has been invested into generative LLMs that the “tech bros” at the helm need this nonsense to be adopted everywhere to justify all the money they’ve been pouring into it. It’s unfortunate for them that their toy is still so miserable at what it’s supposed to do. That’s a lot of money they’ve wasted on an autocomplete. It’s unfortunate for the rest of us that this nonsense is going to wreak havoc on the economy for at least a time as short-sighted employers hand over more tasks to machines.

But what does FInnegans Wake itself have to say about true, human intelligence and creativity, and about the hollow aping of it?

Read on to find out more!

In one sense, we could map these concepts to Shem and Shaun: the inspired artist and the dull imitation who tries to take credit for the former’s work. But the brothers are more complex than this: Shem himself is a “sham,” a fraud and a plagiarist, and Shaun has his own creativity that triumphs at various points in the novel, especially at the end, when the St. Patrick side of HCE, associated with Shaun the extrovert, brings the rising sun of waking, everyday consciousness to banish the mysticism of the night.

These characters are intricately involved in the issue of the authorship of the Letter, a mysterious document that ALP writes about HCE. Symbolically, it is a message from the muse (the Unconscious mind) about humanity itself (Here Comes Everybody), simultaneously pardoning and condemning humanity for its faults. Thus, it is a representation of Finnegans Wake itself or, more broadly, literature itself or art in its highest sense, endlessly gossiping about mankind, endlessly denouncing humanity, and endlessly forgiving its wrongs. It is pure creativity, and as such, it can also be seen as “written” by Shem, the inspired artist, dictated to him by the mother ALP (whose words literally burst through the speech of Shem/Mercius at the end of I.7).

Early in the novel in I.5, the chapter all about the Letter, Shaun — in the form of Kevin — discovers the Letter when it is dug up from a midden heap by Belinda the Hen (ALP). Shaun/Kevin greedily takes credit for having written it, even though this is a lie.

About that original hen. Midwinter (fruur or kuur?) was in the offing and Premver a promise of a pril when, as kischabrigies sang life’s old sahatsong, an iceclad shiverer, merest of bantlings observed a cold fowl behaviourising strangely on that fatal midden or chip factory or comicalbottomed copsjute (dump for short) afterwards changed into the orangery when in the course of deeper demolition unexpectedly one bushman’s holiday its limon threw up a few spontaneous fragments of orangepeel, the last remains of an outdoor meal by some unknown sunseeker or placehider illico way back in his mistridden past. What child of a strandlooper but keepy little Kevin in the despondful surrounding of such sneezing cold would ever have trouved up on a strate that was called strete a motive for future saintity by euchring the finding of the Ardagh chalice by another heily innocent

[…]

The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans, a more than quinquegintarian (Terziis prize with Serni medal, Cheepalizzy’s Hane Exposition) and what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome’s health

About the original hen and the original sin: out from the threshold of this dump comes first fragments of orange peel (the forbidden fruit that precipitated the Fall — see the first page of Finnegans Wake: “oranges have been laid to rust upon the green” in the colors of the Irish flag). And then comes the Letter — at the 12 o’clock hour of HCE’s Fall — which links the Old World and the New, the world of the Parents and the world of the Children. Here is a reference to the T.S. Eliot poem “Boston Evening Transcript,” about the delivery of a newspaper (which is another form that ALP’s Letter takes, reporting the news about HCE/Humanity) and the ships that brought Irish immigrants to the New World. It puts me in mind of the Nightletter at the end of II.2, written by the children back to the parents. In a sense, ALP’s Letter belongs to all ages, as it is dictated to the Children and recurs through all eras.

Shaun/Kevin takes it — and it appears momentarily in I.5 as the artifact the “Ardagh chalice.” “Ardagh” means “high field” in Irish, and the first syllable sounds like “art.” This anticipates St. Patrick in IV.1 “shuck[ing] his thumping fore features apt the hoyhop of His Ards,” the highness of his arts (as well as his arse). Kevin’s “euchring the finding” in I.5 further anticipates Shem’s note in II.2 that the forgiveness of his brother is “Euchre risk,” both a version of the eucharist and a risky move in the zero-sum game of life in the fallen world, here represented by the card game euchre. Both brothers partake of the chalice in II.3 when they reconcile (perhaps this chalice is the Letter, art in its highest sense, in the form of the Ardagh chalice claimed by Kevin; of course, this being Joyce, it’s called a “chimbley phot,” so it’s also a chamber pot).

But here in I.5, the brothers are not reconciled at all. They first divide more fully from each other in I.4 and are at odds for the rest of Book I. Although Shaun presents himself in many places in the Wake as the author of the letter, this is a lie, and he is ultimately a sham of the kind he accuses his brother of being. In fact, Shaun’s role in the novel is not writer but postman, mail carrier. In his highest form, Shaun delivers the words of the inspired artist to humanity. He is the messenger, not the author. But early in the novel, and early in Book III, as I will discuss below, he is consumed with jealousy at his brother’s talent. Witness his resentful rage at Shem in I.7 and elsewhere, which includes his self-incriminating projections: the more he accuses his brother of being a “sham” who is “covetous of his neighbor’s word,” the more Shaun reveals about himself. To hear Shaun tell it, Shem is a thief: “he is such a barefooted rubber with my supersocks pulled over his face which I publicked in my bestback garden for the laetification of siderodromites and to the irony of the stars.” The reference to the “apathy of the stars,” as well as the back garden, both allusions to Ulysses, suggests that Shaun is taking credit for publishing (and presenting to the public) true art like Joyce’s novel while accusing the real author, Shem/Joyce, of being a “barefooted rubber” or barefaced robber. [“socks” here can be both the stocking pulled over a robber’s head and the punches or “socks” that Shaun will give his brother, as in II.2]

The extrovert aspect of the dreamer/humanity — the tech bro, the moralizer, the priest, the exoteric religionist, the inferior artist — cannot produce true human creativity. He can only steal it, take credit for it, pretend he understands it. This dynamic plays out differently in each of the roles Shaun can be said to represent. As exoteric religionist, he cannot realize the mystical core at the center of religion: he can only ape the forms, the prayers, the rituals, without personally undergoing the experience at the center. As inferior artist, he does not experience authentic inspiration; he sees it in other artists, he seethes with envy, he imitates form without grasping essence, or he plagiarizes and steals from his superiors. As moralizer, he doesn’t understand acting with true compassion and engagement with others: he can only follow (and promote) rules that have been abstracted from human behavior as guidelines.

In all of these examples, Shaun represents a kind of cargo cult, imitating the form of something — art, mysticism, morality — without truly understanding the experience that motivates those things. Art, religion, and ethics aren’t about following rules, ultimately: they flow from a direct experience that I’ve been calling Selflessness on this blog, an overcoming of ego or Selfhood, a direct perception that the self is not separate from the flux (riverrun) of experience.

The comparison to AI programs and “tech bros” is instructive. The AI system cannot actually grasp human creativity because the system is not conscious. It has no experience. It is just math, picking the statistically likely next word based on an algorithm. The tech bros who build and finance the AI system also can’t grasp human creativity — not because they are not conscious but because they, like Shaun, fundamentally lack a depth of consciousness. What would help them is to do as Shaun eventually does in II.3, a first step toward reuniting with his brother and rectifying the lonely, moralizing Selfhood he embodies: in the guise of Butt, he admits to Taff that he couldn’t overthrow the Father because he “adn’t the arts.” He hadn’t the heart, but perhaps the reason that he lacks the resolve is that he also had not the art that Shem does, the creative gifts of his brother. Instead, the art that Shaun has is the art of the ad, a debased art that has become pressed into the service of capitalist success in the zero-sum game of the fallen world.

*

The title of my post — a garbled version of “artificial intelligence” is taken from two moments in the Wake. When the Shaunish narrator of I.7 recounts Shem’s meeting with a police officer, he declares he’s had “enough of such porterblack lowness” for “our undilligence has been plutherotested.” He is trying to say that his intelligence has been too much tested by a plethora of questions (and also by something hellish, from the underworld or Pluto). But he unwittingly reveals that what he considers his “intelligence” is really his refusal or inability to be diligent in investigating the world. And perhaps he is also being tested by Shem’s artistic wealth (pluto).

The other word comes from IV.1, from a scene surveying the three “Benns” — three peaks of Howth Head. Curiously, this passage mentions hens and writing:

The rare view from the three Benns under the bald heaven is on the other end, askan your blixom on dimmen and blastun, something to right hume about. They were erected in a purvious century, as a hen fine coops and, if you know your Bristol and have trudged the trolly ways and elventurns of that old cobbold city, you will sortofficially scribble a mental Peny-Knox-Gore.

This passage claims the hills were built as hen coops, and so they can be considered the equivalent of the midden heap in which Belinda Doran finds/composes the Letter. The sight of this diminished Mount Parnassus is “something to right hume about,” to write home about — to write in a way that touches the very essence of humanity, our home. To “right hume” recalls the philosopher David Hume, suggesting that the naive materialism/empiricism of this Shaunish thinker might be “righted,” perhaps by combining it with the insights of idealism, in a way like I suggested here.

“Sortofficially” is glossed as artificially, superficially, and “sort of officially,” as well as a reference to a sorting office, where mail is sorted (an appropriate location for Shaun in his guise as postman).

As postman taking letters (and the Letter) from the sorting office, Shaun is sort of official, and his thoughts are superficial. He doesn’t create: he delivers what others have made. His intelligence, which is informed by his lack of diligent investigation, is artificial and superficial, and only sort of official.

It’s a nice summary of these LLMs: they speak authoritatively, but their words, on every subject, are the ultimate “sort of, but not really.” Their outputs are surface level at best. They sort through works they don’t understand and can only ever be a delivery system, not a source.

*

Book III is dedicated to Shaun, and it bored me to tears on my first few trips through the Wake. “Yeah. yeah, I get it, Joyce. Shaun is the egotistical part of the dreamer, and he’s a moralist and priest and hypocrite. We’re supposed to understand that he’s not the real essence of humanity itself, even though he thinks he is. Got it. Next?”

But ever since identifying Shaun, in his most limiting forms, with “tech bros” and their ridiculous LLM toys, I’ve found new meaning in studying Shaun’s claims to produce original work, his jealousy of true creativity, his condemnation of his brother, and inability to realize his limitations.

Book III picks up after the Fall of HCE at the end of II.3 — when he collapses in his tavern after drinking the leftovers of alcohol in the cups of all his customers — and his dream in II.4 that he is King Mark being cuckolded by Shaun in the form of Tristan. Now Shaun takes center stage in Book III…perhaps this is more of HCE’s dream, perhaps this is the beginning of a new cycle where the brothers, now divided from each other, battle and Shaun thinks himself superior and self-sufficient…until he quickly becomes exhausted and collapses in III.3, and the voices of all the other characters of the novel come pouring out of his sleeping mouth, including the voice of the Father, HCE.

As I summarized III.1 in another post, “Shaun sets out on his own to replace HCE but realizes that he is incomplete, that the conception of the individual as a self-sufficient ego is deeply faulty. No man is an island. The contraries need each other, and we all need each other to fully realize our Humanity, for this is the book of Here Comes Everybody.”

At the beginning of III.1, Shaun speaks before the adoring people. Among the things he says in his speeches is his intention of creating a book of sayings. He calls it a “savingsbook” (a book of coupons? Appropriate for his capitalist perspective), but it reads to me like “sayings book,” not unlike Molly’s idea in Ulysses 18 to create a book of Leopold’s sayings, “the works of Master Poldy yes.”

I will say it is also one of my avowal’s intentions, at some time pease Pod pluse murthers of gout (when I am not prepared to say) so apt as my pen is upt to scratch, to compound quite the makings of a verdigrease savingsbook in the form of a pair of capri sheep boxing gloves surrounding this matter of the Welsfusel mascoteers and their sindybuck that saved a city for my publicker

And indeed, Shaun’s moralistic advice fills both Chapters 1 and 2 of Book III.

When Shaun is presented with Shem’s Letter, he says it’s Greek to him (that is, he can’t understand it), but he still condemns it as immoral:

—Greek! Hand it to me! Shaun replied […] It is a pinch of scribble, not wortha bottle of cabbis. Overdrawn! Puffedly offal tosh! Besides its auctionable, all about crime and libel! Nothing beyond clerical horrors et omnibus to be entered for the foreign as secondclass matter. The fuellest filth ever fired since Charley Lucan’s. Flummery is what I would call it if you were to ask me to put it on a single dimension what pronounced opinion I might possibly orally have about them bagses of trash which the mother and Mr Unmentionable (O breed not his same!) has reduced to writing without making news out of my sootynemm.

Shem’s work is actionable libel (against Shaun?), and auctionable…because it is sold in the marketplace? Shaun appears to be projecting again.

The mother, ALP, isn’t responsible for the Letter, he claims. It’s all Shem’s fault:

She, the mammy far, was put up to it by him, the iniquity that ought to be depraved of his libertins to be silenced, sackclothed and suspended, and placed in irons into some drapyery institution off the antipopees for wordsharping only if he was klanver enough to pass the panel fleischcurers and the fieldpost censor.

The word Shaun uses for Shem shortly after this passage — “Homo” — is not only an accusation about his brother’s sexuality but a declaration that he is a man and that he is the same as his brother. I am reminded of a line in I.1: “This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same roturns.” Humus (nurishment), homos (humans), home. As I once noted, the word “brickdust” links this line to the Letter, via another line in I.5, and I concluded: “The physical earth, other human beings, works of literature [art]. All of them are a kind of humus that richly nourishes us. All of them are Home.”

For sure, Shem’s work is to be condemned:

Every dimmed letter in it is a copy and not a few of the silbils and wholly words I can show you in my Kingdom of Heaven. The lowquacity of him! With his threestar monothong! Thaw! The last word in stolentelling! […] He store the tale of me shur. Like yup. How’s that for Shemese?

Again, projection: Shaun is convinced that Shem is the thief who copies the work of others, whose damned letters are dimmed and devoid of the light of inspiration. The “last word” may be a reference to the “lost word” of Freemasonry, a metaphor of divine truth and ultimate meaning. Though he’s trying to call it the ultimate example of theft, Shaun inadvertently reveals that he knows, on some level, that Shem’s art is such a “lost word.” And perhaps the last word in their argument.

The art that Shaun offers in this chapter is The Ondt and the Gracehoper, an alternate story to The Mookse and the Gripes that he had given in the costume of a professor in I.6. Like the former fable, Shaun’s tale tries to assert the superiority of the Ondt’s (Shaun’s own) perspective but reveals what Shaun knows deep down and represses: that he is only half of humanity and needs to collaborate with his brother, despite his brother’s shortcomings.

You can read my discussion of the fable in Book III in the post linked in the last paragraph, where I note that it ends with the Gracehoper’s song “forgiving the Ondt and reminding him that they are both necessary for humanity and that the Ondt, for all his great wealth and power, doesn’t have the artistic integrity that the Gracehoper does. It’s interesting that it’s Shaun telling this story because it suggests that he is aware, on some level, of the Shem perspective, even if he can’t fully embody it.”

There’s much more to say about Shaun and his attitude. I was reminded of this bit of him talking about Shem in III.3, and the response of some of the Four Old Men interrogating him:

He feels he ought to be as asamed of me as me to be ashunned of him. We were in one class of age like to two clots of egg. I am most beholding to him, my namesick

—As you sing it it’s a study. That letter selfpenned to one’s other, that neverperfect everplanned?

—This nonday diary, this allnights newseryreel.

I really like “asamed” instead of “ashamed.” Perhaps a subject for a future post.

*

It is said that good artists borrow from others while great artists steal. Shem’s thefts, however, are not Shaun’s: the true artist does not steal like the AI bro and his LLMs, by piecing together bits of inspired works that they do not understand. Instead a true artist steals by making others’ words his own and pressing them into the service of a new and original artistic vision, something that will always be beyond the ability of the limited perspective represented by Shaun.

This is exactly what Joyce is doing in Finnegans Wake, and what he was doing in Ulysses. He once remarked that Finnegans Wake was being written not by him but by the strangers around him: the words and sayings in the book all originally arose from other people, and Joyce overheard and appropriated those words. Indeed, reading his books very much gives one the impression that they are full of phrases and stories that Joyce himself heard from the lips of other people. He takes the words of others in conversation, the events of his own life and of others’, and presses all of it into prose, transubstantiating experience into aesthetic pleasure.

Ironically, Shaun does have his own art, the practical art of everyday life. When he stops resenting his brother and when he finally acknowledges his brother as a superior artist, he stops trying to claim that Humanity itself ought to reflect only Shaunish qualities: he opens himself to a greater humanity of which his perspective is only a part, and he becomes capable of cooperating with his contrary.

In its highest sense, the Shaunish perspective has its place in solving practical problems, distributing and implementing the words of the inspiration. If the Shemish side of humanity undergoes the experience of selflessness and records the experience fully in art, the Shaunish side of humanity puts its lessons into practical application.

Will the modern-day people who need to learn this lesson actually learn it? It depends. Can they admit that they and their toys are not the apex of humanity and are not foundational to our future? Can they admit that the humanities — the subjects that include literature and art — have as much or more wisdom than the STEM fields? Can they adopt an attitude of humility and cooperation?

I guess we’ll just see, won’t we?