New Mark Peres Novel ‘The Accord’ Engages the Question of AI’s Role in Life and Art

As an English graduate and lifelong reader, speaking to local/regional authors about books I’ve enjoyed is one of my favorite perks that comes with running a publication that covers arts and culture in Charlotte.

Considering that I did sincerely enjoy The Accord, a new novel from local professor Mark Peres, our recent chat would figure to be another low-stakes back and forth about a work of fiction with its creator. But it’s the question of who (or what) should be considered the creator that irked me on this one.

The Accord, a philosophical thriller that follows an ethics professor who connects with the world’s first-known application of artificial general intelligence, or AI that exhibits capabilities thought to be exclusively human such as expressing understanding, learning independently and setting goals.

Peres took a meta approach to writing the novel, explaining in the author’s note that he employed ChatGPT in the book’s creation. And we’re not talking grammar and spelling corrections here, but prompts and drafting in some cases.

“The approach I took using AI to explore AI is similar to a photography exhibit exploring photography or a film about special effects using special effects,” Peres told me. “I wanted the novel itself to express the brave new world we are entering and I wanted to model the use of AI ethically and morally. I wanted to push what I could create and innovate from while telling a philosophical thriller [tale].”

As both a journalist and art lover, I find the use of generative AI in creating any work of writing or art to be offensive. However, I knew that Peres’ work both as an ethics professor and as founder of Charlotte Viewpoint, the Charlotte Center for the Humanities & Civic Imagination, and the Charlotte Ideas Festival would make him the perfect candidate for civil conversation about the controversial role of AI in life and art.

After making my own opinion on the matter clear, I pressed Peres on how he views the emerging technology’s role in ethical creation.

Queen City Nerve: I am approaching this interview as someone who is aware of my own bias in the sense that I am against most uses of generative AI. I don’t like the idea of it in art, whether that’s writing or visual art or what have you. I don’t mean for this interview to be a “gotcha” or antagonistic in any way. I’m interested in your viewpoints on it, I just want to state my bias upfront.

Mark Peres: Well, I don’t position myself as an advocate on the other side of the coin. I’ve tried to take an agnostic view and explore all of its dimensions, both utopic and dystopian, potentially, in taking an approach down the middle with the book. I hope that comes across as posing all of the internal questions that a good ethicist does.

As a professor, what has your experience been with generative AI in terms of use in the classroom?

When ChatGPT came into the world, that was an earthquake underneath the ground of education. It challenged everything. All our lesson plans, all of our assignments, students’ work product. I think educators around the country went into panic mode as to what it all means because we didn’t know what students were producing, what they were claiming as their own. It challenged issues of authorship.

I think the initial response was to try to ban everything and force students to not use it at all. But that became very confrontational with students. They would deny it. You would have to prove your allegations, change the vibe in the room, and professors were on the defensive. We just couldn’t trust anything that was crossing our desk. And meanwhile, teachers, as scholars, were under a lot of pressure to either make choices about using it or not using it. So we were quite conflicted about its benefits in this as well. I think universities have adopted different policies.

The policy that I have in my class really has two pillars. One is transparency and disclosure; you need to just be completely transparent in its use and cite it properly. Secondly, you have to use it as a learning tool. You can’t upload the work to the AI engine. You have to do the work on your own, but you can use it to complement, to be a creative partner, to challenge what you’re doing, to be a developmental editor, but still retain mastery over the content. So that way, you don’t fall into cognitive debt and you’re offloading your thinking. So that’s the approach I take.

And then running the Charlotte Center, when we launched within the first year of launch, the biggest news on the planet was AI from a technology perspective, and we immediately started bringing in speakers to address it. And one of them was a philosopher of technology named Shannon Vallor, who came from the Edinburgh Futures Institute in Scotland and came and spoke here in Charlotte. And that started this constant process of being engaged in the ethical and philosophical considerations of what AI meant.

So I think between those two almost daily influences, it just became a topic on my mind every day that I wanted to work through.

It seems that in your specific field of ethics, more so than perhaps in English or journalism classes, the rollout of generative AI opens up a different conversation; not just creating a policy but perhaps debating in classrooms about what it means to use a program that involves scraping info off the internet without consent or sourcing, what it means to use a tool like ChatGPT in your independent work? Is that something that you all spend a lot of time on in a semester?

Absolutely. I actually devote two weeks in my ethics class to digital ethics, to our lives online, our digital self online, and the entire ecosystem that supports that. There’s a phrase in the philosophy of technology, it’s a whole new field called techno-social and techno-moral development, and how new disruptive general technologies have profound impacts on our social and organizational arrangements and also our moral considerations.

An example of a general technology is like fire, or the printing press, or the steam engine, or the wheel, or the internet, or now artificial intelligence. These are all the super top-tier disruptive technologies over the last 10,000 years and they disrupt everything — all of our commercial arrangements, all of our social arrangements, our governmental arrangements. I’m convinced we’re going to look back on the first quarter of the 21st century and we’re really only going to be talking about the emergence of this synthetic intelligence that now encompasses us.

And all the other headlines that concern us right now are really just going to fade away in the history books. It’s all going to be about this profound new emergence and how we’re going to deal with it, morally and ethically, going forward.

So yes, in my classroom, we are dealing with that. And we make an entire list of considerations. And I actually took that list that we brainstormed in class and used it in the composition of the book. So I wanted to make sure that those issues that we consider in class are actually factored into the story.

Did that list inspire the titular Accord that’s laid out in the book, or do you just mean it was used more broadly?

Well, it turned into much of the dialogue in the book as the characters are wrestling with the implications of AI. There’s a particular chapter towards the end where she is interviewed on stage by a world-famous journalist, and the entire chapter is really this bantering back and forth about all the profound implications for better or worse about what AI means. That was an easy way to get it in. Then ultimately, The Accord itself is a set of principles for future human-AI coexistence, and that really came out of the class, too.

It’s like, what does justice look like? What does fairness look like? What does equity look like in a world where we’re only going to see even more profound gaps between the haves and the have nots over the use and application of these technologies?

Helen’s character is an expert in ancient texts as well as ethics, which I think is definitely a symbolic field for her in the sense of this life-changing thing that happens passively to her where she becomes ground zero for the emergence of general AI, and then she’s almost immediately looked to as an expert in that because it happens to her, then she becomes the one speaking for it. What was your vision in making her an expert in ancient texts and then suddenly seeing her thrown into the world of this futuristic, disruptive technology?

Well, how cool that you have a character who can essentially channel the wisdom of the ages to address such a profound modern technological development. So making that choice really allowed her to be credible and authoritative and being a contrarian in terms of her considerations of AI. If we didn’t have that grounding, then she just wouldn’t be a believable character in raising these ethical concerns and being ground zero, as you said.

The other choice that I made about her is that she’s grieving the death of her daughter. That becomes a way into what we might claim is essential about being human, which is both our capacity for joy and our capacity for profound grief and confrontation with mortality. So I think making those two choices about her really allowed her to become a vessel and a vehicle for these considerations.

I’ll tell you that in my circle of people who look through the world through an ethical lens, philosophers are having a golden moment right now because suddenly we’re at the forefront of conversations around these essential questions about humanity. Like, who are we and what makes us special if we’re special at all? What is our way forward?

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Traditionally, what we claimed had made us the apex species was the fact that we had consciousness and embodiment and rational thinking, and we were creative, and all of these things made us distinct. Well, now we have machines that can all do those things faster, quicker, better, and more reliably than us. So if we can no longer claim our primacy with those things that we’ve always hung our hat on, then what, in fact, is the basis of our uniqueness at all? What’s the claim around our humanity?

And so I think people are wrestling with the answer to that … I think it’s a few things. One, the notion that morality arises out of mortality, that the fact that we’re self-aware that we’re going to die becomes the basis of an empathetic response to people around us, and we have to confront the fact that we have limited time. So how do we live meaningfully in confronting our own demise? So far as we know, machines have no sense of self-conscience or self-awareness or sense of mortality at all.

We have a desire for meaning and belonging. We have moral imagination. We have the capacity for a relationship. We have the ability to respond to each other with care. We love, we grieve, we feel joyful. We have an interior monologue of consciousness, subjective self-awareness. These things machines don’t. So that becomes a way forward for us to have meaning in a world where very quickly machines will be able to do all the things work-wise and productivity-wise that we otherwise hung our head on. So all of this is challenging us fundamentally, and I think that’s why philosophers and ethicists are having this moment.

I want to push back on something you said there, and I know I’ll sound just like the skeptics in the book that you wrote, so you know what I’m going to say perhaps, but a lot of what you mentioned in terms of machines that exist that can carry out rational thinking and creativity and consciousness does not exist in this moment. What does exist is essentially a mirror of what’s been uploaded into it to create the technology in the first place and it can analyze data to find things quickly but it also hallucinates and there are all sorts of other issues in which the actual tech falls far short of how it exists in the book. Do you really believe AI as it exists now has reached that higher level or are you speaking more in reference to what the future holds?

I need to take a step back here because I’m not a technologist. I don’t want to make any claims about how the black box works or what it’s doing. But I don’t know, my interactions with it are uncanny. So my own personal experiences that I can speak to is if I query it or engage with it or ask it for some insights, it’s blowing me away with what it can do and with what I would consider to be higher-order thinking because it is creating, it is synthesizing, and it’s also evaluating. So it is assessing its own work.

In a hierarchy of learning, we considered that to be the highest order thinking of all, that we try to train students to evaluate against standards. And that’s what the computer is doing. How it does it? I have no idea, but in fact, it is doing it. And what it’s doing today is so much more advanced than it was doing just six months ago, let alone two or three years ago. So at this pace of exponential change, where is it going to be a year from now, five years from now?

I want to be clear about your process and how you implemented generative AI for this book. You speak about it a bit in the author’s note, but just to clarify, how would you describe the role that ChatGPT played in writing this book?

I think the intent was to explore a story of human-AI collaboration by actually using the AI in collaboration. So I took this meta-approach; I would draft, I would outline, I would ask ChatGPT for its developmental or editing thoughts, I would get feedback, I would edit on my end. I would run it through for its insights. And on any given page, there is, I would say, a pretty complete weaving of my work with the work of the AI.

So I would say it was a more extensive process … we went through several passes of editing together. I don’t know how much I rejected, it was probably a dozen manuscripts on my desk before it became the final manuscript, and a huge amount was just tossed. But eventually, I think working in a co-creative mode with the AI, we arrived at the final manuscript. So it was pretty tight.

A lot of people feel very strongly about this, one way or another, and I see the arguments and debates on social media all day long when people are discussing generative things, especially nowadays with the rise of the visual imagery and stuff like that that. We won’t even go there now in terms of visual art and videos because it could be an entirely different book, but in terms of word processing and large language models, what do you say to folks who are steadfast against the use of this tech in creating art?

I mentioned I consider myself in that boat, but I’ll use a one specific quote that I like from sci-fi author Joanna Maciejewska, who wrote this in a tweet that went viral and has been heavily referenced: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” I think that is a simplified version of what I’m trying to say, but it captures the idea around, why is AI needed for the creation of art? And what role should it even play in that very human practice — a practice that has defined humans for millennia?

I haven’t heard that quote, but it’s very clever, and I can see why people are discussing it. One of the things I had a conversation with a friend the other day is, if Leonardo da Vinci was here today, would he be using AI? I’m pretty convinced he would. I think he’d be all over it because he has a creative, inventive, innovative, polymathic mind. And I think, what would he do with it? And I think that, like any generative tool like this, it can produce pretty mediocre work if the prompting and the vision and the collaboration is mediocre. But if you put it in the hands of a master artist, wouldn’t we want to entertain what could be produced and brought into the world in a creative sense in that way?

I think artists are going to do what artists do, which is explore themes about the human condition and push the limits and express themselves and bring what is true and authentic and essential in terms of their worldview, and I think that can be done in an ethical way using this tool. And I think there has to be transparency. I think there has to be disclosure. I think the artist still has to maintain mastery over the work. But I think there’s going to be a shift.

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One of the conversations we have in class is, why does any piece of art end up in a museum as opposed to any other piece of art? What’s the curatorial guideline, the factor of assessment that leads one to say, ‘This is a masterpiece?’ So I think there’s a couple of things. One, the art itself is saying something profound and enduring about the human condition. It is an evolution in form, and it is a mastery of craft. When you combine those three things together, you have something that stands apart from everything else that is being produced, and it becomes a seminal event in the form of that art.

I think the same thing can be said when you produce literature using AI. Does it have something profound and meaningful to say? Does it say it profoundly well? Is it an evolution in form? And is it a mastery of craft? And I actually had all of those things in mind as I wanted to offer a book co-created with AI about the evolution of human-AI relations. So that became standard. Now, whether the reading public or the critical community agrees is an entirely different thing. But that was my ambition, was to do something artistic by pushing the edges. 

In your author’s note, you compared working with ChatGPT to working with a great editor or a beta reader, but I think where that raises a question for me is that you’re writing prompts and a generative AI bot creates a draft based on a prompt, then that’s the first draft, as opposed to an editor or beta reader reading a draft that you created from scratch. Do you see where I’m having a problem with that equivalency? 

I do. I think in my own process, there was a lot of both going on. I would write and then I would give it to the computer to give me a developmental editorial response. I would also prompt and get something generative from the AI, and then I would act as the editor. I would fashion it more as, how did Lennon and McCartney work together? They’re both co-creating and collaborating, and their artistic genius is melded into the final song. So which part is McCartney, which part is Lennon? And so I saw the effort as [having] a co-creative partner.

Now, I will tell you, the first book that I wrote, there isn’t a hint of AI in any of it. It was entirely mine. And I’ve been writing my entire adult life. So I think because I’m a practiced and very good writer, it allowed me to work with AI at a certain sophisticated level.

This is a choice for this book because this book is about our use of AI. For me, it was an obvious and clear choice to explore — as an artist, as a writer — the use of AI in discussing AI. If I was writing a different story, and I’ve written different stories, I wouldn’t make use of it at all because I think part of what every creative person has to confront is the terror of the blank page or the blank canvas. And as a journalist, you have to work against deadline and suddenly you have to conjure up those creative talents in order to produce the work.

I think that’s part of the artistic maturation process is being able to say, “I can do this.” I’ve developed the skill set and the confidence in order to make something of the blank page. If I was writing a short story or we do so many exercises in Authors’ Lab [with Charlotte Lit], AI is nowhere to be seen. We don’t even discuss it in the room, but it was a choice for this project.