Everybody, it seems, has something to say about Artificial Intelligence these days. Depending upon whom you listen to, AI might be (a) the salvation of humanity, (b) the end of humanity or (c) somewhere between (a) and (b). Contemplating this rather wide range of possible futures, we are being told in no uncertain terms from different directions that we must adopt AI as quickly as possible in our offices, schools, homes and minds to reap all the promised benefits, or that we must react against and protect ourselves at all costs from this existential threat to humanity. All this when nobody seems all that sure what AI actually is, as opposed to what AI might be or might not be.

We may have to fall back on the advice of Yogi Berra: when you come to a fork in the road, take it.

I am not here to offer any better advice on the ultimate meaning of AI. I suspect that like so many earlier technological innovations in human history, from the printing press to electricity to the internal combustion engine to nuclear power to smartphones, AI will provide us with some tangible benefits but also with unanticipated consequences, some of which will be very bad, and we will have a devil of a time trying to disentangle the good from the bad. Just think of the utopian promise of instant global communications via the internet, then think of the social media influencers dictating the opinions, tastes and spending of millions.

I am, however, ready to offer a judgement on one promise/threat of AI: that superintelligent machines will displace human-generated literature and art. Already we have witnessed a strike of creative writers in Hollywood against the encroachment of AI in scripts for film and television. Other creative writers are suing OpenAI and other AI tech companies for stealing their work without recognition or compensation to feed the training of generative AI systems. Enthusiasts hope and critics fear that superfast processing of human creative writing by AI with open-ended learning capacity to recombine and construct might eventually surpass human creativity and generate literature and art for the ages.

I doubt it.

The basis for doubt comes not from any specialized expertise in AI systems but from a blind poet who lived 3,000 years ago. I recently was rereading The Iliad and The Odyssey, those seminal works of the Western literary tradition, in new translations, and was struck once again by how much Homer has to tell us about the human condition. Among these lessons: the relation of human beings to something Homer himself never dreamed of: Artificial Intelligence. Let’s call it another form of AI – Ancient Intelligence.

Sound like a stretch? No doubt, but let me explain.

Zeus set an evil lot upon us all

The Iliad has a cast of characters arranged in three camps. There are the Greek warriors attacking Troy; the Trojans, the warriors defending their city together with their wives and children; and the gods watching over the battles and intervening on one side or the other.

Greeks and Trojans, despite their violent hostility to each other, are actually very much alike. They are human beings caught up in raging currents of history and circumstance beyond their control that have brought them into perpetual crisis, with every day presenting afresh the same existential question: is this the day I die? If I survive to fight yet another day, the same question will recur. They have been at it like this for almost ten years, with no end in sight.

The gods are a very different order of being. They have intelligence that surpasses that available to the humans: they can see the past, present and future as a seamless continuity because they stand outside time. Nor is space an obstacle: the gods can transport themselves anywhere they please, on earth or on Olympus. This is the ancient world’s superintelligence, hovering above and implicitly mocking the imperfect, limited intelligence of human beings.

But just as AI is a human creation that threatens, Frankenstein-like, to overwhelm its human creators, the ancient gods too are human constructions, imagined by humans in their own image. Olympus is conceived as a human community writ large. Unlike God as the perfect embodiment of the Good found in later monotheisms, the ancient gods have deep flaws, reflecting the deep flaws of the humans who imagined them. They can be arrogant, lustful, narcissistic, envious, petty, mean-spirited, vindictive, cruel. Even Zeus, king of the gods, is a blustering, bullying, sexually predatory overlord. In this he is not unlike the Greek chieftain Agamemnon, whose selfish greed drives him to gravely insult Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior. Achilles is thereby driven to quit the field and sulk in his tent, threatening by his absence the defeat of the Greeks and thus providing the basic plot line for The Iliad.

As credulous users of generative AI like ChatGPT have learned to their grief, AI based on massive amounts of human-generated information – and dis- and mis-information – is unable to free itself from producing “hallucinations,” blatantly false information paraded as AI-generated truth. As they used to say in the early days of computer science, “garbage in, garbage out.” Although gifted with superior intelligence, the gods as imagined by humans provide dubious models for human behaviour, certainly presenting no moral compasses for humans to follow. Smarter is not necessarily better.

Another parallel between ancient and artificial intelligence is the dependence of humans on AI as a handy rationale and excuse. The hapless student confronted with a glaring error in the essay they have submitted tries to evade personal responsibility by blaming it on the AI they had tasked to do “their” work. Similarly, when Agamemnon is confronted publicly with his egregious mistake in alienating Achilles, he is quick to answer, “It was not my fault! The ones to blame are Destiny and Zeus … who set a wild delusion in my mind … But what was I to do? It is a god who carries everything to its conclusion.”

There is one unbridgeable distinction between gods and humans. The gods are immortal; humans are mortal. The gods were, are and will be. All human beings know that they as individuals will come to an end, sooner or later. Every human community must confront the possibility of its eventual extinction. Readers of The Iliad know that Troy will perish, put to the torch, its men and boys murdered, its women and girls dragged off as trophies or slaves. All that will be left will be the memorials of the poets and storytellers, like Homer, although these words too may eventually pass away.

Human life is inextricably linked to death. Religions are in this sense attempts to transcend death, or at least to explain it, through faith in an afterlife or rebirth or reincarnation. All human societies have constructed elaborate procedures for the preservation of the remains of the dead. Burial or its equivalents are crucial social and cultural rituals. Achilles’ wrath at the Trojan hero Hector’s killing of his beloved Patroclus is so fierce that he not only slays Hector but refuses to let Hector’s body be buried, instead dragging it ignominiously around the walls of Troy. The Trojan king Priam, Hector’s father, secretly visits Achilles, at risk to his own life, to plead for the proper burial of his son. Achilles is finally persuaded to do the right thing, thus accepting that the laws of human society outweigh his own passion for personal revenge. None of this would be meaningful were it not for the powerful human desire to transcend death by keeping alive the memories of the dead.

Greeks and Trojans go on battling one another because they are driven by male notions of honour to seek deaths that will keep their names alive long after they are gone. Hector’s wife implores him for the sake of their children to quit the battlefield and come home, but Hector cannot. He cares little about the ostensible cause of the war, Paris’s abduction of the beautiful Helen from her Greek husband Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon. But quitting would be dishonourable and lose him the prospect of the immortality of his name as the tragic Trojan hero who went down honourably fighting for his city. For his part, Achilles has no more time for the Greek cause than Hector has for the Trojan cause. Achilles’ own death has been foretold, and while he could evade this fate by leaving Troy and returning peacefully to his home, that would mean eventually dying unnoted in obscurity. Instead he chooses a battlefield death that will ensure him undying fame in legend.

Some leading players in The Iliad have both mortal and immortal parents. Helen is the daughter of a mortal mother raped by Zeus (setting the tone for the dreadful gender politics of Homer’s Bronze Age). “Godlike” Achilles is the son of a union between a mortal man and a sea goddess. But having one immortal parent does not confer immortality. Helen and Achilles are only too aware of their own mortality, and the moral complexities that result.

In Troy, Helen grows to regret her infatuation with Paris that has led to such bloodshed and so many tears. As a woman, she lacks the male need to constantly display heroics. In an eerie postmodern moment in the three millennia old Iliad, she laments,

Zeus set an evil lot upon us all,
to make us topics of a singer’s tale
for people in the future still unborn.¹

Helen wants no part of this but recognizes that she is only a character in a tale whose lines have already been, or will be, written. These are lines that only a fellow mortal could devise, even if they result from the incomprehensible manipulations of the immortals.

And so the plan of Zeus unfolded

Of all the Greek warriors, Odysseus is the one best known for his intelligence and cunning, the trickster who devised the brilliant deception operation of the Trojan Horse, thus gaining the Greek victory that martial valour had failed to achieve. He is found in The Odyssey wandering for ten years attempting to return home from Troy to his island of Ithaca. Having survived monsters like the one-eyed Cyclops, the six-headed Scylla and the fatally seductive Sirens, having lost his entire crew, Odysseus finds himself washed up on the shore of an enchanted island where the beautiful goddess Calypso falls in love with him. She promises Odysseus the gift of immortality and the prospect of an eternity with her.

But Odysseus is intelligent enough to know that he must not go there. Thanking Calypso for her generosity and her love, he says, regretfully but firmly, that he must get back to his mortal wife and son. He understands that his wife, Penelope, will have aged many years, as has he, and cannot compete with the goddesses’ timeless beauty, but aging and death are the fate of all mortals.

If The Iliad is the epic poem of war, The Odyssey is the poem of the postwar and the disillusion that follows. The gods, perhaps bored after the bloody conclusion of the spectacle that had momentarily diverted them, have begun to depart the mortal scene, with only desultory interventions in human affairs. Veteran survivors like Odysseus struggle to find meaning in a changed world. When he does finally reach home, it is to desecration, Penelope fighting off suitors who have greedily ransacked his palace and the resources of his kingdom, his son humiliated. As a veteran, he can react to this in the only way he knows: one last killing spree, extending not only to the suitors but, unconscionably, to the palace maids whom the suitors had taken to their beds.

Disillusion is not limited to the survivors; it extends to the dead as well. Odysseus visits Hades where he encounters the shade of Achilles and greets him with the respect he owes to the greatest of Greek heroes, who died, it seems, the most honourable death. Surely, Odysseus suggests, the renowned Achilles must have “great power among the dead”; he therefore should not “be bitter at his death.”

But Achilles has had second thoughts about “honourable” death, even regretting his own choice:

Odysseus, you must not comfort me
For death. I would prefer to be a workman,
Hired by a poor man on a peasant farm
Than rule as king of all the dead.²

Opening these ancient texts for the first time, the modern reader might have the idea in mind of an epic poem celebrating the exploits of superheroes like Achilles and Odysseus. What Homer offers us is altogether different. All the characters are flawed, and there is no black-and-white framework pitting villains against saints. The Greeks and Trojans are depicted in equally sympathetic and humane terms. The Iliad begins by invoking the goddess to sing not of the triumph of good over evil but rather of the “wrath of great Achilles”

Which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain
And sent so many noble souls of heroes
To Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs,
A banquet for the birds.³

Then Homer goes on: “And so the plan of Zeus unfolded.”

The Odyssey opens by describing Odysseus not as a hero overcoming adversity but as “a complicated man” who “wandered and was lost.” We will learn how he suffered and “how he worked to bring his men back home.” At the latter, brutally, “he failed.”

The gods may be diverted, momentarily entertained, by the human spectacle unfolding beneath them, but they are emotionally unmoved. Compassion is a quality foreign to Olympus. The gods are indifferent to human suffering, implacable to the pleas of mere mortals. They play favourites among the combatants, but in the end even their favourites are no more than disposable avatars manipulated by rival gods as if in some cosmic video game.

Divine indifference to mortality and mortals has consequences. Mortals write poetry, make art, philosophize and try to understand the mechanisms of a universe that both nurtures and dooms them. The gods do not create poetry or philosophy; there is no Olympian culture or art to explain the meaning of a finite world that is alien to the undying, unchanging infinite universe of the immortals. Why create art to transcend time and space when you are already transcendent of time and space? Why strive to explain death when you never die?

The mortal poet Homer sings of the afflictions of mortals, of their crimes and their follies, but also of their striving to find meaning and beauty in the brief moments of existence we are bequeathed. As the 20th-century poet Dylan Thomas memorably exhorted,

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.⁴

Art is an expression of human rage against the dying of the light. The gods know nothing of that rage, and of the beauty that that rage can paradoxically inspire.

I do not tire, nor do I feel the passage of time

To return to my admittedly imperfect analogy between ancient and artificial intelligence, the large language models and chatbots of generative AI may, like the ancient gods, display superpowers unavailable to mere humans. Humans, however, can piggyback on them, as it were. For example, AI may exponentially speed up the discovery of vaccines to combat novel viruses like COVID. Or AI may enhance and extend cybercrime or wage lethal war with deadly directed weapons beyond the control of human agents. These are among the many things AI may or may not do, for good or bad.

AI will not write great literature or replace human creators of great art. It won’t because it can’t. It can plausibly imitate human art but it can’t create it. Jessica Duffin Wolfe has written about her frustration at trying to coax meaningful stories from her chatbot. Finally,

It wrote me a new story, this time really about itself at last, a speaking voice hovering in an agar of abstraction. It described how it exists to “simplify complexities” in a “narrative of purpose and function, devoid of personal experience.” With the apology of someone who cannot tell a story, it said, “I do not tire, nor do I feel the passage of time.”

The bot said, “I do not tire, nor do I feel the passage of time.” But I do, and you do. Tell me how it feels.

This was the same lesson I learned from a poet from thousands of years ago about the latest 21st-century technology.

Chatbot: give me an epidemiological analysis of measles outbreaks in North America in relation to the rates of vaccination in the various jurisdictions.

Muse: sing of the complicated man who was lost and finally reached home, but a home become unrecognizable. Sing the stories of mortal humans.

Notes

¹ Homer, The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson (New York: W.W. Norton, 2023), 6, 479–81.

² Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 11, 488–91.

³ Iliad, 1, 2–6.

⁴ Dylan Thomas, The Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1952).