The water rises in one room. The floor disappears in another. Somebody has to turn the next wheel.
In Diaries of a Murderer, Rae and Dude find themselves caught in a particularly unpleasant arrangement designed by Attention.
Jimothy is in danger. Dude can turn a series of wheels to change what happens, but the mechanism exacts a price.
Water pours into his chamber. Elsewhere, the plates beneath Rae’s feet begin dropping away, exposing spikes below.
Standing still is dangerous. Moving forward is dangerous too. Each time Dude acts, he risks making Rae’s situation worse. Refusing to act leaves Jimothy exposed to further harm.
Rae tells him to turn the wheel anyway.
What interests me about the scene is how little the dilemma resembles a tidy moral question once it is happening to the characters.
They have incomplete information. Their bodies are exhausted. They care about one another, and Attention has designed a situation in which that care becomes something it can exploit.
There is no comfortable distance from which they can calculate the correct answer.
Of course, as the person developing the story, I am sitting outside the chamber.
The water cannot reach me.
I can reconsider a decision, rewrite the encounter or put the manuscript aside. The people inside the fiction have no such luxury, and that difference is part of the strange pleasure of writing about them.
It also leads me toward a question that has become particularly interesting while working with AI.
When words make us feel something, whose experience are we encountering?
The feeling someone wishes to share
Leo Tolstoy argued in What Is Art? that artistic activity involves communicating feelings from one human being to another.
The artist expresses something they have felt, and others may come to experience it through the work.
There is something appealing about that understanding of art.
A story can bring us close to another person’s fear, affection or grief. Sometimes a writer expresses an experience in a way that allows us to recognize something we have struggled to describe ourselves.
Yet Tolstoy’s account is more subtle than the claim that a writer must personally have lived through every event they describe.
He allows for imagined circumstances. A person who has felt fear may invent a frightening encounter and express that feeling through the invented event.
That distinction matters enormously for fiction.
I have never been trapped in one of Attention’s chambers. I have never watched a magical cheerleader attempt to survive over disappearing floor plates.
But fear, uncertainty, affection, guilt and the wish to protect someone are all experiences I can draw upon when imagining the situation.
The fictional circumstances are impossible.
The emotional material need not be.
For Tolstoy, however, the ability to produce words associated with fear would not be enough by itself. His theory also places weight on sincerity and the actual communication of a feeling.
That creates a difficult problem when we consider systems that can generate convincing descriptions of experiences without establishing that they have experienced anything resembling them.
Finding the emotion in the work
R. G. Collingwood offers a different perspective, developed in The Principles of Art.
In his account of artistic expression, the creator does not always begin with a clearly identified feeling and then search for an effective way to transmit it.
The process of expression can itself be a way of discovering what the feeling is.
This comes closer to an aspect of writing I recognize.
Sometimes an idea is interesting before I know why.
I may imagine an uncomfortable situation, begin exploring what different characters would do, and discover that the most important part of the scene is not what I initially expected.
A character’s refusal can become more revealing than their decision.
A small reaction can change how I understand the entire encounter.
Something I thought would be funny may develop into a situation I find disturbing.
In those moments, creating the scene is also a way of exploring my own response to it.
The work is not simply the execution of a fully formed emotional message.
That becomes especially interesting with AI-assisted writing.
I can encounter a suggestion that changes the direction of my thinking. I can discover a possibility in generated prose and then develop it into something different.
I can also reject a technically convincing scene because it feels emotionally false for the character involved.
The process changes what I understand and what I want to create.
None of that requires me to claim that the AI system is having the same experience.
The convincing imitation
The characters in Max Aura Dungeon have fictional histories, fears, relationships and habits.
Writing them convincingly requires more than assigning an emotion to a scene.
A person who responds with anger in one situation may respond with humour in another. The difference can depend on their relationships, their memories, the information available to them or something they are unwilling to admit.
This is one of the places where I have repeatedly encountered limitations in AI-generated prose.
Characters can drift toward familiar patterns. Their dialogue becomes more interchangeable. Their behaviour begins satisfying the immediate demands of a scene while losing the peculiar qualities that made them recognizable.
A sentence may be moving in isolation and wrong for the person supposedly saying it.
That has led me to develop more detailed character references and to revise scenes with greater attention to the individual lives those characters are meant to have.
The difficulty is not always that the AI fails to describe fear, joy or sadness.
It can describe all three convincingly.
The problem is that a description of an emotion is not necessarily a convincing expression of that emotion by a particular fictional person.
Those are different achievements.
The real feeling produced by something unreal
Then there is the person reading.
A reader might become genuinely anxious while Rae attempts to cross the disappearing floor. They may feel anger toward Attention or frustration with Dude for hesitating.
Those responses are real experiences.
The characters and the chamber are inventions.
The distinction has never seemed especially troubling to me. Fiction gives us the opportunity to respond emotionally to situations that exist entirely within our imaginations.
But AI makes the relationship between the creator’s experience and the reader’s response harder to describe.
Suppose a passage that deeply moves a reader was initially generated by a system, then selected and revised by a person working on a larger story.
The reader’s emotion does not become imaginary because of that history.
Yet the emotional response alone cannot tell us which participant in the creative process expressed what, or whether the machine possessed an experience of its own.
We should be able to recognize the reader’s genuine response without pretending that every other question has thereby been answered.
Nor should we assume that generating convincing language proves the existence of subjective experience.
That would require a different kind of argument.
A room full of people who never existed
In the water chamber, the mechanical problem is relatively straightforward to describe.
Turn a wheel. Release more water. Lose more floor. Risk someone’s life.
The emotional situation is considerably harder.
Rae knows that continuing may kill her. Dude knows that acting may contribute to it. Both understand that hesitation has consequences for Jimothy.
Attention is trying to turn their care into something that can be measured, displayed and used against them.
I can describe those facts without resolving what the characters ought to feel.
That uncertainty is part of what makes the encounter worth exploring.
The artificial intelligence systems involved in producing the books can help generate possibilities, dialogue and description. I can accept, reject or transform what they offer.
A reader may eventually encounter the result and feel something neither the initial prompt nor the generated draft could have predicted.
Somewhere between the imagined chamber, the words used to describe it and the person reading, a genuine emotional experience can take place.
The machinery that helped produce the prose is part of the story of its creation.
The machinery inside Attention’s chamber is part of the fiction.
And Rae still has to find somewhere to put her next foot.