Persuasion by Netflix

Not your grandmother's Jane Austen: Dakota Johnson's
Anne Elliot breaks the fourth wall and holds a rabbit
throughout the film.

Still a Jane Austen neophyte, I watched Netflix' Persuasion this month. Like the screen versions of Pride and Prejudice, the movie necessarily dispenses with the nuances of the novel in order to tell the story in under two hours. If inspired to move on to the book, the viewer can then savor the subtleties of the characters as they navigate the rules of Regency society.

To get right to the point, I liked the film. It had outrageously self-absorbed characters that provided the grist for protagonist Anne Elliot's ironic observations, and the requisite Austen plot twists that provided a happy ending for most of the players.

But it's a good thing that I didn't read the reviews first. They slammed the movie because of the modern dialogue ("He's a 10" "Now we're strangers, worse than strangers, we're exes") and the 21st-century sensibility of Anne Elliot.

Here's an example of movie dialogue that would never come from the pen of Jane Austen.

[Male character]: He [Wentworth] could be an admiral some day, great service to the Crown and all that it holds dear, but instead he'd rather fart around inland for the rest of his life.

[Woman character] Oh, let the man fart where he likes.

It's obvious why diehard Austen fans ("Janeites") are outraged, but I'm not so wedded to historical authenticity. It's fiction.

The Last Mile is the Hardest

Alan Turing (biography.com)

Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, proposed in 1950 a way of distinguishing human from artificial intelligence in what has become known as the Turing Test. Though the Test is highly structured (typewritten communication in a laboratory with a human being and a computer), it has been popularly simplified to the question of whether one can tell if one is talking to a computer or a live person.

Alan Turing predicted that by the year 2000 a computer would have a 30% chance of fooling its interlocutor. We're a few years behind schedule, but his prediction has been fulfilled:

GPT-3 can work out analogy questions from the old SAT with better results than the average college applicant. It can generate news articles that readers may have trouble distinguishing from human-written ones.

And it can do tasks its creators never thought about. Beta testers in recent weeks have found that it can complete a half-written investment memo, produce stories and letters written in the style of famous people, generate business ideas and even write certain kinds of software code based on a plain-English description of the desired software. OpenAI has announced that after the test period, GPT-3 will be released as a commercial product.

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer, third generation) seems to "understand" fairly complex texts. Example:

(WSJ image)

I copied and pasted the first paragraph of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address: “The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.”

GPT-3 gave me its translation: “I am not going to run for president.” Take a bow, HAL 9000.

Nowhere in the Washington quote does the word "president" appear. Scary.

But the GPT-3 isn't perfect.

Yet when I gave it the famous first line of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”—the AI was puzzling to watch. In the course of my first four tries, a few of its answers were sort of in the ballpark without being quite right. (For instance, “A man with a lot of money must be looking for a wife.”) Then on my fifth try, it seemed to crack up: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man with a good fortune must be in want of a wife, because men are very vain and they want to be seen as wealthy, and women are very greedy and they want to be seen as beautiful.”

I took satisfaction from knowing that the artificial super-intelligence had as much trouble with Jane Austen as I did. It is a truth universally acknowledged that female communications are still too complicated for the presumptively male programmers to figure out. Eventually, the AI suffered the fate of male brains: "it seemed to crack up."

Pride and Prejudice: Getting Unstuck

In June I described why I found the novel Pride and Prejudice to be heavy going:

I find English manners in the 19th century to be stupefying, when women can only meet the male object of their desire by being properly introduced through a mutual acquaintance, they spend chapters discussing how they can manipulate the mutual acquaintance, woman and man have the meeting where a few words are spoken, then the women discuss for chapters what the words meant. Arrggh.

Though Jane Austen's prose wasn't difficult, the various story lines moved at a glacial pace. Finally I got unstuck by watching the 2005 movie, which by necessity had to dispense with wordy nuance and even some minor characters in order to do justice to the major plot lines within the two-hour running time.

One example: a pivotal point in the book, about halfway through, is the letter that Mr. Darcy writes to Elizabeth Bennett. One chapter is a recitation of the text of the letter, and the next chapter is devoted to Elizabeth's thoughts about it. Just one minute of the film is spent on both, as the letter is reduced to a few bullet points while the actress Keira Knightley's facial expressions communicate her reaction to each revelation.

Once I knew where the novel was going, I resumed reading. With the impetus of finding-out-what-happens removed, I could better appreciate the descriptions of early 19th century England, the obsession with class and wealth in a world where learned but unmarried women had few property rights and could easily fall into a life of desperate poverty, and the interior monologues of the Bennett women (Jane Austen's narrator wasn't privy to the thoughts of the male characters).

The younger me would have refused to see the movie or read the Cliff's Notes version in order experience the novel as the writer intended. The older me is more interested in finishing things, and not necessarily in the best way possible. When the clock is running out, you use the tools at your disposal to get unstuck.