The Everyday Genius of <em>Shakespeare in Love</em>
Earlier this year, Google introduced a chat application powered by artificial intelligence—an experimental competitor to ChatGPT and a tool that it hoped, per its marketing copy, would “be a home for your creativity, productivity and curiosity.” Understanding that some potential users might be less sanguine about a technology that blurs the line between the augmentation of human intelligence and the obsolescence of it, Google gave its new bot a canny name: Bard.
As a general term, “Bard” suggests the lyric capabilities, and the latent wisdom, of the human mind. As a specific one, it summons one of the most famous avatars of that art: William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is, at this point, his own kind of marketing message. His words double as incantations, invoked to confer legitimacy and a sheen of artistry on any he that utters them. The early modern poet has achieved that consummately postmodern strain of transcendence. He has become a brand.
Google’s release of Bard, as it happens, coincides with the 25th anniversary of the film that considered the origins of the great poet’s elevation. —a whimsical imagining of the events that led to the writing of —is remembered, today, as much for the stories that played out on its periphery as for the one it put on the screen: those . Those plot-twisty reshufflings of , , . The of Harvey Weinstein. But the tabloid-addled memories,, the comedy from the late 1990s that takes place in the late 16th century, managed to anticipate some of our era’s deepest anxieties. And it serves as a reminder that one of the questions new technologies have wrought—what will artificial intelligence do to the human version?—is, while unprecedented, not strictly new. The human brain versus the computerized one has always been a false distinction. acknowledges that, indirectly but eloquently, as it gives shape to the messiness and randomness and muddled vitality of the creative process.
