It is impossible to conceive a literary event in India without our very own human thesaurus- Shashi Tharoor. So it goes without saying that one of the key sessions of the Tata Literature Fest 2023 was an interaction with Shashi Tharoor on his latest book on Aphorisms – The Less You Preach, The More You Learn: Aphorisms for Our Age.
So what exactly are Aphorisms? Well they are a figure of speech that contains a general truth says the English dictionary but when the consummate wordsmith talks about how he developed these and his love for the English language, his inspirations and role models for writing, it was sheer poetry on stage. The audience heard in rapt attention and one of those rare occasions when an hour seemed so less and you wish time could just stop.
This literary experience went a notch higher when Tharoor joined Marcus du Sautoy OBE, Fellow of the Royal Society and author of celebrated books like The ‘Creativity Code’ & ‘Around The World in 80 Games’ and Tech Entrepreneur Parvez Diwan on How AI is impacting the creative process.
Have you ever wondered how AI is slowly but steadily creeping into our lives? Does it have the capability to dent our creative instincts and would people resort to AI to write books in a not-so-distant future? Well, Tharoor doesn’t think so. He emphatically highlighted how “Imagination is a particularly human quality.”
While Du Sautoy tried explaining the algorithms and programming mechanisms of generative AI that enable these platforms to mimic a certain extent of style and tenor, Tharoor reiterated that creativity may only lie in prompting in the case of Ais and he expects “more from a writer than the mere ability to prompt,” and goes on to highlight the need to undertake the right approach in training kids today to better accept the challenges of tomorrow- “Don’t teach kids what to think but how to think.”
Perhaps that’s where the brilliance of this event and this discussion comes through. Creativity and literature need not necessarily bow down to technology… It is possible to coexist in a symbiotic synergy leveraging the demands of changing times.
