Monkeys, metaphors and made-up minds: A history of literary hoaxes from Shakespeare to AI
Shakespeare is, perhaps, the best-known case of our seeming inability to tell write from wrong. While the Bard of Avon is unarguably the most celebrated poet and playwright in the canon of English literature, there continues to be much controversy as to who exactly authored the works believed to be those of the man who bequeathed to his wife his 'second-best bed'.
Shakespearewallas have argued that the authorship attributed to Shakespeare was really the work of his contemporaries, such as Christopher Marlowe, or Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere, or more recently, a minor English poet called Emilia Lanier, imparting a feminist twist to the tale - which implies that the Bard of Avon should really be called the 'Bird of Avon'.
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The candidacy of dozens of possible ghostwriters who could have been Shakespeare has been put forward, prompting mathematicians literally to go ape and calculate that if X number of monkeys were given X number of typewriters, in X number of years they would reproduce the entire Shakespearean corpus which, statistically speaking, might claim to be, if not rhyme and reason, then at least rhyme and rhesus.
Literature is replete with all manner of monkey tricks. The 18th century Scottish poet James Macpherson rose to fame by publishing a cycle of epic poems. These, he claimed, he had translated into English from the original ancient Gaelic, and which were composed by the legendary Irish bard, Ossian, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, or in its anglicised avatar, Finn McCool. Though several critics saw through this McCool con, Macpherson had the last laugh by being interred in the hallowed sanctum sanctorum of Westminster Abbey.
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His English contemporary, the child prodigy Thomas Chatterton, wasn't so lucky. When he tried to pass off his poems as having been penned by a fictive 15th c. poet called Thomas Rowley, his ploy was denounced in print as fraudulent, causing him to commit suicide at 17. Lamenting the untimely demise of the 'golden boy', Byron wrote: ''Tis strange that the brain, a most fiery particle/ Should let itself be snuffed out by an article'.
On a less sombre note, literary fun and games were had in 1969 with the US publication of an erotic novel, Naked Came the Stranger, authored by a Penelope Ashe. Ms Ashe, upon scrutiny, turned out to be a team of 24 journalists who collaborated to take the mickey out of the American cultural establishment.
With the advent of AI, there'll be no limits to such highbrow high jinks, as already evidenced by the publication of Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the Architecture of Reality. Originally published in Italian as Hpnocrazia: Trump, Musk e La Nuova Architettura Della Realta, and translated into English in December 2024, the book is purportedly the work of a made-up philosopher, Jianwel Xun, invented by Italian philosopher-essayist Andrea Colamedici.
The book, which describes how digital technology shapes public perception through 'hypnotic narratives', gained widespread readership in German, French, and Spanish translations, and was lauded by top technocrats. However, Hypnocracy is itself a 'hypnotic narrative' in that Colamedici created it by using two AI tools. Unmasking himself, Colamedici said that the book is aimed at combating '
cognitive apathy
' by revealing the pitfalls of progressively delegating our thought processes to machines.
An AI-generated book acting as a caveat against the overuse of AI? A circularity of logic that squares the sphere of literary lampoonery. What next? A book aimed not at humans but AI readers to warn them about human-created hoaxes? Why not? And the question as to who would author it, answers itself. Bring on the monkeys with the typewriters.
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