“I saw everything, so it is not a question of what I saw, but how I saw.” Anton Chekhov, Letter to Alexei Suvorin, SS Baikal, Tartar Strait,September 11, 1890 (2008)

I present here a series of graphic field notes drawn on site during the 'Driving the Human' event at the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity” on May 10, 2023, along with ethnographic text co-written with ChatGPT. One of my favorite books on ethnographic writing practice suggests that the best companion for writing ethnography would be Anton Chekhov, who in his pioneering work on Sakhalin Island intended to write with “scientific and literary purposes in mind”. (Narayan 2012 : 3) Using an AI and prompting it to write 'in the style of Anton Chekhov' made me feel like I was partnering up with the great playwright —or almost so. Sometimes I had to edit a lot, sometimes I had to let in a few sentences that clearly showed that a non-human intelligence was at work. Chekhov would approve this mode of sketching things up, as shows this excerpt from a letter to his brother in 1899: “Don’t smooth out the rough edges, don’t polish; be clumsy and bold. Brevity is the sister of talent.”(2008) If the accidental lyricism of the IA works well with this motto, it also plays around a current limit that the Russian writer also recognized as his: As he wrote to a friend in another letter dating from 1897, uncannily relating to the state of ChatGPT at the moment: “My sins are unintentional because, as I am only now beginning to understand, I do not yet know how to write longer pieces.”(2008) Together with my drawings, the "taste of the hand" and the flavor of the AI combine to create — I hope— a reading experience as joyful as its making.

Read the essay there: https://stretchingmaterialities.pubpub.org/pub/ds0pgumg