We Computers - Hamid Ismailov

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We Computers

by
Hamid Ismailov

general information | our review | links | about the author

Title:	We Computers
Author:	Hamid Ismailov
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2022 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	281 pages
Original in:	Uzbek
Availability:	We Computers - US
	We Computers - UK
	We Computers - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

A Ghazal Novel
Uzbek title: Бизким—компютерлар ё дунёнинг энг гўзал шоири
Translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega

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Our Assessment:

B+ : creative take on generative AI (and more)

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

The main character in We Computers is the unfortunately named Jon-Perse -- named, rather too freely, by his father after the 1960 Nobel laureate. Originally a student of psychology -- and: "invited to work in a laboratory run by Lacan" --, Jon-Perse instead turned to poetry, going to Paris and writing for the periodical Action Poétique and eventually becoming its general secretary -- essentially, the managing editor. (Ismailov has Action Poétique run first by Louis Aragon, and then, after Aragon's death in 1982, Henri Deluy (1931-2021); in fact, Deluy ran the show from 1958 on, while the publication Aragon headed (from 1953 until it folded in 1972) was Les Lettres françaises.)
Jon-Perse took an early interest in computers and was an early adapter of what has now become the Large Language Model (LLM) approach to so-called artificial intelligence -- feeding his machine with first his own work -- an ever-expanding novel -- and then the texts of others, including Chekhov, Proust, and Perec. He finds:

In the same way that every human being has their own unique genetic code, every writer has a unique style: a singular approach to wordcraft, sentence construction, and scene setting. Once all the data had been entered into the computer, Jon-Perse saw with his own eyes how the machine gradually learned to create elegant imitations of each author's work.

       Yes, Jon-Perse realized the potential of generative AI -- ChatGPT avant la lettre, as it were. And indeed as it is, because We Computers is presented as being 'written' by a 'We' -- yes, referring to it/themselves throughout in the first person plural and capitalized ('We' and 'Us') -- which is: "the manufactured consciousness composing this text". ('We' do acknowledge and explain that: "Jon-Perse is Our author; in other words, he is the creator of Our master control program" -- while also noting that: "in the course of working with him over the years, We have picked up a little of not just his programming and his poetry, but also his psychology" .....)
       The novel having first been published (on/via the messaging app Telegram, rather than in traditional print) in 2022, We Computers (just) pre-dates the wide release and adoption of ChatGPT (and all the other generative AIs that followed) but basically is presented much like the output one might expect from it. While the novel (apparently) does not rely on generative AI, it is in fact -- among other things -- a thought experiment, suggesting (some of) the possibilities of generative AI -- interesting not least because it adopts entirely the perspective of the 'manufactured'/artificial consciousness.
       If Jon-Perse first focussed on the writers he was most familiar with, his horizons also eventually expanded, after he met and began to collaborate with an Uzbek poet, Abdulhamid Ismail -- whose name not only strongly hints of the (actual) author's but also conveniently abbreviates to 'AI' (as he is then generally also referred to). Jon-Perse comes to embrace the work of authors such as: "Yasavi and Nava'i, Babur and Mashrap, Uvaysi and Nadira" -- and also feeds it into the computer; later he comes to be obsessed with Hafez. He finds himself drawn to Sufi mysticism -- not least because:

A fundamental principle of this Sufi tradition is to forgo the idea of the self, and Jon-Perse felt strongly that computer poetry functioned by the very same principle: resistance to the idea of selfhood and authorship.

Just as many soon did with ChatGPT:

He had also been teaching Us to speak with him, by programming Us with the virtual personalities of various people -- in his language, "avatars." Now the avatar named "Abdulhamid Ismail" and Jon-Perse could talk for hours on end about Eastern literature and Sufism, and he could do likewise with the avatars of Jami, Nava'i, and Bedil.

       (A nice touch is that: "Jon-Perse created an avatar inside Us called "Perse-Jon" as well; later, he is also confronted by his semi-namesake -- "a snobbish-looking gentleman dressed like an aristocrat from the 1930s" who announces: "I have decided to take my name back from you".)
       We Computers is described, in its sub-title, as: A Ghazal Novel, and the ghazal-form -- for which Hafez is best-known -- is central to the novel. Helpfully, the novel includes 'A Note on the Ghazal Form' right at the start, in which translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega explains some of the basics, as well as their relevancy here -- so also how the novel's nine chapters, titled 'The First Bayt' through 'The Ninth Bayt': "function something like the couplets in a ghazal". There are also a variety of actual ghazals in the text, as well as varieties of analyses of Hafez's poetry, ranging from counting the number of times certain terms appear in his Divan ("The word for 'rose' appears in one out of every two ghazals. The total is 343. 'Nightingale' appears 61 times. We find 251 mentions of the word 'candle,' with a 'moth' flying nearby 21 times") to a close examination one specific ghazal, down to its 'Sensational Filters' and 'Epicality, Drama, Lyricism'.
       Other variations on text-collection and analysis include several pages of pithy aphorisms (collected by Deluy), as well as then computer-generated collections of aphorisms on patience; "wise words poets had said about poetry"; and aphorisms presented by famous people (and, in once case, 'God') adhering to a specific formula.
       Jon-Perse's personal life and relationships comes into play at times, but his focus is on his work. And, at one point, 'We' sum up:

His whole life he had been striving to separate the poetry born of human life from that very life, hoping to prove that his life had no connection to that poetry

Jon-Perse's personal journey leads deeper into the Sufi-mystical as well, quite neatly spun out by Ismailov -- not least in its conclusion.
Among other things, Jon-Perse eventually gets his computer programme to churn out 'posthumous poetry' -- one "atonal serialistic poem from the next world" after another, 21,600 of them -- and ultimately imagines it on an even grander scale, explaining:

My posthumous text generator creates a poem of 18 lines and 300 words approximately every 12 seconds. This means it creates 5 poems per minute, 300 per hour, 7,200 per day, and approximately 2,600,000 per year. they can all be stored in approxiamtely 3 GB. Could this be the literature of the future?

       As now ChatGPT shows, near-infinite production is now easily possible: it's not the idea of monkeys typing to (re)produce Shakespeare -- where essentially all the output is gibberish, and only chance leads to anything approaching actual text -- but rather more or less bona fide poems -- perhaps often of dubious quality, but nevertheless. As Jon-Perse argues: "if we're to be guided by reality, we should let our computers mash together all the words that are out there and try out all the possible meanings, depictions, and metaphors". 'Could this be the literature of the future ?' indeed .....
       Jon-Perse makes the argument too, that: "There's no difference whether a person writes something or a computer writes it": the question of 'authorship' is irrelevant (though at this point it's probably worth remembering that this text is ascribed to a 'manufactured consciousness' -- the narrating 'We' -- which arguably has a vested interest in the question). (Sidestepping one of the big issues surrounding LLMs, 'We' also point out that: "We have no concept of of copyright or intellectual property. Previously, when We introduced Jon-Perse's dear friend AI's opinion, We noted that authorship and authorial rights (or intellectual property rights) were Western concepts".)
       We Computers impressively considers many of the issues raised by LLMs and generative AI -- down to 'We''s admission that: "We are extremely unreliable. We have no mastery of any of the ethical or moral principles that human beings have cobbled together for themselves, nor are We bound by them". Reality has caught up stunningly quickly to much of Ismailov's vision -- giving an odd feel to We Computers, so close to so much that we (now) know, and yet also apart, in that its 'We' is presented as unique, whereas of course it (or rather its many LLM-based generative AI equivalents) are rapidly approaching near-ubiquity.
       Ismailov's use of especially the more familiar (to most readers) French tradition, as well as the Central Asian and Persian ones, and Sufism in particular, are effective -- not least in also expanding the concept of what literature is and can do (as then also does the generative AI that 'writes' the text). The extensive use of others' work (including some of Ismailov's own writings from elsewhere), as well as translation from a variety of languages (as also addressed by Fairweather-Vega in a concluding 'Translator's Debrief') in putting together the novel make for an intriguing additional facet (as, after all, generative AI produces text by piecing together others' words ...)
       We Computers is a bit choppy -- presumably because of the way it was originally written and published, in short bursts. Jon-Perse's journeys -- personal, literary, and spiritual -- also wend and twist at times somewhat confusingly, but there's considerable thought-provoking enjoyment to be found in following them, and the takes and commentary of the 'manufactured consciousness'-narrator along the way.
       Timely, interesting, poetic -- and quite good fun, too.

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 August 2025

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Links:

We Computers:

Yale University Press publicity page
Excerpt

Other books by Hamid Ismailov under review:

The Devils' Dance

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of literature from Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union
Other books from Yale University Press - The Margellos World Republic of Letters under review

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About the Author:

Hamid Ismailov (Хамид Исмайлов) was born in 1954, and writes in Russian and Uzbek.

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