{"id":164034,"date":"2025-09-23T18:00:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T18:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/164034\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T18:00:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T18:00:14","slug":"a-resistance-to-ai-the-author-inviting-readers-to-contribute-to-a-mass-memoir-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/164034\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A resistance to AI\u2019: The author inviting readers to contribute to a mass memoir | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Beard, award-winning author of The Day That Went Missing<\/a> and Sad Little Men<\/a>, thought he was writing his next book, a whole life memoir. In the event, he has written his way off the page and into an entirely new publishing model. The Universal Turing Machine is the title both of Beard\u2019s memoir and the mass memoir project<\/a> he hopes others will help him to build.<\/p>\n

Organised as a chessboard, each of the 64 squares narrates one year of Beard\u2019s life, in 1,000 words per year. (He\u2019s 58, so the last five years are fictionalised.) The reader moves around the \u201cboard\u201d as if they were a knight, picking the next year to read from options limited by the knight\u2019s L-shaped ambulation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way you go round it, what you want to know, will tell you something about yourself,\u201d he says. Each entry or square contains signposts to future and past entries; you can pick your subplot or skip to the juiciest bits, read faithfully or game the machine. The public are free to respond to the constraints of the board however they choose, merging or repeating years, provided they submit 64 years to fit the shape of the board, each of no more than 1,000 words. The memoirs will be displayed in a grid with each square a clickable whole-life memoir. As more are published, the overall grid of the \u201cmachine\u201d will grow.<\/p>\n

Photograph: The Universal Turing Machine<\/p>\n

The project takes its title from the test that Alan Turing devised to discern artificial intelligence from human intelligence. \u201cThe idea is that if you write your memoir, you are passing the Turing test,\u201d Beard says. \u201cYou are showing that you\u2019re human through the life that you\u2019ve lived, through the memories that you have. In a way, it\u2019s a resistance to AI-generated content.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beard\u2019s memoir is beautifully written, with a dedication to emotional accuracy that feels both tender and ruthless. \u201cMuch of the kindness in our marriage involved leaving the other person alone,\u201d he writes, \u201cwhich often went unnoticed.\u201d Or of his dad\u2019s last breaths: \u201cWe fed him drops of water from the spout of a rainbow-striped teapot and watched the mist in his eyes become dominant, a grey colour like old washing-up water or wet kitchen-towel or cold lamb-fat or the outside of a blown lightbulb \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

It is impossible to resist the thought that it ought to be a book. But Beard found that however he ordered his honest memories, the process of ordering made them feel less honest. He realised he remembered specific events in his life in the context of what happened before and after them, and there was no satisfying way to represent this truth in fiction. \u201cThe thing to get your head around is that [this memoir] doesn\u2019t work in any one order, but it does work in every possible order.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remembered by jumping around,\u201d he says. The answer was to find a way for readers to jump around, too.<\/p>\n

There are precedents for nonlinear narratives, such as BS Johnson\u2019s The Unfortunates, which was published as loose leaves in a box, or Julio Cort\u00e1zar\u2019s Hopscotch, which contained instructions for alternative reading sequences.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s still there on the page,\u201d Beard says. \u201cBy using technology, you can make it an immersive, interactive experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beard started out writing experimental fiction \u2013 his early works were Oulipian<\/a>. Damascus (1998), for instance, used only nouns from the Times on the day the Maastricht Treaty took effect. He switched to memoir with 2017\u2019s The Day That Went Missing, which told the story of his brother\u2019s death by drowning; Beard was in the sea with him, aged 11. The book disclosed, and bore, its emotional constraints. Each memoir has been more revelatory than the last.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, because each time I get better at telling the truth,\u201d he says. \u201cI can now see that the novels were acts of deflection and evasion \u2026 I was using them to get validation, basically. Of course, I didn\u2019t realise that at the time \u2026 Whereas once I got into nonfiction, I was just concentrating on trying to write what was true, and I\u2019ve got much closer to what I think writing is for, and why writing is valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Universal Turing Machine is free to read, and publication on the platform is free too. Memoirs are submitted as word documents, and will be copy edited. Beard, who used to direct the National Academy of Writing, will personally read and copy edit the first 15 memoirs to be published.<\/p>\n

There is no commercial outcome \u2013 unless a publisher comes forward with an innovative suggestion of how to represent The Universal Turing Machine on paper. An origamist, perhaps?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s uncommodified, which is one of the reasons why it feels important \u2013 and the fact that everyone can give it a go,\u201d Beard says. \u201cThat seems to me a much more healthy way to approach writing than to get caught up in the competitive traps of sales and validation and essentially showing off.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a way of taking writing seriously,\u201d Beard says. \u201cI\u2019m enthused by it because I believe in literature. I believe in writing. And it feels a little bit threatened at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richard Beard, award-winning author of The Day That Went Missing and Sad Little Men, thought he was writing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-164034","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}