My number one favorite book has got to be Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by the mother of Science Fiction herself, Mary Shelley. I could go on a tangent about exactly why this book holds so much significance for me, but I will settle to say that it takes a true innovative thinker to assemble such a morbid and creative tale. Especially now in the age of AI, Shelley’s story continues to stay relevant. In a way, we are all Frankenstein, and our monsters of choice are Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. Although Frankenstein’s Monster still continues to be a bit far from our current technological capabilities when it comes to being a “living” thing, his lead is decreasing at an exponential rate. Now more than ever it is important to take note of Frankenstein’s morbid ending, and recognize its parallels to our present unresolved reality.
Although I just said everything up above, I did find it thematic to use Google’s Gemini to do a distant reading analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The results were interesting to say the least.
For one, Gemini did not take very long to process the entire text of Frankenstein. This was quite impressive to me, and made me think about the days it took me to finish the book on my own. After processing the book, Gemini gave me an initial distant reading analysis. Overall, I do think that Gemini was able to understand and recognize the themes of Frankenstein. However, I am skeptical. Frankenstein is a very popular piece of literature, and some of Gemini’s answers seemed almost too accurate for only using distant reading. One example being when I asked Gemini for what genre this book was, to which it said “Gothic Romantic and Early Sci-Fi”. These are all quite accurate, but the words that got them to this conclusion were questionable:
| misery | 271 | High frequency suggests a persistent emotional state. |
| horror | 251 | Explicitly marks the novel’s affiliation with the Gothic tradition. |
| death | 257 | A central preoccupation, moving beyond metaphor into narrative fact. |
| felt / fear | ~499 | Indicates a narrative focused on subjective emotional terror and anxiety. |
| night | 297 | A core setting device for Gothic literature (darkness, secrecy). |
I don’t know how these words necessarily give “Early Sci-Fi”. Unless Gemini already knows Frankenstein‘s genre.
Another thing that I wish to note is Gemini’s sass. Sometimes Gemini would not actually generate the correct work, and when challenged would give me snarky comments that I was not appreciative of. One example being when I requested a bar graph of frequent phrases, the bar graph was made before disappearing right away. When I asked again I got this remark:
So this is clearly not right.
Overall, Gemini is a tool that certainly has strengths. And those strengths will only get stronger as time goes on. However, after spending half an hour trying to get Gemini to make a bar graph, I’ve come to find it significantly less threatening than Frankenstein’s monster.
Attached are some images Gemini made for me:
