This is the closest I will get to a public anti-AI screed. Here it goes: generative artificial intelligence could never come up with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Hollywood Africans. You would ask it to make a picture that depicts three black men thinking about Hollywood racism in Hollywood and it would make it depressingly literal: ultra charging Basquiat’s locs, giving Rammellzee period accurate samurai armor, putting the wonderful backdrop of psychological graffiti on to a brick wall. Gen-AI couldn’t invent Cubism if a person didn’t invent it first. It can only understand changing art as a prompt. We can pull up others but dunking on AI is startlingly easy and after a point you’re just preaching to the choir, correct as they are. 

That doesn’t help me from being haunted by this screenshot, which I saw on Bluesky via Lincoln Michel:

 

If you don’t care what the lobby looks like, that’s part of the problem. So let’s approach this as a technical problem. I’ve never spoken about craft publicly. I also write fiction with no particular distinction from my nonfiction writing, to the point I split my year in half between focusing on one and the other on the other. 

AI’s idea of high end is a literal one. Our story is a world with nyads who get sick, but have to be hidden as they heal. That gives clues as to where we would be healing nyads. It also does not rule out the mansion, or that it’s actually shabby outside to hide how much money courses through the nyad hospital or any other number of options. So to illustrate my point better, let’s move away from the Nyad hospital to somewhere more prosaic. 

Let’s say I’m writing a novel about myself. In my novel, Christopher Sloce has moved to a city called Anglican City, Kentucky to research a book. In this scene, he has to get a nonfiction book by a former professional wrestler turned pastor who disappeared after he made extraterrestrial contact. Now that I’ve set you up with the scenario, let’s talk about the lobby. As I write about Anglican City, I’ll have more of an idea of what makes Anglican City different from anywhere else. As of now, I have to describe the lobby of this library. 

The fact the library has a lobby already feels like a hint. The very idea of a lobby in a library speaks to me to be a place that implies some import, so we might be at the central branch in Anglican City. There will probably be warm colors on the walls, some seating, maybe a community bulletin board. That all depends on what kind of city Anglican City is: maybe it’s a cold sad, place. Maybe there’s folding chairs in the lobby. Place is an underrated tool, and if the area where your nyad hospital is doesn’t give any hints to the interior, you may need to step back and think for a second.

When I originally created this scenario, I was thinking of Newport, Kentucky (or rather, my idea of Newport), so a small Midwestern/Southern city. But wait: Anglican City isn’t real. There is nothing tying me to having to make Anglican City fit the mold of a typical midwestern/southern city, no one said I was an anthropologist, and in fact, I may accidentally hit on some kind of truth by going with an odd detail.

The reason for this is descriptive is associative. Why do we find the “getting a lot of boss baby vibes” from this tweet funny (it’s a little overused now but whatever)? Because we do this. Every library I describe is a composite of every library I’ve ever been in. But there are associations, ones that almost feel synesthetic to me, and as I think about the idea of a library in a city that doesn’t exist in a region I’m familiar with, something strikes me. The library has an old, faded Dr. Pepper machine in the lobby nobody has filled up for years. 

This may not be the right detail for the library in your story, but consider: our protagonist is aware of a Fortean Americana. The history of professional wrestling goes back to the Civil War and traveling shows, to say nothing of the circuit riding pastor or our own odd history in the space age of extraterrestrial contacts. During all this we experienced a great consumer boom, the artifacts of which are all around. In a library, we are likely to encounter such artifacts, but the Dr. Pepper machine that’s empty yet has not been removed is another kind of artifact, one that creates an uncanny effect. If we know the history of Dr. Pepper, we know of its southern roots, and how that might travel up to the inbetweenland of Anglican City. But also: why Dr. Pepper? Was Coke or Pepsi not available? That’s another choice to make as well. My hope is that you imagine my character walking into a library, see the Dr. Pepper machine, are struck by it, and pick it up as another clue to tell you the world of the story we’re in, which hopefully gives you a fuller, better impression of the work. Maybe not to its overall theme (I would argue no book has one “theme” besides maybe allegories like Animal Farm), but to a motif or subtheme.

In the construction of every story, there is an intermediary. I’m there. Death of the author is often misconstrued to say works have no authors; what it actually is is an attack on authorial authority as the end of a work in contrast to the New Critics. When I thought of the library, I thought of the libraries I’ve gone to. I thought of things that spoke to me of dusted America. I thought of cigarette machines, then I thought of the Dr. Pepper machine, because I remembered the lobby at our local greasy spoon diner called The Dairy Barn. That should communicate something to you: I think of the south in culinary terms (which is pretty common). Obviously people aren’t going to know that, and it would be annoying (maybe to good effect) if Christopher Sloce the character turned around and said, “Just like the Dairy Barn”. But the sense of dilapidation, of being ignored after days when the machine was necessary, of somebody forgetting about something because they couldn’t make money, that’s what we’re hoping to communicate. Maybe my character will go over and try to get a drink and be barked at by the librarian. Or he’ll know immediately it’s empty. AI can only provide a false edifice of this level of contemplation about a soft drink machine in a library. It is merely there.

In many ways, that’s what AI art boosters would like. You would think someone would like to read something entertaining and identifiable human, and I think for the most part, people do. But consider an old canard of the anti-analysis school: the blue curtain meme. In the blue curtain meme, we pit the teacher against the writer. The teacher is asking, “What do the blue curtains mean?” The writer, exasperated, says “The curtains are fucking blue.” There are issues with the way we treat literature as a rote series of clues in order to meet up to a standardized test, but the teacher is just doing their best. What’s actually at stake here is the role of the critic, which the teacher is standing in for. A critic can extrapolate across a work the meaning of the curtains, how often they’re mentioned, if the curtains are a motif in the writer’s work. What AI wants to do, by defeating both the writer and the critic, is remove the writer’s critical capabilities to bring in a machine that can only create an unceasing literalism. The writer becomes a junior partner in the work when AI takes over, because AI has artificial associations that are predicting the writer can only react to rather than continuing their own vision. On occasion, there might be a fuck-up labeled as a “hallucination”, but a writer can do bad on their own. The AI hallucinations are the closest thing the machines make to an associative leap, one they do not land. That leap is oftentimes better made by a writer, whose hazy vision of all the possibilities available to the author is more striking than a machine shitting itself. 

It’s in those associative moments a work has some sort of soul, some sort of grit, something that proves its real, and that is the miracle. Your library might have no soda machine: it may just be a front desk in a small building. Whatever you come up with will be better than what the machine does. 

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