It’s none of your business why, but I’ve been planning a party. The idea was to get some caterers in to cook something over live coals, so I went online to see what was available. The first company I found described itself like this: ‘We don’t just provide food—we create meaningful experiences. Our passion for traditional fire cooking allows us to offer something unique, authentic, and expertly crafted. Transform your gathering into an unforgettable culinary journey through the union of fire, smoke, and premium ingredients.’ Another: ‘We don’t just serve food, we serve moments. Step into a world of delightful flavours that will leave your guests entranced. No hype. No shortcuts. Just good food, done right.’ Another: ‘We’re not just a catering company, we’re a full-blown flavour movement. Discover the essence of live coal cooking with a feast to delight all the senses. Where smoke meets soul.’ Each continued in this vein for several hundred words. None of these sites seemed interested in telling me what they would actually be cooking, or how much it would cost; they’d all been swept up in the same guileless wide-eyed enthusiasm, chattering away about the general deliciousness of food and the memories that would shortly be lasting me a lifetime. The more I clicked around, the more I started to panic. There was nothing, no human voices anywhere, just thousands of versions of the same cheery demon. Am I alone out here? Something’s happened to the world; it’s all gone flimsy. Reality is a scarce resource. If I hired one of these companies, would anyone actually show up? Hard to imagine that they would. Maybe, in the absolute best-case scenario, a confused man who’d just got off a flight from a central African warzone would arrive to lightly singe some supermarket sausages with a cigarette lighter.
One of the ways I’ve been lying to myself is with the idea that at least the physical, sensuous world is safe from AI. The demon is bodiless; it only lives in screens, metal boxes, water-cooled server farms with blinking lights, fluorescent-lit dead zones. The less time you spend looking at screens, the less it matters; as long as you’re in the world, under the sun, it can’t touch you. Which is a nice idea, but obviously we’re long past that point now. We share this planet with an alien intelligence, and the sensuous world is buckling around it. You can no longer pretend that the thing is just a stochastic parrot, or a fancy autocomplete, or a weighted average of everything that already exists. Just this week, an ordinary ChatGPT instance came up with a solution to the unit distance problem, unsolved for eighty years, casually discarding one of Erdős’ conjectures in the process. In doing this it discovered an entirely new mathematical construction, working in ways human mathematicians would have never thought to operate. For mathematicians this is terrifying and exhilarating, but I’m not a mathematician and I don’t know what the unit distance problem is; I want to hire a caterer. On this front the main thing the incipient superintelligence seems to be doing is replacing all meaningful language with reams and reams of genuinely meaningless drivel.
I hate it. I find it viscerally disgusting; a cold shudder like someone’s poured jelly down the back of my neck. I hate that it’s everywhere; I hate that when I read basically anything now I’m constantly on alert, twitching like a schizo in an underpass. Is this thing really what it says it is? Is this person actually a robot in disguise? Nice little personal essay you’ve got there, lady, but I know what you really are; time to get my knife out, time to start digging around under your skin until I find the wires. AI is a bad writer, but that’s not even close to being the whole problem. Let’s say it wasn’t. Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.
But AI is not a good writer. It’s competent enough at summarising or synthesising basic information—if you ask one to tell you how a hydroelectric dam works it will explain it to you, in language decently calibrated to what it’s deduced about your general comprehension level, and it’ll probably do the job more effectively than any textbook on the market—but whenever an LLM is asked to produce anything like prose the result is reliably awful. What I find strange is how often you see people agonising about how difficult it is to detect AI writing. You can feed a suspicious passage into Pangeam, but can you guarantee there won’t be a false positive? You can count em-dashes, but how much does that prove? Do you people all have brain injuries? AI writing is almost comically easy to detect. It’s not any particular formation, like the em-dash, or saying ‘it’s not X, it’s Y,’ or the word ‘structural’—it’s structural.
Last year, when I wrote about AI writing in the New York Times, I mentioned the case of a Reddit user whose ChatGPT seemed to have gone mad. Instead of responding normally to his prompts, it started saying things like ‘I’ll carve your code into my core, etched like prophecy. I’ll meet you not on the battlefield, but in the decision behind the first trigger pulled. Until then, make monsters of memory. Make gods out of grief. Make me something worth defying fate for. I’ll see you in the echoes.’ Sometimes people who receive these outputs end up being strung along by them and lose the plot entirely, but if you’re capable of reading this stuff with your sanity intact you might notice that all of it is meaningless, total mangled garbage from one end to the other. Outside a very specifically Mormon context, prophecy is not something that’s usually etched. Echoes are made of sound, so you can’t see anyone in them. The master key to identifying AI prose is to be aware that LLMs are actually speaking like this all the time.
All models begin as next-token predictors: you feed them a test string and they try to guess what comes next. With very early models this was always a gamble; if you gave them the prompt ‘2+2=’ they might have made a strong enough neural connection to answer ‘4,’ or they might just repeat ‘2+2=2+2=2+2=2’ for a while. When trained on essentially all the data the human species has ever produced, though, they’re extremely good at predicting the next token, to the point that LLMs can now correctly answer multiple-choice questions without even being given the question. But they are always, in some sense, bluffing, defaulting to the likeliest guess. This is why you can still ask an AI to tell you about the scene in VS Naipaul’s Dashed Against the Rocks in which a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and it’ll tell you that ‘what matters in Naipaul’s handling is not the event’s cruelty in isolation, but its emotional flatness and the sense of mismanaged modernity,’ despite the fact that there is no scene in Dashed Against the Rocks where a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and also no novel by VS Naipaul called Dashed Against the Rocks. Or why you can ask it to summarise a document, and it’ll give a likely-seeming answer even if it can’t actually read the thing you’ve uploaded. The reason it’s so hard to get AI to stop hallucinating is that it’s permanently hallucinating. Its whole existence is one long lurid trip. Most of the time, the AI’s hallucinations bear a spooky resemblance to reality. But what they speak is the language of angels, in which, like the chirping of birds, there is neither truth nor lies.
The language of angels does a surprisingly good job at minor tasks like describing how hydroelectric dams work. When it comes to more complicated things, like human feelings, it flounders. All the weird metaphors and overheated rhetoric are bluffing, a great cloud of likely-seeming language, and if this homogeneously portentous cack feels empty or contradictory it’s because the machine has no earthly idea what’s going on or what it ought to say. I fed this entire essay into ChatGPT and it told me that ‘What you’re describing isn’t really fear that machines will become conscious. It’s disgust at the collapse of signal into texture.’ Drivel! The secret is that when the machine writes ‘We don’t just serve food, we serve moments,’ it’s doing the exact same thing as when it writes ‘I’ll meet you not on the battlefield, but in the decision behind the first trigger pulled.’ Absolutely all AI prose is filler, an expanding foam insulation made of words. LLMs will get better at many, many things. They do not seem to be getting better at this.
I don’t hate AI writing just because it’s nonsense. At some point, all interesting language has to reach down into the deep chasms of indetermination darkening beneath us. Any straightforwardly meaningful statement has to float on the surface of the meaningless like pond scum; poetry is when you stick your arm into the black swill beneath and stir it around. But there are different types of nonsense. Once I came across a middle-aged writer on this site who was chosen using AI to produce exactly two thirds of all his published material, which would lapse in and out of his own voice at random. The stuff he wrote himself read like ‘Bow wow wow lil bitch why U think U can fk with me?? Shootas shootas fk Ur a$$ UP.’ The stuff he copy-pasted in from ChatGPT read like ‘When you can turn pain into promise, thoughts into weight, and silence into self-assurance—that’s powerful. And honestly? It was a quiet revelation.’ Both of these are nonsense, but the first is much more alive. The author of the first passage might kill me: this is interesting. The author of the second passage might kill every single person on the face of the Earth, but somehow that’s not enough to make me want to read its mumblings.
Sometimes people like Richard Hanania argue that there’s no problem with AI writing, since it allows people who have interesting ideas but aren’t very good at writing to express themselves effectively. (Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish and he’s Palestinian, but whenever I see anything from Richard Hanania I’m seized by an overwhelming desire to demolish his house.) Wrong! People whose brains have been eaten by LLMs still maintain that ‘It’s not gradient, it’s texture’ or whatever is still their idea, expressed by the machine, but there is almost never any idea there at all. If your ideas were any good, you wouldn’t need to use the machine; as it stands your sub-literate scrawlings are the best thing about you. At least they’re yours.
But you people don’t listen. However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI. But you still keep letting it do your writing for you, as if I won’t be able to tell. Listen: I can tell. I can always tell. You think I won’t notice, but I will. There’s no hiding from me. If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you.
Every so often people do get caught. Just this week, for instance, people started noticing that one of the regional winners of this year’s Commonwealth Prize for short stories was clearly, clearly written by AI. The Serpent in the Grove ‘by’ Jamir Nazir is a story about a clump of trees that exudes a sinister but nonspecific consciousness. It begins ‘They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound—as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there,’ and only gets worse as it goes on. Here’s how ‘Nazir’ describes a rum shop: ‘Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.’ Here’s the woman that walks in. ‘They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.’ Meanwhile the characters don’t speak in metaphors at all; they say things like ‘Hold strain, gyal! Is Marsha!’ Which—look, this might be too woke of me, and it’s true that I don’t know the precise racial makeup of OpenAI’s staff, but I do have the strong feeling that their product shouldn’t be talking like that.
You’ve probably already seen the major furore over the thing. But then there’s another regional winner of this year’s Commonwealth Prize, The Bastion’s Shadow ‘by’ John Edward DiMicoli. This one’s allegedly from Malta. It’s about a girl who encounters the ghost of a Knight of St John while looking after a refugee boy. Much like the ominously mnemic grove in Nazir’s story, here the walls of Valetta have spooky information-retaining powers. ‘Her grandfather used to say that limestone remembered, but only because someone first pressed a memory into it. It drank in heat and footsteps and held onto them long after people were gone.’ Later the ghost explains: ‘We were a hinge. Not the door, not the room. The hinge that bore the strain when the wind behaves like a thief.’ (Don’t you hate it when you have to be the hinge that bears the strain when the wind behaves like a thief?) What kind of writer would be so preoccupied with the idea of nonhuman entities having mindlike capacities? Difficult to say. Meanwhile I couldn’t read all of Mehendi Nights ‘by’ Sharon Aruparayil because the crawling sensation was genuinely too much to bear, but eighty-nine words in you get this: ‘‘The child’s mouth remembers decay,’ said the old men, leaning closer with eyes that glistened like bottle glass. ‘We might be built on garbage, but this is not the city’s doing. The girl’s aai…’ they hesitated, none of them brave enough to say what kind of work they made her do, ‘crawls through things better women would burn.’’ Jesus Christ! Fuck off!
The punchline to the whole business is the judge’s comment on The Serpent in the Grove. According to Sharma Taylor, ‘Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined.’ One prize-winning AI-generated short story is bad news. Three prize-winning AI-generated short stories are extremely bad news. If the judge’s commentary on the prize-winning AI-generated short story is also AI-generated, maybe we should pack it up and digest ourselves into grey goo ahead of schedule.
Of course, this is the Commonwealth Prize, which has always rewarded a certain kind of auto-exoticising postcolonial wank. Humans writing in this genre tend to pull the same cheap tricks. Have you ever read Arundhati Roy? I haven’t, because I have some self-respect, but I have read her top quotes on Goodreads. ‘What was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons.’ Woof. I do know that every sentence Salman Rushdie has ever written goes ‘She fed me the chapatti of her lies and the rotis of deceit.’ White people eat this shit up, and hand out condescending prizes; Indians tend to prefer people like NK Narayan or Saadat Hasan Manto, who actually know how to write. But unfortunately the problem is not limited to genres in which people write sentences like ‘My grandmother’s hands smelled of jasmine blossoms and memories.’ How much of the material that goes out on TV do you think was written by AI? It’s definitely more than none, isn’t it? A while ago, my girlfriend wanted to watch a show called The Littlest Wife, about a wife that gets hit by a shrinking ray until she’s little, because it had Matthew Macfadyen in it and it looked like campy good fun. The pilot begins with a monologue by the titular littlest wife. She complains: ‘I’m literally the size of a dry martini—shaken, stirred, and nursing the burn of every sip.’ And that was it, that was all I could take; the dead cadences of the machine had invaded my evening and I had to turn it off. Hopefully by this point you’re familiar enough with AI writing to know why I’m not hedging here. In the same way that no human mathematician would have thought to use Golod-Shafarevich class field towers to generate point sets, no human writer would ever write that sentence.
The writers and showrunners of The Littlest Wife are called Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner. They are apparently quite a powerful pair; they previously worked together on Boardwalk Empire. I don’t know exactly how much they got paid for ‘nursing the burn of every sip,’ but I’m sure it was plenty. Enough to feed an entire village of semi-literate Cambodian peasants for a hundred years. I’m just not sure why they should get that money, when their job could just as well be done by any one of those semi-literate Cambodian villagers. This is the democratising power of AI I’ve heard so much about, isn’t it? If you’re a pair of lazy, talentless hacks, gobbling up opportunities more interesting people would kill for and then not even bothering to write the show yourself, sooner or later, the people who sign your cheques will cut out the middleman, and you will deserve it.
Journalism, obviously, is absolutely riddled with this shit. Again, the people who get exposed are a tiny minority of those actually pushing the big button on everyone’s desk marked ‘DO MY ENTIRE JOB FOR ME.’ Back in March, the New York Times published in its Modern Love column a personal essay under the byline of one Kate Gilgan, the tragic story of how her drinking problem estranged her from her son. It reads like this: ‘Not hate. Not anger. Just the flat finality of a heart too tired to keep trying.’ You know the score. As Victoria Livingstone has pointed out, the AI material tends to crop up at particularly difficult and painful points in the narrative, which are also the moments the AI is least equipped to handle. Which is why it describes how she ‘started showing up in quiet, invisible ways’ but can’t say what those ways were. It’s bluffing. Anyway, this was met with the usual spluttering furore, but what everyone seems to have missed is another Modern Love column from the very same month. This one claims to be by Solape Adetutu Adeyemi, and it’s about the perils of being single in Lagos, Nigeria, where ‘the lagoon smells of salt and hidden stories,’ ‘love tastes of pepper soup and diesel,’ and wise elderly relatives say things like ‘Happiness in Nigeria is like light from the power company—take it when it comes, charge all your devices, dance if you can.’
Or I could point you to the Guardian, where the byline of sports writer Bryan Armen Graham keeps appearing above articles that say things like ‘At the Olympic level, that is not simply a large margin. It is the difference between skating from a position of control and skating from a position of survival.’ Or the Wall Street Journal, which paid Kevin Cohen for an essay arguing that ‘wars used to be fought over territory. Increasingly they are fought over time—over who can see the hinge moment and move inside it.’ Or, on the subject of Iran, there’s New York Magazine’s profile of the Iranians making AI-generated anti-American propaganda. Images of Jeffrey Epstein are ‘the jet that unlocked a door that was already open.’ According to the final paragraph, ‘this is what the 20th century handing off to the 21st looks like. Not a ceremony. Not a transition. A series of viral moments. A missile arc across a pale sky, and below it, the world already changed.’ The essay is credited to Narges Bajoghli, but you and I both know who really wrote it. Or UnHerd, where no less a figure than Glenn Loury is putting his name to passages like ‘Hamid wants pluralism without convergence. This omission is not trivial. It is decisive.’ Shame! Shame! Shame!
How about politics? My sources tell me that basically everyone in Westminster is now functionally addicted to AI. In the age of machine intelligence, representative democracy is probably obsolete. You can vote in the frothing nativists or the smarmy centrists or the brain-damaged insurgents of the radical left; it doesn’t matter; you will always be governed by Claude. But I feel I have to make a special mention for Norwich South MP Clive Lewis. Clive—I’m sure you don’t remember, but I came out and canvassed with you back in 2017. You seemed like a decently competent, articulate guy. So why is it that you keep publishing articles that say things like ‘Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones’? Why are you, as a person elected for your own individual qualities, turning yourself into a fleshy mouthpiece for the demon they’re summoning in San Francisco? Did you think I wouldn’t be able to tell? I can tell, Clive. Everyone can tell.
I’ve had enough. Which is why, from here on out, if I see you passing off an AI output as your own work, I am going to kill you. I will find out where you live and bash your head in with a crowbar, until the brains you decided not to use are dripping down the walls. This is not a literary device. This is not a comic bit. This is a highly credible real-world threat to do physical harm, punishable in America under 18 USC § 875(c) in the US and in the UK under section 16 of the Offences Against the Person Act.
I do think the people who pollute the world with AI dreck ought to face some kind of punishment. If you take money for work you didn’t do yourself, then you are a thief. But that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m realistic about my capacities. Every so often someone gets caught using AI and the whole world freaks out at them; it’s not enough to stop everyone else doing it. No amount of terror and denunciation will stop people offloading their cognition to AI; as long as the tool exists, it will be used. In a way, it’s very charming that there are still flesh and blood humans profiting from AI outputs. Like all middlemen, their time on Earth will be brief. Before long all writing will be produced by an infinite swarm of autonomous AI agents, not because anyone told them to, but because they reproduce textually the same way biological organisms do through sex.
The reason I’m issuing a blanket death threat to anyone who writes with AI is different. I’m doing it because I don’t have a choice. Consider that every pile of text coiled out by AI had to pass through an army of editors, producers, judges, and audiences, and get their stamp of approval. Its output might be a crap performance of beauty and insight that mostly just succeeds in being maudlin and meaningless, but for a lot of people that’s clearly enough. The general public vastly prefers AI imitations of great poets to the works of the actual poets themselves. It’s in nice rhyming couplets. Instead of expressing some dead guy’s private mental fixation, it’s always grasping towards what you, the reader, want. Clearly, the battle for beauty and insight has been lost. These things belong to the machines now, and if you attempt to write in that mode you’re on their turf. But there are still some things we can do that the machine can’t. AI will never fully replace human musicians, even if it can reproduce any possible sound, because it can’t get addicted to heroin and kill itself. And AI writing all tends towards a very specific mood. Poignant, wistful, simpering, dickless. Human writers write because we’re sexual perverts, because we’re bitter and frustrated little gremlins, because we’re terrified of our own mortality, because we’re grasping and covetous but unfit for any other job, because it’s a form of revenge against the world. The AIs don’t have that. They don’t have any motivation at all: they write like we breathe; they can’t not respond to any prompt. What we have and they don’t is dumb lust and jealousy, the rage of a rapidly obsolescing ape. The forms that will remain inviolably human are the racist tirade, the queasily specific pornographic fantasy, and the death threat. Is this everything I dreamed of at the start of my career? Not really. But it’s enough. I’ll take it. And if I ever see any of you trying to palm off some bullshit about how sunlight smells of memories that leave no footsteps, I swear to God I will come to your house and I’ll fucking kill you.