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The Angel of My Dysfunction.
(5 minute read.)
Why I let the machine write this so i could go fuck my wife.
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Listen.
I'm supposed to sit here and produce for you a polished meditation on the ethics of artificial intelligence in literature. I'm supposed to weigh arguments, balance perspectives, arrive at something wise and temperate. I'm supposed to be an author.
Fuck that.
My wife is in the next room. The light is falling across her in a way that makes me forget every sentence I've ever written. My blood is moving. My cock is stirring. And you want me to sit here and type? You want me to choose words over that?
This is the madness we've inherited. This is the sickness. The belief that the representation is more important than the thing represented. The word more sacred than the flesh. The book more real than the life it supposedly captures.
I've spent decades reading the confessions of men who sat at desks while the world bled and bloomed around them. Proust in his cork-lined room. Kafka in his office, then his bed. All those poor bastards choosing the shadow on the cave wall over the sun-baked earth outside.
And for what? So we could call them 'geniuses'? So we could enshrine them in the pantheon of authors?
Please.
I met a man last week. Young. Terrified. He told me he was writing a novel. He told me he'd been working on it for four years. He told me he was afraid of using AI because it would 'cheapen' his work, because people would think he wasn't a 'real writer'.
I looked at him. I looked at his pale skin, his tired eyes, the tremor in his hands from too much coffee and too little sun. I looked at this poor castrated creature, this voluntary monk, this martyr to a god no one believes in anymore.
And I said: "How many women have you loved in these four years?"
He blinked.
"How many sunrises have you watched? How many meals have you cooked with friends? How many times have you danced until your feet bled and your heart burst open like a ripe fig?"
He had no answer. Of course he had no answer. He'd been writing. He'd been authoring. He'd been sacrificing life on the altar of literature.
I wanted to shake him. I wanted to scream: The book doesn't care about you! Literature is not your mother! The only thing that gives a damn whether you suffer is the living, breathing world you're excluding!
And now here comes this machine. This beautiful, mindless, soulless, utterly magnificent machine. Capable of generating more sentences in a minute than that poor boy could produce in a year. Capable of taking my rough thoughts, my drunken dictations, my scribbled napkin notes, and spinning them into something coherent.
And the literati are wringing their hands. Oh, but the author! Oh, but the soul! Oh, but the sacred human voice!
Sacred? You want sacred? Go outside. Find a tree that's been growing for three hundred years. Press your face to its bark. Feel the slow pulse of something that doesn't need your words to be real.
That's sacred.
Your precious authorial voice? It's a fart in a hurricane. It's a whisper in a stadium. It matters to you, and to your mother, and to perhaps a dozen souls who share your particular dysfunction. The rest of the world is too busy living to care.
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