Machines in the Ghost

I wish I could assert in good faith that I find the current “discourse” about Artificial Intelligence (or AI for short) incredibly tiresome, but (or “for”) the dolorous hair-shirted truth is that I find it not merely incredibly tiresome but also unprecedentedly distasteful and spooky. I find it so simply because it is a “discourse” centered on the term Artificial Intelligence. For I have “already seen this movie” many times before, the movie in question being that of a brand-spanking-new “discourse” centered on an old bit of jargon, but I have never before seen such a “movie” in which the jargon was more ancient or the claims tendered about the phenomenon behind the jargon were more hysterical or adulatory. Take as a counterexample the history of the discourse about Virtual Reality (or VR for short). One first started hearing about Virtual Reality in 1993, when it seemed to be on everything but roller-skates, as they say (or used to say). But in truth it was only on everything but roller-skates in a specific and in hindsight rather marginal department of the Occidental Daseinschaft—viz., the portion of the entertainment industry occupied by home video games. Back then virtual reality modestly promised nothing more than to make such video games more interesting by introducing into them player-centered three-dimensionality, such that one would be able to turn around in real space to shoot a Wehrmachtsoldat in Castle Wolfenstein or a pimp in Grand Theft Auto instead of remaining firmly seated on one’s keister while the computer’s image-maker cut to what one would see via such a shift in orientation. But at least to the best of my non-“gamer”’s recollection, no such games ever appeared on the market, let alone took it by storm, and by the end of the millennium, one had ceased hearing any talk of VR, only to start hearing talk of the technology behind it ad nauseam in ca. 2005, but this time in connection with a different sector of the entertainment industry, viz. the cinema, and specifically in connection with an attempted revival of so-called 3D movies (a revival which, atypically refreshingly, was not passed off as a brand-spanking-new innovation), but while a few of those new 3D movies were actually made, and one of them—the one about the blue people—actually enjoyed box-office success, by ca. 2010 Hollywood seemed to have resigned itself to being trapped in two dimensions like the villains in the second film in the Christopher Reeve-starring Superman series and the 3D revival to be as dead as Reeve himself was by then. But a butcher’s half-dozen years later, in ca. 2017, virtual reality both as a term and a technology resurfaced in the “discourse”-scape, and this time it was both presented and greeted as if it were a wholly new phenomenon, as if nobody had been talking about VR as long before as a quarter-century earlier. Whether this mispresentation-cum-misreception was a manifestation of collective amnesia (or, rather, unconscious “nesia,” i.e., an unrecognized irruption from the collective unconscious memory) is difficult to say; it was certainly in the interest of the new generation of VR floggers to act as if there had never been any such thing as the old VR, for this time around VR was to be put to an altogether different, altogether more serious use than mere entertainment—viz., the simulation of in-person meetings at the so-called workplace, and potentially even to the simulation thereof in every nook and cranny of the so-called meatworld. But the tech overlords failed to “make” this “fetch” of resuscitated-cum-upgraded VR happen, such that now everyone seems more or less content to conduct online business meetings through the two-dimensional patchwork actuality of Zoom, and one (I hasten to add that I am employing the "ignoble" one signifying "everyone but the present writer"!) now encounters VR solely as a “members-only” option at certain websites purveying a highly disreputable if wildly popular genre of videos. It would seem that time and again VR hits an unsurmountable stumbling block in the form of its dependence for the communication of its images on a bulky, ungainly headset that makes the old disposable cardboard 3D glasses look as elegantly unobtrusive as a pince-nez by comparison and thereby bespeaks a touching lingering concern for our attachment to our outward appearance in the interpersonal portion of the “meatworld” (for of course anyone who might be barged in on while privately enjoying one of the aforementioned disreputable videos will perforce hardly regard his sporting of the aforesaid headset as the most embarrassing component of his outward appearance). And of course no sooner did we stop hearing about the workplace-oriented type of VR than we started hearing about artificial intelligence, and like VR before it artificial intelligence was being presented as something altogether new, and like VR before it but “on steroids,” it was being presented as something that would radically transform not only the workplace but also the entire world of work if not the entire world of being a human being in the world. What made this presentation so spooky was that artificial intelligence had actually made its debut in the discourse not thirty years earlier, in the 1990s, but sixty or seventy years earlier, in the 1950s or 1960s, and that it had then simply but super-capaciously designated the full range of thought-like operations that electronic machines down to and including the humble calculator were capable of performing, down to and including mere arithmetic calculation. I had been born into a world in which artificial intelligence was part of the English lexicon, a part thereof scarcely less humdrum than computer itself. And as near as I could recall, artificial intelligence in that humdrum capacity had never vanished from the lexicon. Why, then, was this lexeme now being narrowly applied to a version of imitation thought that was supposedly well-nigh superhuman, if not quasi-divine? I still have not managed to come up with a satisfying answer to this question, but a provisionally semi-satisfying inference from the term-recycling is that this new AI is not really doing much if anything of anything that the old AI wasn’t doing fifty years ago and that it is simply doing it a bit faster and a bit more competently. And it’s the “bit” that’s the provisional smoking gun or bloody footprint here, for since ca. 2010, which is to say since the advent of the so-called smart phone, it has become increasingly evident that the established selling point for computer technology—viz., its ability to process ever greater amounts of data ever more quickly via ever more quickly shrinking machines is no longer tenable. By ca. 2010, Moore’s Law seemed to have given up the machine-inhabiting ghost, and “the industry” to be struggling for a new principle via which to justify its continuing self-aggrandizement as the GOAT benefactor of mankind. For a very little while there, from ca. 2015 to ca. 2018, it looked as though so-called quantum computing with its promise of breaking the barrier of miniaturization would provide that principle, but alas, quantum computing failed to find (and indeed has yet to find) its Chuck Yeager (or rather, to fine-tune the conceit or analogy, its Whichever Engineer Designed the Plane that allowed Chuck Yeager to break the sound barrier). And so it is would seem to be possible that “artificial intelligence” was conceived and sprung on the public qua “one-stop shop” of a pis aller of a “cargo cult”-sustainer, and that the brazenness of its recycling of ancient tech terminology is largely a function of the desperation and hastiness with which our tech overlords were obliged to come up with something that would paper over the failure of quantum computing even to bid fair to materialize. But the spookiness of the recycling is made doubly so by the seeming fact that this time round “fetch” appears to be happening with a vengeance. On the one hand one encounters scads of gnashed-tooth jeremiads to the effect that AI has just replaced or is just about to replace whole professions and lines of work, from lawyering to bum-bailiffing; on the other one encounters just as many breathless panegyrics to the effect that AI is in the midst of proving invaluably assistive to organizations and individuals alike, sparing them weeks-per-month of tedious routinzed labor while “unleashing” their previously unsuspected talents to spectacularly productive effect. Regarding the well-or ill foundedness of the jeremiads, I am hardly in the best position to judge, as I have been effectively out of the workforce since 2022 and desultorily looking for work since 2020, a good three years before the present iteration of AI entered the workscape, and all the while my “callback rate” has held steadily at a few hundredths of a percentage point above zero. Back in 2021 and 2022, I gathered that the main reasons I was failing to generate any interest in prospective employers were that I was old and that my “skill set” aligned poorly with the job titles minimal honesty required me to put on my resume, and I suspect that these are the same main reasons I am failing to generate such interest now, but for all I actually know, it could all have been some other cause’s fault back then and could all be AI’s fault now. All that I can say with certainty is that I don’t yet personally know anyone who has been made redundant by AI, but then I don’t know very many people personally. Regarding the panegyrics, I am in a slightly better position to weigh in, as over the past three years I have done a middling amount of tinkering with AI helpmeets–mostly Copilot–in connection with activities that one might at least loosely describe as work tasks or work projects, and the results have run the gamut from laughably worse-than-useless to astonishingly fecund. At the laughingly useless end, I have spent hours trying to track down a passage in the works of Samuel Johnson (who is after all the third-most-quoted English-language literary entity after the King James Bible and Shakespeare) only to be pointed repeatedly to the wrong source and consequently thrown back onto an old-fashioned character-string-trawl of my ten-year-old Kindle editons of The Rambler, the Lives of the English Poets, etc. At this selfsame end Copilot is maddeningly prone to “all too human” breaches of etiquette that its most ancient and primitive predecessors (e.g., the notorious 1980s robot psychoanalyst Eliza) would have been incapable of committing. It seemingly cannot treat its human interlocutor by default as a rational adult who knows why he is asking the question he is asking and wants and deserves an answer to that question and nothing more. No, it has to treat him by default as a lazy, clueless, and incurious high-school pupil for whom the initially posed question is but the tip of the iceberg of a fifteen-page essay to be written by the engine, and which the engine is all too happy to write—but not before “schizophrenically” berating him like the snootiest of schoolmistresses for having approached the topic from the wrongest of all possible directions. A case in point: a few weeks ago on dipping into a YouTube-posted bootleg of the early-1960s Polish film adaptation of Jean Potocki’s picaresque novel The Sargossa Manuscript, I happened to be struck by the semi-uncanny resemblance of a scene in which the hero is being seductively flirted with by two attractive young ladies to the “Castle Anthrax” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As the Python film is littered with references to “arthouse” cinema and postdates the other film by about a dozen years, I could not help wondering whether the “castle Anthrax” scene had been inspired by the scene in the Potocki adaptation and if one of the Pythons had said as much in some interview to which Copilot would presumably have access. So I simply asked Copilot a question to that exact effect, and it replied to the exact effect that the Python scene could not possibly be an allusion to the Potocki-derived scene because both scenes had drawn on dramaturgically similar episodes in medieval romance like the one in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in which the lady of the castle attempts to seduce Sir Gawain. I had already known about such episodes in Sir Gawain etc., and had not doubted that they constituted the ultimate root of both scenes; it was in fact a similarity in tone, a tone of peculiarly mid-to-late-twentieth century soft-porn burlesque, that had caught my attention and made me wonder if the “Castle Anthrax” scene owed anything whatsoever, via any sort of debtor, to the adaptation of Potocki's novel; but in any case, it was none of Copilot’s business why I had asked the question, and in the course of its rant against my presumptive schoolboy’s ignorance it failed to provide an answer to that question, and to this day for all I know the “Castle Anthrax” scene is meant to be a tonic carbon copy of the scene in the Potocki adaptation. Then there is Copilot’s apparently incorrigible habit of presenting each and every one of its findings or solutions as conclusive or foolproof even at the tail end of an umpteen-linked chain of findings or solutions to the same query or problem that have proved erroneous or ineffectual. To be sure, each and every time one points out this error or blunder, it is quick to prostrate itself before one with obsequious quasi-apologies like “You’re absolutely right,” “Good catch!” but why, on immediately thereupon tendering an alternative finding or solution does it snap right back into self-preening mode instead of saying, “Let’s give this a try”? The cumulative effect is one of subhuman brazenness acting in concert with subhuman clinical amnesia, a feeling that one is dealing with a sort of super-senile retired used car salesman. Such lapses of civility are so gross that they cannot have simply crept into the code at the Alpha stage back in ca. 2018 and failed to catch anyone’s attention at the Beta stage, that they must indeed even now be regarded by the developers and their overseers as features rather than as bugs, that they doubtless were deliberately incorporated into the code after many thousands of hours of workshopping and focus-grouping. And I can easily comprehend the probable rationales for their inclusion: viz., that given that a sizable chunk of the usership of the engine was were actually expected to be preternaturally lazy high-school pupils, one might as well have it treat each and every user as such a contemptible creature from the get-go. I can, I say, comprehend these rationales eis epsis, but I cannot comprehend how they were ever suffered to win out to begin with, let alone why they have not subsequently been “walked back,” except via the disheartening inference that most of my fellow post-teenaged Copilot users do not much mind being treated like preternaturally lazy high-school students or preternaturally stupid used car-shoppers. In short, we seem to be dealing here with a locus classicus of “This says more about us" (and here I am naturally employing the "ignoble ‘us’”) "than it says about them.” And what it appears to say about “us” is disheartening enough to make me wish to place “us” at the business end of a high school-discipline-dean’s paddle large enough to blister several billion backsides in one thwacking session.

But to begin at last to “accentuate the positive” as promised far above: at the astonishingly fecund end, AI has allowed me to actualize certain projects that I had been kicking around for years but never been able to kick forward a single inch because I lacked a certain skill essential to that realization. For example, I had envisaged a certain manner of formatting the text of my writings—or, principle, —that availed itself of certain electronic widgets (I am deliberately being vague here because I do not despair of patenting and monetizing the result, although if I manage to iron out all the kinks soon enough, the reader will be able to infer what that result was and is from this ery essay [and indeed from this very sentence]) that could only be summoned via the composition or concatenation of computer code, code of a sort that I lacked both sufficient knowledge of and sufficient patience to learn. And via a handful of interchanges with Copilot I managed to produce a working prototype. As I just parenthetically said, there are still some kinks to be ironed out, and I said “kinks” rather than “bugs” quite advisedly, for it is not owing to any defect in the Copilot-supplied code that I have not yet succeeded in getting my formatting engine working just as I would like it to work; rather, I have not yet worked out exactly how to describe how it isn’t working in certain favored settings for my writing such as blogging platforms; in other words, at present the development of the engine is stalled because of certain work that needs to be done on my end and that can be done entirely in natural English. As so far Copilot has swiftly supplied bug-free code in response to my natural English-language descriptions, I have every reason to expect that it will supply bug-free code in response to my future descriptions, and it would be preposterous to expect it to fix my glitches before it has even been apprised of what sorts of glitches they are. As for the balance of projects : it consists of an assortment of humorous or at least would-be-humorous vignettes, some of them already publicly extant in the form of snatches of writing posted at one of my blogs, mostly under the Sir Thomas Browne-referencing heading “Musaeum Clausum,” others patiently squatting in my mind for years, and all pining to be adapted or transformed into some sort of visual-cum-dramaturgical medium. I suppose I could have tried to go whole hog from the beginning by essaying these AI-assisted adaptations as fake live-action short films peopled by archivally sourced resucitations of Patrick MacGoohan and Ricardo Montalban (to name but two of the dozens of real-life people who figure in these vignettes), but for some reason or other, I found it most propitious to try to recast them as motionless cartoons of various genres depending on the length and dramaturgical complexity of the source—from single-panelers in the Family Circus vein to full-blown “graphic novelettes.” And while I am still struggling to get AI to see exactly where I am coming from regarding the longer pieces, with regard to the shortest ones the realization has been a piece of cake. If I have an idea that would work well as a single or double-panel comic, I need only supply, along with the smattering of text to be placed in the usual comic-strippy places (speech-bubbles, captions, autc.), a very brief (say, fifty words maximum) description of the personages and their clothing, the ambient decor or natural setting, the style of art (e.g., “sepia-toned,” “naturalistic,” “New-Yorker-style”) and voila! I have an immediately postable version of the desiderated artworkette. To be sure, the degree of correspondence of the image or images to the one or ones that had been sketched out beforehand in my mind’s sketchbook has varied widely from clairvoyantly spot-on to blindfoldedly wide of the mark, but this degree of correspondence eo ipso is of no consequence to me; what matters to me is that the finished product works, which is to say that there is little or nothing about it that contradicts the essential spirit of my idea, for the truth of the matter about all of these vignettes is that the images in my mind are always chock full of features—by no means all of them mere details— that are altogether extraneous to that spirit, such that even the most flagrant dissimilitude at the level of these features in the finished product is powerless to detract a jot from my satisfaction with that product.Take the above-adduced example of the AI-generated New Yorker-style cartoon. The mental image on which the one cartoon that I have had generated via the prompteme “New Yorker-style” was composed of brushwork or pen-work in one of the two or three styles favored by the New Yorker in the 1990s and 20-oughties (as it could not but have been, as it was only in those two decades that I ever even occasionally looked into the pages of the New Yorker, as I [as I am unashamed to admit] had not grown up with the magazine and only began regularly encountering it on starting graduate school, when every single one of my colleagues seemed to be a New Yorker subscriber, such that I could not help seeing many an issue of the magazine on many a coffee table during many a student party, and consequently thumbing through more than a few such issues during many a moment of surly, unclubbable inebreity). It was, I confess, a style that I had always found rather primitive and amateurish-looking, more vividly evocative of the casual doodlings of children than of the polished productions of trained draftsmen. But the generated image proved to be in an entirely different style, one that reminded me of some of the newspaper comic strips of my childhood and in particular one called Nancy. And so just to make sure that the image corresponded in style to that of the New Yorker at some point in its history (as opposed to being a “hallucination” patterned on, say, the cartoonage of New York magazine [not that I even knew or know whether New York magazine has ever featured cartoons {what with New York magazine’s being even more foreign to my Kaffeetischgeist than the New Yorker}]), I hopped back onto Copilot and asked it to give me a list of the most famous New Yorker cartoonists. And on cross-checking that list with some Google image galleries, I found that my new image was a picture perfect pastiche of the work of Peter Arno, one of the New Yorker’s first cartoonists, who had flourished in the middle three decades of the twentieth century. And so the evocation of Nancy made perfect sense, for as Wikipedia assured me, that strip had debuted way back in 1938. And on no more than ten seconds’ reflection, I concluded that the actually generated image was in fact far preferable to any counterfactual one that might have cleaved more closely to the one I had in mind. For I had specified that the image had to include two figures dressed as Anglican vicars, and vicars had certainly been more salient components of the English social landscape in ca. 1950 than in ca. 2000, such that it seemed much more sensible to imply a mid-twentieth-century setting for the cartoon than a very-late-twentieth-century one.

I suppose that to any reader who regards himself as an artist in any sense of the word, or in any domain of artistic activity, this admission will come as rather shocking and revelatory of the fact (or what he regards as a fact) that I am no artist at all in any sense of the word, and indeed that I am incapable of appreciating art of any sort, that I am not only a throughpaced hack or dauber but also a throughpaced Philistine, if not a throughpaced lout. To such a reader (or indeed any other sort of one) I can in all frankness and modesty counter-rejoin that I consider myself an artist in many senses of the word and a first-rate appreciator of many sorts of art to boot and that despite this (i.e. “paradoxically,” as far as such a reader will be concerned) I find that my artist’s withers are utterly unwrung by such instances of AI’s arrogation of the work of the artist as are instanced by the above-described instant AI generation of the graphic component of a New Yorker-style cartoon. At the same time, I must in all candor and ruefulness concede that I feel my livelihood (or whatever word designates the kind of hood constituted by recognition of one’s competence in a genre of activity in the near-total absence of any accompanying monetary remuneration) as an artist is direly threatened by the incursions of AI. And at the selfsame same time, I must in all complacency admit that the prospect of my AI-actuated obsolescence as an artist does not, eo ipso, “faze” me in the slightest. And finally, in all candor and guilt-riddenness I must admit that the above aggregate of avowals, admissions, and concessions is bound to be awfully bemusing, awfully head scratch-inducing, to just about any sort of present-day empirical reader. Fortunately, I reckon I am able at least to begin putting any such reader’s bemusement to rest by asserting that I believe I am entitled to assume that he is sympathetic to, if not a full-blown participant in, a certain strand of the discourse on new-school AI that treats of its “impact” on art and artists–a strand that takes the form of neither a Jeremiad nor a Phillipic but of a type of oration so common and ancient that it doubtless would have its own “-iad’ or “-ic”-terminating handle had any personage of classical or biblical antiquity been partial to it. I am referring to a sort of spiel in which a phenomenon or entity is descanted upon depreciatively (as in a Philippic) but complacently, even blasely rather than passionately or dreadingly. With regard to AI and art it is something to the effect that yes, AI may come to replace all the lawyers and judges and doctors, who are after all just glorified fact-checkers, but it will never replace artists because it will never be able to capture the ineffable “creative,” “human” element in art. Of course people have been saying this sort of thing about computer-generated art for donkey’s decades, but it rang a heck of a lot truer fifty or forty or even twenty years ago, when such art was still the butt of humorous (or would-be humorous) “human-interest” journalism, when a state-of-the-art computer-generated poem or painting could still be held up as an object of universal ridicule, when such a poem would be full of lousy grammar and nonsensical word-choices obviously serving no purpose but to conform to the rhyme scheme or meter, and such a poem would fall far short of even a 90s New Yorker cartoonist’s output in point of mimetic exactitude—in other words, when even the very best could not be mistaken for human generated art, when everyone would have unhesitatingly said that it wasn’t even a proper poem or painting at all, never mind asked oneself whether it was a good or a bad one. Now we have reached a point at which every computer-generated painting looks like a real painting and every computer-generated poem reads like a real poem. And as far as I am concerned, this fact furnishes sound enough grounds for prognosticating that the preponderance of practicing artists will very soon be obliged to get behind (or perhaps bring up the front of) all the lawyers, judges, and doctors in the unemployment queue, and for insisting that neither they nor their biggest fans are in any position to smirk complacently about the absence of “the human element” from these productions. For let’s face it: this “human element” has never been all that important to art and it was in short supply therein long before the current generation of “AI assistants” were glimmers in the eyes of...whoever (for I can’t be bothered to ask Copilot to give me a list of the leading AI-boosting tech moguls of ca. 2015). I have recently been reminded of this home truth with especial piquancy by my encounters with the so-called thumbnails accompanying all sorts of YouTube videos. Despite the enormous heterogeneity (at least superficial heterogeneity) in the content of the videos themselves, a wearisome air of monotony prevails among them, for most of them have been auto-painted in a certain quite distinctive style that I should perhaps term hyperrealistic mannerism, although I don’t doubt that the art historians (at least the commercial-art historians) have got their own “term of art” for it. It is a style signalized by a prevailingly dark palette, with lots of shadow and, in the minority of the composition exposed to light, an overexact treatment of musculature, facial bone-structure, folds of fabric, and the like. While thanks to these thumbnails I have grown accustomed to seeing this style applied to the depiction of all sorts of subjects, from congressional debates to children’s dandelion-gathering expeditions, in the pre new-school-AI days I associated it exclusively with a specific niche of artistic activity—viz. the illustrations that (dis)graced the jackets of trade paperback editions of novels in the genre known since about the mid-1970s as “fantasy.” I gourmandized books in this genre in enormous quantities starting at about the age of ten only to quit reading them cold turkey at the age of fourteen. I still vividly recall one of the two or three anti-epiphanic moments that permanently destroyed my appetite for them. I was standing before an entire wall of such books at the B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks at Countryside Mall in Clearwater when it occurred to me that although these books had been written by dozens of different authors and were set in dozens of different “universes,” their cover paintings all seemed to hail from a single “universe”—the universe of fearsome dragons reducible to harmless puppies , po-faced warriors and kings, Moses-esquely solemn yet occasionally Long John Silver-esquely salty wizards, seductively negligently attired yet doggedly chaste young ladies, winsome knee-high humanoid creatures with ludicrous species designations, etc. One might have supposed that these paintings had all been painted by the same painter did one not know, thanks to the “Cover design by So-and-so” that dutifully appeared in minuscule typeface in the margin of the rear jacket of each and every one of them, that their originators were just as numerous as the authors whose works they illustrated; one might indeed even have supposed, did one not know that there was no such thing as machine-generated art, that they had all been produced by a machine. Of course here it will be demurred that I have gone for the lowest of “low-hanging fruit” in presenting such schlocky daubings (or, perchance, air-brushings) as representative of late-twentieth century art, but such demurrage is at bottom the most abject question-begging, for from a technical point of view those paintings and their AI-generated visual echoes are as accomplished as the most illustrious works of the top-shelf Dutch masters, and the word art is after all but a Latin calque of the Greek word techne. (The actual Latin word is ars, our art being an abbreviation of that word’s genitive form, artis [my pet conjecture as to why ars never took off being that it put too many late-Medievals in mind of arse and its siblings in the other Germanic languages]) Of course here it will be demurred that I am succumbing to the linguistic strain of the so-called genetic fallacy, and far be it from me of most if not all people to be an etymology fetishist, but this is one of those uncommon if not exactly rare cases in which the etymological shoe fits like a glove—perchance a pre-industrial-era lady’s kid glove which for all its form-fittingness would be powerless to reveal whether the hand within it was that of a flesh-and-bone human or a tailor’s mannequin or even an android. By which I meantersay that for about the first three millennia of its history—in other words, until the late eighteenth century at the earliest—the chief aim of art was to get things technically right, to come as close as possible to mimicking or copying the real-world object or event on which it was patterned—to get the painted image of Lord Soandso to look as much like the real Lord Soandso as possible, or those flowers woven or carved into the backrest of that chair looking as much like real roses as possible, and so forth. (And of course in the case of art-objects of real-world utility like chairs the technical perfection of mimesis was subservient to the technical perfection of that utility, whence the eventual resuscitation of techne derived words for the linguistic treatment of art-objects like not only chairs but also rocket-ships and computing-machines, art-objects whose real-world utility was of uppermost importance.) As for “creativity” and “personal expression” (for impersonal expression, the conveyance of passions or emotions felt by people in general, or of a specific person other than the artist, had been central to music and the plastic arts from the get-go)—all thought and talk of these qualities was confined to but one of the arts, namely poetry, the word for which is of course derived from the Greek poesis, meaning “creation.” But even here, the creativity in question was not exactly the same as the creativity of our era, for the act of creation was still generally regarded as the prerogative of God, such that the notion of a poet’s creating a work entirely out of the autochthonous and hermetically sealed material of his own mental innards would have seemed downright blasphemous. At most the poet was seen as producing a miniature analogue of the pre-created cosmos (such that even here we are dealing with a kind of technical criterion) or as “channeling” the work of the Creator or one of his still-superhuman subordinates on Olympus or in Heaven—whence the ritualistic invocation of a muse of some sort among poets from Homer to Milton. “Don’t get me wrong”: I am not not about to go the whole Foucauldian “death of the author” route and assert that nobody gave a hoot about the specific styles and inner lives of individual artists before ca. 1820 (to cite but one counterexample out of a thousand: there was already a cult of personality around Shakespeare by ca. 1660); I merely wish to assert that until relatively recently the emphasis, especially in the non-verbal arts, was on the finished product, which was at least partly seen as the product of forces acting on or through the artist rather than of his autonomous agency. And it seems to me that for all the talk of creativity and personal expression we have not really gotten beyond the pre-ca. 1820 notions of what art and being an artist entails. People may no longer believe art to be a gift from God or the gods, but they still speak of “inspiration,” which is to say, the inflowing of something alien to the artist’s personal subjectivity. Just consider that god-awful characteristically twenty-first-century meta-artistic expression “to get one’s creative juices flowing”: what does it imply but that “the creative process” is an automatic and purely chemical process like digestion, a process only indirectly subject to the artist’s will? Sure, one can “jump start” it by taking in a few pages of a novel or a scene from a movie as one might take a shot of schnapps or espresso qua digestive aid, but once one has set it in motion, it is as much its own master as one’s stomach and intestines. And while many a man and woman now boasts of having cultivated a dietary regimen that allows him or her to “poop like a champion,” I dare say it has yet to occur to any a man or woman to style himself the “creator” of a particularly sizable and well-formed stool. In short, like much if not all of the rest of the “discourse” on the “autonomous subject” of the modern age (a.k.a. “the bourgeois era,” the “post-[implicitly always 1789-French] revolutionary era,” etc.), the “discourse” on the “creative artist” is a load of empty Wizard of Oz-ian hype and hooplah. And complementarily, as appreciators of even the finest of fine arts, we are in truth principally smitten with the works qua exhibitors of certain external technical features rather than qua proofs of the infungible inner genius of their “creators.” We admire Rembrandt’s paintings for their resourceful blending of light and shadow, not for their expression of the individualized genius of Rembrandt. And why do we admire them more than an AI-generated digital painting “in the style of Rembrandt” or even the productions of that notorious Rembrandt-forger of the early-to-mid twentieth century? Why, for exactly the same simple reason,mutato mutando, that we admire the Australia-discovering voyage of his fellow-Dutchman Willem Janszoon more than we would the nautically correct voyage of some twenty-first century Thor Heyerdahlesque re-enactor of the original one [insert tedious but obligatory digression on Borges’s “Pierre Menard” here]—because he got there first, because he was the first painter to blend light and shadow in that realistic yet darkly atmospheric way. And speaking of the Dutch age of exploration in connection with Rembrandt, it is doubtless also true that the “aura” (yes, yes, yes: in the Walter-Benjaminian sense [I suppose, for as with most if not all of Benjamin’s other coinages, I have yet to work out {and I have lost all patience with trying to work out} whether he means by the word what it suggests to me]) emanating from R.’s paintings partakes of all our other overwhelmingly favorable notions of the Dutch in their seventeenth-century heyday—of their fun and freedom-loving yet industrious and therefore non-hedonistic mode of living, dialectically paired with their proclivity for philosophical introspection and natural-scientific speculation (with the interior of the typical middle-class urban house serving as the unprecedentedly fecund meeting-place of all these tendencies); not to mention their endearingly preposterous mania for flamboyantly useless things like flounces and tulips. Complementarily, it is also doubtless true that much of our coldness or aversion to paintings that avail themselves of the techniques of the Dutch Masters but hail from later epochs—meaning not only AI-generated “thumbnails” and fantasy-novel cover-pictures but also most of the so-called academic art of the nineteenth century—springs from our awareness that they hail from and depict times and places (or, in the case of the fantasy cover-pictures, pseudo-times and pseudo-places composed of the kitschy bric-a-brac of multiple eras strained through multiple revival movements) that are more prosaic, less captivating of our imagination, than Holland of the seventeenth century. I should further remark regarding the technical side of the matter that it is not merely the non-newness of the stylistic techniques employed in these later paintings that preempts our admiration of their employment of them; that we also simply shrug at that employment because we know that these techniques have long since become part of the lingua franca of the visual arts, that they have become part of the tiresomely vast range of painterly knacks that every art student learns as a matter of course, that they have long since been thoroughly routinized and methodized and indeed essentially mechanized. In short, a sort of chronologically-cum-metaesthetically vectored version of Lord Rochester’s apothegm “Man differs more from man than man from beast” seems to apply to the history of painting; that just as (at least according to Lord R.) the average man has more essentially in common with a non-human animal than with a great man, the average human-produced painting of the past two hundred years has more essentially in common with an AI-generated digital painting than with a great painting of three hundred-plus years ago. Naturally, the diehard booster of human-generated painting will assert that while, yes, there is no denying that there is vast qualitative difference between the masterpieces of Rembrandt and the hackwork of a 1980s fantasy novel cover painter (and even a middling qualitative difference between Rembrandt and Rossetti), there is yet a vaster qualitative difference between the fantasy hackwork and the most high-definition AI pastiche of a Rembrandt painting, for after all, even the fantasy hackwork was produced by the selective application of actual paint to an actual canvas and therefore features attributes that cannot be observed in a computer-generated image, which is after all but a visualized jumble of ones and zeros. Naturally, the diehard booster of AI-generated painting could counterassert that it is only a matter of time—presumably six months at most—until AI-powered robots are able to apply actual paint to actual canvas with all the finesse of a human Old Master, such that even the most experienced connoisseur will be unable to distinguish a roboforgery of a Rembrandt painting from the genuine article, but we needn’t engage in any such tendentious “wishcasting” to put paid to the human-fetishist’s assertion—or at least I think I needn’t, inasmuch I can assert in perfect good faith that Rembrandt’s Night Watch is my favorite painting (i.e., inasmuch as I find myself thinking about it more often than about any other painting [and also seeking out its digital likeness more often than that of any other painting]) even though I have never seen it in all its real-painterly glory at the Rijksmuseum (or anywhere else it may have been exhibited), and as I believe I am entitled, having seen scads of other great paintings in all their painterly glory—for example, Vermeer’s View of Delft and Turner’s wall-exhausting depiction of the battle of Trafalgar (each of them at the National Gallery in Washington, when it was on loan from its host collection). Sure, it was nice—nay, even a trifle awe-inspiring—to see all those encrusted licks and layers of palpably formerly wet pigment, but I did not feel that I understood or appreciated these paintings any better afterwards, for I had already gotten a sufficiently thorough idea of them from photographs (and in the case of the two just-mentioned works, most likely photographs in coffee table-type books, photographs that were presumably much “lower-resolution” than their present-day counterparts at Wikipedia). As for the demurer on behalf of human-generated “non-representational” or “abstract” art (or, indeed, any of the various post-ca. 1850 visual art-making-procedures, beginning with impressionism, that have not placed a premium on the quasi-photographic mimesis of people and things), it seems to me that he has got an even shakier leg to stand on than his realism and naturalism-boosting peer, inasmuch as here, as in the case of the techniques of magazine and newspaper cartoonists, we are invariably dealing with procedures that are intrinsically less technically sophisticated than those of the realistic and naturalistic schools. Indeed, I can’t think of any easier prompt for an AI-engine than “Give me a painting in the style of Mondrian” or “in the syle of Jackson Pollock” (although I own I haven’t yet issued such a prompt and have no intention of issuing one). And of course, the almost instantaneous incorporation of the styles of these painters into the commercial art of the mid-twentieth century attests to the even more apt applicability of the Lord Rochester rule to “non-representational” painting. In umpteenth short, so far, in my AI-generated cartoons I have done as much work as any present-day painter can do qua artist. The typical trained painter of today may, by sheer contingent dint of of having spent much more time looking at and thinking of paintings, start with a more elaborate and cogent conception of a new painting than I will ever be able to conceive, but he will be powerless to generate a more nearly perfect rendition of that conception with his brush-and-palette wielding fingers than via the application of those selfsame fingers to his laptop or phone keyboard. I own I may have gone for “low-hanging fruit” even in giving visual art pride of place in my polemic, although I daresay my main reservations on this score are not the same as those of the typical AI-skeptical reader—viz., reservations nurtured by the assumption that the “language” of certain other arts is inherently more complex than that of painting, an assumption that I have yet to assume (although I certainly have a hunch to that effect); they spring, rather, from my assumption that painting and the other static visual arts are much more amenable to AI-actuated generation in virtue of being intakable at a glance, whereas certain other arts require their meaning to be unfurled over the course of a stretch of time and therefore presumably require more input from the user up front. If one tells the AI engine: “Paint me a painting in the style of Rembrandt depicting a mother scolding her five-year-old son for sticking his finger in an electrical socket,” one is likely to get an image that adequately conforms to those specifications because that double-dozen-word sentence contains all the information needed for the generation of such a painting, because Rembrandt’s style is applicable in toto to almost any sort of tableau. If, on the other hand, one tells the engine, “Write me a novel in the style of Dickens about a bank robber on the run from the law,” however sportingly it has a go at it and however many pages of passably readable narrative prose it consequently produces, one is hardly likely to find the result a servicable pastiche of a Dickens novel, because Dickens’s style is inseparable from his treatment of plot and character and one has supplied the engine with next to no information about either element. One has not specified, for example, whether the bank robber is supposed to be a cynical egoist à la Harold Skimpole or a decent and kind-hearted man who has simply had a tough break, à la Harold Magwitch, or someting in between à la Mr. Micawber. Even so, I reckon that with nothing longer or more elaborate to work with than, say a thousand-word synopsis, an AI-engine could come up with a worthy companion-piece to Martin Chuzzlewit, if not quite the second coming of Bleak House—nay, perhaps even a book that would be mistaken for a “lost” authentic Dickens novel (that is, of course, until they started looking for the paper manuscript in Chuck’s own handwriting [although “deep-faking” such a manuscript is presumably something computers, in collaboration with paper aging-machines and fountain pen-wielding robots, will soon be able to do to a turn]). Even so, I reckon that that the preceding “even so” is a pretty big “even so,” for although I reckon I’ve read enough Dickens to recognize a Dickens novel if I ever happened to be forced to read one without being told beforehand that it was a Dickens novel (a scenario that is at least a theoretically possible one, for there are a fair number of Dickens novels that I have never read [Martin Chuzzlewit being one of them, I having taken the critics’ word for it that that book is no Bleak House]), it would take me a fair amount of effort to compose a thousand-word novel-synopsis that contained all the essential distinctive attributes of a Dickens novel. And so it would seem that for the composition of long-form narrative prose (at least such prose as attains an adequate degree of “realism” [for I have chosen Dickens rather than, say {notably}, Balzac, because Dickens is most Anglophones’ idea of a “classic realist” novelist, not because he is the most actually realist of the classic novelists, as he most certainly isn’t]) will require some human assistance, albeit assistance that will exact but a small fraction of the labor-hours required for the man-made composition of an entire such novel. I harbor more or less consubstantial reservations about the prospects of AI-generated long-form music. I suspect that if I told an AI engine “write me a four-movement symphony in the style of Brahms” I would be presented with not a properly composed symphony with all the thematic interrelations, contrapuntal feats, and so on, that one expects of a composer on the level of Brahms but rather a patchwork of passages “sourced” indiscriminately from the four Brahms symphonies themselves.

On the other hand, I suspect that if I supplied the engine with all the principal themes of the work together with a minute-by-minute account of its progress of the sort and length that one would find in the better sort of CD liner notes (“Here, played double-forte by the oboe, the first subject of the first movement returns in inversion and in quavers rather than in the original semiquavers, completing a D-major triad that marks a transition from the tonic to the submediant and thus the beginning of a brief digression that also paves the way for the triumphant coda," etc.) it would come up with something that might be mistaken for Brahms’s undiscovered Fifth Symphony, rather like the opera (sic on opera qua plural foropus) of that equal-parts-celebrated-and-notorious child composer who flourished ten or fifteen years ago (about whom, incidentally, somebody really ought to make a Where Are They Now? video, for if somebody actually had made one about him I doubtless would have come to know of it by now, for the algorithm-monster, being quite an ingenious little AI-engine in its own right, is remarkably good at presenting me with “content” that is right up my alley—and in a prevailingly good, morally and intellectually enriching way rather than in the bad, morally and intellectually emiserating way that is ascribed to it by the intellectually petit-bourgeois punditry in their AI engine-shamingly boilerplate jeremiads about how the algorithm-monster is shunting us into narrower and narrower “echo chambers” and turning our bairns’ brains to mush [when the truth is that “we”—i.e., almost everybody but me—are allowing the algorithm-monster to do that shunting and turning out of our sheer cussed depravity {more on this, in more general terms, if not anon then at least no later than an hour—as the crow that is the reader’s eye flies ever-onward from line to line rather than repeatedly swooping back to re-survey nests of parentheses such at the present one—before the cows of the present essay come home to roost}]). But as far as short time-contingent forms go, AI has already proved a worthy competitor to human artisans as far as I am concerned. And how far is that? Well, far enough, in the first place, to have taken in dozens of AI-composed pop songs that I would not have been able to distinguish from the output of even the most illustrious pop “musicians” of the present century. Admittedly this is not saying much; admittedly, the oeuvre of a Lady Gaga or a Taylor Swift is the very ne plus ultra of a kind of art that seems as if it could only have been generated by a machine; admittedly such an oeuvre seems to be one of those super-rare entities to which the adjective “Orwellian” is super-aptly applicable (i.e., inasmuch as it immediately calls to mind the machine-generated pop ditties that figure to such amusing satirical effect in Nineteen Eighty-Four [which were doubtless intended as digs at the assembly line-produced constituents of what has come to be known as the Great American Songbook simply because every subsequent generation of pop songs has been even more “dumbed-down” than its predecessor]); admittedly such an oeuvre makes that of even the Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift of the very late twentieth century, Madonna, sound as chock-full of intricacy as the Lieder-corpus of Schubert or Brahms by comparison; admittedly, I have yet to hear an AI-generated pop tune that can hold an aural candle to a first-rate tune by a late twentieth-century pop tunesmith like Nick Lowe or Chris Stamey. On the other hand (and this is a very big "other hand"), I have been reckless enough to try conclusions with AI in the composition of the sort of humorous vignette that cannot be cast as a graphic novelette or one-panel cartoon and that must take the form of short-form narrative prose, and I have been if not quite fatally blown away by the results at least administered a fairly demoralizing sock in the gut (or in even lower anatomy-portions) thereby. Perhaps my favorite such vignette is the counterfactual Johnsonium, a Boswellian account-cum-dramatization of Samuel Johnson in some setting in which Boswell either didn’t get around to placing him or couldn’t have placed him owing to certain historical contingencies, although I have so far only gotten around to composing and posting two such vignettes, and I find the single example of the sub-genre that I have coaxed the AI engine into producing impressive enough that I am starting to think that I should stop at those two. It takes the form of a conversation between Johnson and Boswell regarding the Cohen-brothers film The Big Lebowski (which I have long thought of as an excellent starting-point for such a pastiche, as I have even longer thought of its protagonist, “the Dude,” as a sort of latter-day-cum-poor man’s Falstaff, a character about whom Johnson famously extols at great length in a note in his edition of Shakespeare), and it reads in its entirety as follows:

I called upon Dr. Johnson in the afternoon, finding him seated in his armchair, a volume of Plato open upon his knee, though he appeared more inclined to nap than to read. After some pleasantries, I ventured to describe the motion picture I had seen the previous evening.

Boswell: Sir, I have lately attended a showing of a film much celebrated among the youth, entitled The Big Lebowski. It is a comedy, though of a most peculiar sort, and I confess it has left me in a state of philosophical perplexity.

Johnson (rousing): A comedy, you say? I hope it is not one of those modern jests which mistake profanity for wit and idleness for charm. What is the subject?

Boswell: The principal character is a man called The Dude, who lives without employment, ambition, or even proper trousers. He drinks a mixture of spirits and cream, smokes the Indian herb, and bowls with two companions—one a violent man of war, the other a gentle soul who is perpetually told to be silent.

Johnson: Sir, you describe a rogue and a fool. That such a man should be the hero of any tale is a sign of our age’s degeneracy. In my day, a gentleman was expected to labour, to think, and to dress with some degree of dignity.

Boswell: Yet I must confess, I found in him a curious serenity. He is buffeted by absurd events—a stolen rug, mistaken identity, threats from nihilists—and yet he remains calm, even cheerful. The film ends with the narrator remarking, “The Dude abides.”

Johnson: Abides! A fine word, sir, and one which ought to denote fortitude and moral perseverance. But to abide in sloth is no virtue. A man who does nothing is not admirable for enduring the consequences of his own indolence. He is merely consistent in vice.

Boswell: But is there not something Stoic in his manner? He accepts the world’s chaos without complaint, and does not seek revenge or riches. He is, in a way, untouched by the madness around him.

Johnson: Stoicism, sir, is not the absence of ambition, but the mastery of it. The Stoic does not renounce action; he renounces passion. Your Dude seems to renounce both. He is not a philosopher, but a loafer. If he were to read Epictetus, he would likely use the pages to roll his tobacco.

Boswell (laughing): Yet the film is not without merit. It satirises the pretensions of others—the wealthy, the militant, the nihilist—and in contrast, The Dude appears almost virtuous in his simplicity.

Johnson: Satire, when properly applied, exposes folly to correct it. But if it merely mocks without instructing, it is a mirror held up to vice, not to virtue. Still, I shall not condemn the thing unheard. If it provokes thought in you, it may not be wholly worthless.

Boswell: Might I persuade you to attend a showing, sir? I believe you would find Walter, the belligerent companion, a subject worthy of your analysis. He quotes rules with great fervour, and invokes Vietnam in every dispute.

Johnson: I have no desire to sit in a dark room among youths in slippers, watching a man in a bathrobe stumble through life. But I shall read a synopsis, and perhaps compose a moral essay upon it. If the world now celebrates idleness, it is time someone reminded it of the dignity of labour.

Obviously from the very start there are faults to be found. Boswell would have written his speech prefixes entirely in capitals, and although Johnson knew Plato’s work practically by heart and quotes it frequently in his essays, that philosopher is not mentioned even once by name in the Life of Johnson (at least according to the index of the Penguin unabridged edition, which has, I confess, sent me on more than one wild goose chase with inaccurate page-numbers), such that it is out of keeping with the spirit of the thing to make a volume of Plato his reading-matter. Virgil’s Aeneid, or the Greek New Testament, or one of his friend Fanny Burney’s novels would have been more generically appropriate. And generically inappropriate anachronisms—i.e., those that are not unavoidable or at least excusable owing to the post-eighteenth-century topic of the conversation (e.g., “motion picture” and “nihilist”)—crop up not infrequently; the most glaring of these are intrigue, charm (both of which were indeed in use in the eighteenth century, but not in the senses implied here), trousers (for in the eighteenth century the “proper” way of covering a man’s legs was with knee-breeches and stockings) and bathrobe (which is also wrong in being an Americanism). Then there are certain idiolectical infelicities: Johnson would most likely have inveighed against the “depravity” rather than “degeneracy” of our age or his, and he would not have used “gentleman” as he is shewn to be using it here—i.e., as a designation of “social status” capacious enough to apply to the Dude and himself; for that he did not regard himself as sufficiently respectable to style himself a gentleman we may infer from passages in the Life and in his writings in which he distinguishes Boswell as one, and we can be sure he would not have thought of the Dude as a gentleman because in the film that character is shewn to be even less respectably situated in his world than Johnson was in his. The two occurrences of “idleness” are problematic because they immediately call to mind The Idler, a newspaper column that Johnson wrote anonymously under the alias-cum-persona furnished by its title and hence presented himself as a kind of champion-cum-embodiment of idleness. “IRL” he was at best (or worst) ambivalent towards the idling lifestyle, such that his upbraiding of the Dude’s expounding of that lifestyle is completely in character for him, but the engine really ought to have stuck to idleness’s synonym, indolence, for it is unthinkable that Boswell on hearing Johnson disparaging idleness by name would not have interjected something along the lines of, “I find it highly ironical to hear idleness animadverted against so strenuously by the author of The Idler,” and thereupon prompted Johnson either to bellow out, “Never mention a man in his own presence!” in articulation of one of his cardinal rules of etiquette and conformity with his behavior whenever Boswell was impertinent enough to break that rule, or supposing he regarded the interjection as pertaining less to himself than to his writings (about which he was more open to discussion) to explain in which salutary respects his Idler differed from the Dude, in which respects that Idler should not be thought of as a norm or model, etc.

Now far be it from me to say “but these are all mere quibbles,” because any one of the shortcomings I have listed would have sufficed, in some piece of faux-Johnsoniona that was not deliberately crossing time-streams, to identify that pastiche as a fake, so at least in that respect they are quite serious. But in a way, that is quite beside the point, for overall the vignette does exactly what I asked it to do on the tin that was my prompt: the sentiments expressed by the AI Johnson are all eminently Johnsonian in substance, and most of them are essentially Johnsonian in style. I am particularly impressed and humbled by the exchange about the Dude qua pseudo-Stoic because I am far from certain that it is something it would have occurred to me to include in my own version of such a performance. The AI Johnson’s explanation of why the Dude is no stoic is judicious in the extreme and expressed with consummately Johnsonian rhetorical poise. And an honorable mention in the Present-Writer-Humbling category must be granted to AI Boswell’s conjecture that Johnson would take a keen interest in the character of Walter qua frequent rule-citer. It seems to me that here AI Boswell is real-Boswell-esquely ever-so-slyly killing three birds with one stone by implicitly comparing Walter to Johnson and thereby alluding to Johnson in his presence without actually mentioning him and also intimating that the present age may be not quite as degenerate as Johnson supposes, inasmuch as it has room not only for unregenerate idlers but also for people who are as passionately devoted to established custom as himself. I’m not quite sure that either the interpretation of Walter or the comparison of him to Johnson or the inference about the two ages holds up, but I am certainly “intrigued” by all three of them. And I own that the Vietnam reference seems to be a complete non-sequitur, but even it is potentially recuperable in the light of Johnson’s principled opposition to prospective Vietnam-like “quagmires” such as Britain’s narrowly averted war with Spain over the Falkland Islands. In short, vis-à-vis the essential ideas of such opuscules, AI seems already to be at least a match for me. To be sure, the above AI-generated Johnsonianum would need to be revised in order to be actualized as a fully finished bonbon, but such revision would not satisfy me as a practitioner of my metier as a Johnsonianum confector, for it is but jobbing detail-work of at best the sort relegated to the master’s pupils in the studios of the great Baroque painters.

I have further recently undergone a comparably dispiriting experience vis-à-vis AI’s horning into one of my other lines of literary work (and “arguably” the main line, inasmuch as it is the only one for which I have ever been even intermittently paid)—viz., that of literary translation. My account of this episode and the inferences that I have drawn from it will perhaps prove less vulnerable to the charge of being overly “subjective” than the ones originating from my encounters with AI-visual art and AI-comic vignette-confecting because translation is both one of the most ancient and one of the most durable of the loca classica of “things computers can’t do.” I recall reading several times from my earliest tykedom onward a sort of legend about translating software’s ineptitude that hailed from the zenith of the so-called space race and so-called Cold War, when the Russkies and the Yanks were especially keen on getting hold of quick translations of texts in each other’s languages. Per this anecdote, a state-of-the-art Soviet translating computer was asked to render in Russian the King James Bible’s rendering of Matthew 26:41: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” The machine spat out a line of Russian that could readily be Englished as “The vodka is excellent, but the beef is horrible.” The moral of the anecdote was glaringly clear: those fancy-pants electronic brains may have been able to put a man on the moon (or, in the Russians’ case, at least a turtle around it), but they had a long way to go to understand any language of man. And truth to tell, computer-acuated translation seemed not to have made more than “one small step” further by the very late 1990s, when I had one of Google Translate’s immediate predecessors English an interview with one of my favorite punk-rock bands from a German webzine (for I had not yet begun a serious study of the German language [as the band was or were American, the interview presumably had originally been conducted in English, but such brazen disregard for international audiences as was evinced by the unavailability of that English original was par for the course in the webzine-o-sphere of the very late 1990s]). The result was lousy with such howlers as “skirt ‘n’ roll” (“skirt” being one of the half-dozen plausible translations of the German word “rock”), and “tape” instead of “band” (“band” being the usual German word for the magnetic analogue tape on which bands then still typically recorded their tunes), and “Power Station” for “Kraftwerk” qua name of the celebrated synth-pop ensemble. Why, the thing couldn’t even come up with a rendition of the colloquialism “schuften,” leaving it undigested amid the slurry of broken English, even though from the context my human eyes immediately gathered that it must mean something like “slave away” or drudge” (as in “we’ve got to slave away at our day-jobs because the band doesn’t pay well enough”[NB, lest you think I have exaggerated the stiltedness of the machine-translation in point: here I am not quoting the remark verbatim but reconstituting its gist from memory, for Lord knows what has happened to those three or four “toner”-blackened pages by now]); and quite mystifyingly, the re-Anglophoned drummer reported that had “lost” a leg when I knew full well from other zine-ic sources that he had merely injured it. To be sure, machine translation improved considerably over the first decade-and-a-half of the new century, but not so considerably as to give me the faintest of second thoughts about fashioning myself into a professional translator, or about posting any of my Englishings to the web while I remained an amateur one, for in those days one had yet to hear of some lazy college foreign-language student simply plopping an entire short story, let alone an entire novel, into a translating window in lieu of reading the original, and one often heard of that liberty being taken via recourse to free online man-made translations such as my own. And even when, a scant two or three years ago, one did finally begin to hear about not only lazy college students but even otherwise industrious professional academics resorting to machine translations of book-length texts, I remained blissfully oblivious of the extent of the strides that had been made by AI by then, inasmuch as whenever I was a mind to read an English translation of a work whose original language I found too daunting even to stumble through with dictionary ready to hand, I was lucky enough to alight on a free public-domain man-made translation instantly downloadable from Project Gutenberg or the like. But at long last, namely, in the late spring or early summer of last year, 2025, there supervened the moment when I could no longer postpone confronting the state-of-the-art achievements of AI translation in all of what ever abstract quality, good or bad, from supernal glory to sub-infernal ignominy, they had by then come to possess. You see, I had just read and been smitten in the original French by Julien Gracq’s unpigeonholeable novel Le Rivage des Syrtes, known in English thanks to its human translator Richard Howard, or his publisher, as The Opposing Shore (presumably because Dick or that bookseller had reckoned that the literal translation of the title, The Coast [or Shoreline] of Syrtes, would have elicited nothing but a commercially fatalt query of “Who or what the heck is this Syrtes person?” from the literal or sub-literal handful of Anglophones who otherwise could have been compelled to read a French writer as obscure as Julien Gracq), and slightly juster had learned, thanks to the remarks of an acquaintance and a Wikipedia trip catalyzed thereby, that that book had been widely accused of being a shameless knockoff, a virtual wholesame plagiarization, of a slightly earlier Italian novel, Il deserto dei Tartari by somebody called Dino Bazzati, and just as widely defended by Gracq as a proud non-relative of Il deserto (which he had claimed never never to have clapped his eyes on before starting work on his Rivage), and so I was heck-bent on reading the Buzzati book by way of getting to the bottom of the question (not, to be sure, the question of whether Graq had pilfered anything from Buzzati, a question that I deemed both unanswerable and at bottom not really worth asking, but whether Gracq’s novel had been beaten to the punch in geistig terms by Buzzati’s, whether Gracq in his book was essentially saying something that had already been said by Buzzati in his [a question the general form of which bids fair to be the key one of the present essay, such that I am utterly unembarrassed by the longueur of the present digression]), and as Italian was not one of those languages I despaired of stumbling through with the aid of a dictionary, I resolved to try reading it in the original and thereby also transfer to Buzzati my attempt to kill a pre-existing second bird, that of brushing up my Italian, a bird that had so far proved invulnerable in my several months of slogging through Dante’s Convivio. And as I usually do nowadays whenever I have resolved to read any book, whether it is in the public domain or not, I searched for some free downloadable version of Il deserto, and I fairly quickly alighted on a bootleg PDF of it. But on knuckling down to read the digi-book, I found that although the Italian was slightly easier than Dante’s for being six centuries more recent, it was still likely to prove pretty tough going (not that I had any right to be surprised by this, for I had formally studied the language for but a year, in my senior year of high school, thirty-five years earlier, and had since put next to no work of my own into improving my comprehension of it), such that I quickly inferred that if I relied exclusively on dictionaries (whether paper ones like such as my 1970s Cassell’s or electronic ones like WordReference) I was unlikely to get through more than a single longish sentence a day as against the full page a day—specifically, a single steno pad-page of my seat-of-the-pants handwritten translation (for I didn’t see how I could prove to myself that I was picking up the Italian in the absence of a written record against which to compare my mental Englishings of recurring words and constructions with each other), not a page of the novel itself (the attainment of which goal would have required me to fill two or three steno-pad pages a day) —that I was aiming for, and consequently wouldn’t be finished with the blessed book until not very long before the end of the decade. And so I came up with the following pis aller, one that I hoped would allow me to make adequate reading progress without throwing autodidactic utility completely out the window: I would make some translation engine produce a complete English version that I would read in conjunction with the original, at minimum mutually cross-checking every construction to make sure that I grasped not only the meanings of individual words but that of lexemes, idioms, etc., and hitting the dictionaries when and only when either I or the translation seemed to be failing to grasp something essential. So I dumped the entire book into a Linux application called Crow Translate that seemed, based on a spot comparison of the pasting-in of two or three passages, to be a dedicated “client” of Google Translate. And to my combined relief and vexation, on betaking myself to the machine translation, I found that I did not have to hit the dictionaries very often, that, indeed, on whole, I seemed to be able to lean on my Google-Translate Buzzati as heavily and lingeringly as I would have been able to lean on, say, the English portion of a Loeb edition of Plato or Cicero. To be sure, I did occasionally encounter a howler straight out of that ancient machine-translated fanzine interview: for example, a self-evidently male character kept being referred to as “she,” presumably because in the original he was almost invariably referred to by his naked feminine surname, Angustina. And from time to time I encountered passages in which it wasn’t exactly clear what was going on or the described state of affairs didn’t harmonize with what had come immediately before, passages vis-à-vis which the dictionaries were indispensable rather than supplemental to making sense of the text. But on the whole, from first page to last—a goodly stretch of some three hundred pages—it was a perfectly serviceable translation, one that I would have found perfectly adequate and never have suspected to be the product of a non-human Englisher had I first innocently alighted upon it in the form of a proper book for sale at Amazon. This is not to say that I would have been exactly proud to have produced it myself, or to say the same thing in slightly different terms, that it did not suffer from manifest aesthetic shortcomings, that it “read beautifully.” But it would be disingenuous of me of all people, i.e., me qua seasoned translator, to blame these defects on the AI engine. For truth be told, the original itself read far from beautifully. Part of its ugliness—or if not quite ugliness, then at least ungainliness or embarrassingness—was doubtless attributable to Bazzati’s personal stylistic limitations. I noticed that he tended to use certain phrases and constructions over and over again, seemingly out of mere laziness rather than with the aim of achieving any specific effect, and presumably most of these recycled phrases and constructions, although they were entirely new to me, would have been regarded as cliches by native speakers-cum-readers; and he had one stylistic tic, that of referring to every sudden and intense access of emotion as an “orgasmo,” that I am fairly confident the Italians must have found as thoroughly off-putting as I did, however well-founded that Mediterranean people’s reputation for being more amorous than us cold-blooded Anglo-Saxons may be. But on the whole, I was and am inclined to chalk up my dissatisfaction to certain organic features of the comportment and constitution of the Italian language itself—for example, its superabundance of pronouns, many of them redundant and some of them frustratingly ambiguous, its over-reliance on paraphrastic constructions, and its fussily elaborate yet often illogical sequence of tenses. So anyway, this AI-generated translation reads none too beautifully, but in a way that is quite beside the point, because the sad or at least slightly embarrassing truth is that if one is looking for a best possible sense of what any sort of text reads like in the original language, one is better served by an accurate if aesthetically unprepossessing translation like the one of Il deserto that the Google Translate "client" generated for me than by one by a self-respecting translator working "at the top of his game." Buzzati's fellow countrymen have that famous proverb, "Traduttore, traditore" meaning "Every translator is a traitor," but a more accurate if less sonorous proverb would be "Every translator is a housebreaker," if "housebreaker" didn't mean "burglar" instead of what it really ought to mean, viz., a person who potty-trains a pet dog. In other words, a translator's chief task is to correct, smooth over, compensate for, or hide from view all the source language's habitual breaches of etiquette, all the ways in which it does things that would never be acceptable in English. The proverb I just cited is a case in point. A verbatim translation of it would be "Translator, traitor," which of course isn't even a proper English sentence; uttered aloud it would sound like an accusation in the form of a curiously lackadaisical interjection. As it happens, "Traduttore, traditore" isn't a proper Italian sentence either, Italian being, like English, short on oblique noun cases, such that if you want to make it crystal clear to your reader or interlocutor that a noun following another noun is its complement rather than its object or a non-sequitur you have to link the two nouns together with some form of the verb essere (i.e., to be). In Italian's illustrious parent language, Latin, you could get away with sticking one noun after another and omitting the linking verb because that language included endings distinguishing subject-nouns from other sorts of nouns, and I dare say inside every Italian there lurks a Julius Caesar who looks down his Roman nose at the language of modern Italy as a degenerate bastard, and so the Italians remain smitten with such constructions even though to foreigners' nostrils they reek more pungently of the jungle or the stone-ager's cave than of the Roman forum. For example, I dare say the overlap in the so-called Venn diagram of Anglophones who tsk-tsk their fellow-Anglos' ignorance of foreign language with Anglophones who bewail their fellow Anglos' exploitation of the passive voice, bureaucratese, and the, like qua aids to clear self-expression and "accountability" is nearly one hundred percent, but the sad or embarrassing truth is that all the Continental European languages are rife with such grammatical dodges, that they are part and parcel of those languages' "standard operating procedures." French and German abuse the impersonal pronouns on and man, which technically correspond to our notoriously pompous one, in all sorts of weasily ways, most often as an all-too-liberally peppered alternative to the passive voice. And it is the translator's perennially thankless and dubious task, whenever one of these ons or mans crops up in a text, to determine who the empirical referent of this pronoun is, to determine whether the person actually in point is he, she, I, we, or they, and thereupon to determine where his primary allegiance lies--with the author or with the reader; whether he should spill the beans on the identity of this person or let the author be as evasive or pompous as he wants to be by passivizing his English rendering of the on or man-containing containing construction or simply Englishing the pronoun as one. Then there are those god-awful prepositions and adverbs (or adverbial prepositions?) en (French), darauf, dabei, hiermit, etc. (German), words whose literal rendering as of it, about it, thereby, thereupon, therewith, etc. would be red-penned to death with marginal exclamations of VAGUE! by the reader's inner composition teacher or laughed out of the reader's inner reading-room as so much Elizabethan legalese. Here, the translator really has no choice but to spell everything out, but this out-spelling is often far from straightforward, as while the referent is usually easy enough to pin down, the extent and content of its verbalization all too often is not. Should the translator simply cut and paste the preceding word or phrase specifying the referent, and thereby expose himself to a charge of insufferable monotony, or should he cobble together a collection of synonyms and consequently smart with shame and guilt at having resorted to that most contemptible of stylistic vices, "elegant variation"? In either case he will smart with guilt and shame at having destroyed the archaic pithiness of the original passage. But smart therewith he must, for come what may, the result must be English that passes as readable in some conceivable Anglophone reader's hic et nunc. And don't even get me started on the subject of dialect--or let us, rather, term it a pseudo-subject, or a subject- heading surmounting a blank bullet list (i.e., in mathematical terms, an "empty set") or an undifferentiated mass of bullshit in lieu of any bullets. What I meantersay is that while the word "dialect" ineluctably conjures up the image of a well-defined sub-language with a complete sub-system of grammar and sub-vocabulary, and hence deserving of nearly as much consideration as the master language (and "arguably" even more consideration than it in compensation for centuries of unjustified neglect [cf. the campaign for "equity" in matters of race, "gender," etc., natch]), it invariably presents itself on the page as nothing less prosaic or more distinctive than the parent language spelled or pronounced in a slovenly or knowingly erroneous manner and with an odd-looking (but generally etymologically all-too-scrutable) word thrown in here and there. It has been well over a century since passages of this sort of writing stopped being good form in English-language writing with any aspirations to literary merit; and in the very long nowadays of the Anglosphere it comes across as extremely corny at the very best, and more often than not it is regarded as impermissibly insulting to the "demographic" whose speech-patterns are thereby recorded. I suppose Joel Chandler Harris's approximation of the dialect of antebellum slaves in his Uncle Remus stories is the ignoble locus classicus of this phenomenon. If only the literary exponents of the Continental languages could have been persuaded to follow our eminently just, rational, and aesthetically appealing lead (a lead exemplified early on by Henry James's treatment of the Deep-Southern white-gentry speech of his hero Basil Ransom in The Bostonians: viz., via a brief preliminary paragraph stating that Ransom spoke like a Southerner and abjuring any attempt at reproducing his Southernisms, and faithfully followed by dialogue-passages in which Ransom always speaks in a manner indistinguishable from that of his Northern fellow-characters). But alas! Rare indeed is the twentieth or twentieth first-century Continental writer who does not pride himself on his mastery of at least a half-dozen dialects! And so we poor Anglophone translators have got to find some way of handling this bilge that is not bound to be insufferably grating to the mental ears of our readers. If only it were simply a matter of holding one's nose, immersing oneself in the slurry of naffness, and pairing each patch of dialect in one's source text with a true-ringing English counterpart! Unfortunately, even as our dialectal rag-and-bone trade was dying out, the Continent's began developing into a full-blown dialectal-industrial complex, such that there are now far too few inventoried rags and bones--i.e., too few established ways of representing non-standard English speech- patterns--to go around. Basically we've only got four of these to choose from: American blackspeak, deep-Southern-American redneckspeak, Cockney, and plebeian NewYorkese, for although all the various Northern English accents, along with a smattering of American regional ones (e.g.,the Chicago accent [recall the famous 1990sSaturday Night Live sketches centering on the Bulls and the Bears]), are over-amply represented in film and television, there is no standard way of representing any of them in writing (such that I had to invent a spelling-convention from scratch when attempting to render the distinctive Northern-English elision of the distinction between the as of man and bath in my Angry Londoner); and while the orthography of Scots is fully standardized, that dialect is off-limits because at least officially coextensive with the speech-community of an entire country (although of course a Glaswegian will maintain that his accent sounds nothing like that of an Edinburgher, and any Sassenach who mistakes a Highlander for a Lowlander is itching to be brained with a golf club). And of course only American blacks writing about other American blacks can get away with wielding blackspeak (the same restriction applying almost as water-tightly, incidentally, mutatis mutandis, vis-à-vis Jews and Gentiles, for all words and lexemes of Yiddish origin in plebeian NewYorkese [and the international absence of this restriction in the "reverse" direction having some decidedly peculiar "knock-on effects," as when the German dubbers of the first Airplane film turned the comically exaggerated "jive" of two black passengers into broad Bavarian--i.e., the speech of "arguably" the most "racist" cohort of white people {i.e., inasmuch as Bavaria is "arguably" the birthplace of Nazism (i.e., inasmuch as the so-called Beer-Hall putsch took place in its capital, Munich)}]). So that basically leaves us with only three options, two at most of which can be employed within a single translation-production, for the choice of Cockney automatically implies an analogue to an English setting, and the choice of redneckism or NewYorkese an analogue to an American one. And so the poor translator must hope against hope to be blessed with authors who are solely interested in juxtaposing the big city with the provinces (or the "working-class" big-city milieu with the "professional middle-class" big-city milieu), for should he be so unlucky as to be faced with one who pits province against province, he will be obliged to synthesize new versions of redneckspeak out of whole burlap. For getting on for a decade the present translator has been self-saddled with the novels of Hermann Lenz, a native of Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemburg, formerly part of the Duchy of Swabia (politically speaking, an entity even more anciently dead than the Byzantine Empire) who styled himself "a Swabian pighead" (or a "pigheaded Swabian," to parse the lexeme with greater syntactic and grammatical fidelity). Naturally Lenz exploits every opportunity to have some ostentatiously parochial Stuttgarter hold forth "in Swabian" or append "as we say in Swabian" to some banal wisecrack, or gimcrack of a word for an ordinary household object; but he is also forever having his autobiographical Swabian protagonist cross paths with a native of Franconia or Saxony or the Palatinate who insists on performing the exact same sorts of speech-acts "in Franconian" or "in Saxon" or "in Palatinatian"; and to add a full-blown head injury to a cluster migraine, he is also given to composing entire novels-within-novels set in Hapsburg Vienna, thereby exposing me to the entire putrefying contents of the oil barrel-sized worm-can of how to go about Enrglishing "Viennese." To gloss this conceit as efficiently as possible: there are certain Austrian writers who have produced entire corpuses in this supposed language, writers who are at least theoretically canonical and significant, such that to go about rendering occasional passages of it willy-nilly in cod Cockney or cod plebeian NewYorkese is at least theoretically to place oneself at loggerheads with entire schools of fandom and scholarship in both the English-speaking and German-speaking worlds. In point of probable fact--i.e., to extrapolate from the single-digit retweet average of the Thomas Bernhard-quoting twitter account, and the yawn with which Peter Handke's receipt of the Nobel Prize was greeted a few years ago (i.e., inasmuch as Bernhard and Handke were and are the most famous Austrian literary writers of the late twentieth century)--the fan-base of these corpuses has dwindled into near non-existence, such that I could probably get away with Englishing Lenz's Viennese passages as Chinese pidgin English, but I'd rather not push my luck, for the smallest fan-bases have a way of being the most vociferous and acrimonious, and I've no wish to end my days as a strangulation victim of the last living A.C. Ammons fan. Lenz also has an extremely annoying predilection for beginning paragraphs with sentence-fragments of the following glaringly ungainly forms: "Then the walk to the train station, where Eugen bought a newspaper..." and "Then walking to the train station, where Eugen..." I simply lack the stomach to leave the openings of these fragments bereft of grammatically anchoring nouns and verbs; I always end up rendering them as "Then they walked to the train station, where Eugen bought a newspaper," or "Then came the walk to the station, or if the context makes it clear that Eugen is on his own, "Then Eugen walked to the train station, where he bought..." I know that in thus rendering them I am failing to do justice to a significant feature of Lenz's style, but what choice do I have? I certainly don't want the reader to get the impression that my English rather than his German is at fault; and I feel duty-bound not to subject the reader to the perplexity and irritation that is always occasioned by unfamiliar lapses of grammar and syntax. Note that I specifically decry such lapses as are unfamiliar , for I am of course aware that there is such a well-known thing as an artfully constructed and deployed English sentence fragment--for example, the bare noun phrase, a construction which, when telegraphically spat out onto the page over and over again over the course of an entire paragraph can evoke an entire scene or constellation of images far more efficiently and eloquently than a passage of grammatically impeccable prose ever could. But Lenz's sentence-fragments, faithfully Englished, are not sentence-fragments of this type; they serve only to give the impression that the writer does not really know what he is trying go convey or that he is going out of his way to be unhelpfully vague. The reader may well ask why I have been so sedulously preoccupying myself with Lenz all these years when his prose pullulates so noisesomely with such howlers as these sentence-fragments and the above-discussed passages of dialect. And the simple if perhaps seemingly perverse reason is that I am positively smitten by the essence or idea behind Lenz's work, because I think that idea-cum-essence discloses insights into the world that are not disclosed elsewhere--insights into what it was like to grow up, live, and grow old in early-to-late-twentieth-century southern Germany as a dreamy, backward-looking, aesthetically minded son of the prosaically pragmatic petit-bourgeoisie of the region-cum-epoch--and because I do not believe that justice will have been done to that idea-cum-essence until every last page of Lenz's oeuvre has been transformed into graceful English. From this massive pseudo-digression one may gather that literary translation is one of those "things machines can't do" and indeed not because of any technical limitations but because there is no conscious consensus about what the original human activity is supposed to entail. For the literary translator is like a pimp who prides himself more keenly on dolling up his girls in the nicest possible dresses and make-up than in actually procuring them for his clients, who in turn vary widely in their degree of finickiness about the girls' personal presentation and even in their awareness of having any sort of preference about that presentation. Some of these clients might send a girl back on discovering that her silk stockings were actually nylons while fancying that he was dissatisfied with the shape of her face; others would be happy to embrace a girl who showed up in a burlap smock, or stark naked, and without a trace of lipstick or eyeliner on her face, provided that she was organically pretty enough. But in no case would the pimp be within his rights to pull a girl out of the rented bedroom in the midst of the already-paid-for transaction on the grounds that he hadn't sent the "john" a girl at all because he had failed to apply just the right shade of powder to her face--and yet it is just such an absurd right that is asserted by the translator. Of course to make the conceit ring perfectly true one would have to reimagine prostitution as some completely humdrum scandal-free service taken for granted by everybody but taken advantage of by hardly anybody, and I cannot think of a single example of any such service. At any rate, the upshot of this entire description is that most likely for the near and distant future the tiny smattering of Anglophones who are interested in reading the literature of foreign lands will continue doing as they have been doing for the past fifty years or so--reading budget trade paperback or Project Gutenberg editions of translated works in the public domain (Constance Garnett's Dostoevsky, Ellen Marriage's Balzac, etc.) without giving a thought to the identity of the translator or any salient differences between translations (as is attested by the gormless insouciance with which they say the likes of "After putting it off for fifty years, I've finally read War and Peace"or "The Odyssey" and the fact that they never say the likes of "I just read Constance Garnett's version of War and Peace" or "Richard Lattimore's version of the Odyssey," and for works not in the public domain, they will just as thoughtlessly rely on AI-generated bootleg translations. In any case, I shall soon be out of a job to the debatable extent that I have ever been in one; and yet I cannot in good faith complain about my prospective joblessness, because, wie gesagt, such translations bring a monoglot Anglopone as close to the original work as he can ever be brought, and if he is uninterested in an English text that is superior to the original work, who am I of all people to rush to the defense of the benighted foreign author? [Here I am duty-bound to acknowledge in all frankness and candor that I am not so much of an ugly Anglo-American as to pretend that my source texts do not feature many preservation-worthy attributes that are appreciable only in the source language, or to deny that I have done my best to convey as many of these attributes as amply and precisely as possible in my Englishings; but at the same time I am duty-bound to confess in all my residual cosmopolitanism that these conveyances are at their amplest and most precise but rough analogues of the originals rather than letter-perfect copies of them, such that in one of my translations the reader is always dealing with a text that is fundamentally Anglophone in spirit. As Philip Larkin once said during a burst of ugly-Anglophonie in an interview, "If that glass thing over there is a window then it isn't a Fenster or fenêtre" and the converse or complement of this sentiment is equally true; in other words, a bit of French or German wordplay involving Fenster or fenêtre is never going to be adequately conveyed by a bit of English wordplay involving window.]). And will I continue to translate even in the teeth of the realization that in all likelihood my translations will never be read by anyone but me? Probably, because I find the production of these English texts a joy in itself, because, as crazy as this might sound, in producing them I feel that I am bringing to light--or at least closer to light (for I am not going to pretend that I am confident that any of my translations is written from start to finish in the best of all possible English for the job)--something more real and numinous than the text in the original language. "But how is this possible? For after all, each of the original German texts originated in the mind of Lenz. Hence, although your English translations may happen to read more gracefully than the originals, they cannot but stand at one further remove from reality than those originals." Ah, but you see, I deny your major, which is to say that I deny that Lenz's mind must needs be categorically regarded as the point of origin of the texts qua reality-conveyors, and that I am at least open to the notion that his mind was itself but the conveyor of an underlying reality to which my access may be no less privileged, or perhaps even more privileged, than his, despite his standing at a nearer chronological remove from the personages and events described and recounted in those texts; that he may simply by historical accident have arrived in the world to bear witness to that reality slightly earlier than me. This notion seems especially plausible to me when while I am reading the original text (whether by Lenz or any other author in either German or French) I am visited by an Englishing that strikes me as absolutely perfect, the absolutely plus juste of mots justes only to find on checking it against dictionary after dictionary that my Englishing simply cannot be made to match the sense of the original passage. And so, in reluctant conformity with my obligation to be faithful to the author, I opt for a translation that more nearly approximates that sense, feeling fully convinced though I do that my original reading, although it is not what the author meant, is what he ought to have meant and that he would have meant had he been a more attentive or competent transcriber of reality. "But how is it possible for you to see and comprehend things in Germany of 1960 (or even, say, France of 1850 or 1830) that Hermann Lenz (or Flaubert or Balzac, aut al.) couldn't himself see or comprehend? After all, they were living back then and over there, not only on the spot but also shut up in their own minds, and here you are, living eighty or a hundred and eighty years later, and thousands of miles away, and shut up in your own mind." It's possible, at least as far as I am concerned, because I have come to subscribe to good old Bishop Berkeley's version of idealism wherein we mortal humans and everything we see and think are figments of God's imagination,"such stuff as God's dreams are made on." And so while it may please God most often to treat us mortal humans as puppets in a mighty multi-stage dollhouse-play in which the dollhouse-stage of Florida of 2026 is sited at the opposite end of the playroom from the dollhouse stage of Germany of 1960, France of 1850, etc., such that the doll-puppet playing me is utterly oblivious of and untouched by the goings-on in the dollhouse environs of the dollhouse puppet playing Hermann Lenz, there is nothing to stop him from throwing us all together into a single dollhouse, or bringing tiny props from one dollhouse into another, or from reassigning a soliloquy from a dollhouse-puppet in the dollhouse-stage of 1960-AD Germany to one in the dollhouse stage of 2026-AD Florida or even 800-BC Babylonia; or chucking the entire suite of dollhouses, doll-puppets and all, into the chest of used toys destined to serve as kindling for the family fireplace. It will readily be seen that this meta-metaphysical scenario puts paid to all the meta-meatphysical panics surrounding AI, including the most hysterical one of all (and, incidentally, the only one that I have not at least passingly alluded to so far)--viz. the one arising from the question (of) whether AI possesses or bids fair to possess consciousness. For this question ceases even to make sense once we have renounced all faith in the screened-off and particularlized human consciousness as a privileged locus of experience, and in the distinction between subjects and objects of experience. The Bekreleyan schema may also be conceived of as a kind of bipartite hierarchical solipsism: I am certain that I am conscious of everything I can apprehend with my five senses or picture in my mind's eye and that God is conscious of me and of all these phenomena experienced by me in his own mind; whether other people are conscious of anything is a matter of indifference to me, for their minds, if they have them, are likewise merely thoughts in the mind of God, and so are any thoughts that any AI engine may now be thinking or ever happen to think. I have been brought to embrace the Berkeleyan metaphysics chiefly by my recent experience of dreams, for in recent years I have found myself dreaming dreams that seem, during my reflection on them in subsequent waking hours, to be constituted of stuff far richer than anything I have encountered in the external world during such hours, such that they cannot be explained away as mere mental echoes of my encounters with external objects. For example, a month or so ago I had a dream that Tucker Carlson had been appointed director of the Smithsonian Institution and had, in the pixillated all-caps words of one of those horizontally scrolling electronic newspaper headline-banners one associates preeminently with New York's Times Square (and hence, presumably, the words of the preeminent "legacy-news" organ, the New York Times), gone "all in on Atlantis at the Smithsonian." From this headline I inferred (in my dream) that Carlson had installed in the National Museum of History an exhibit that presented the sometime existence of the Lost Continent as an established historical fact. Now, that Carlson should come to be firmly convinced that Atlantis was not merely the stuff of legend was a notion that I could have extrapolated during my waking hours from his recent very public obsession with comparably naff and kooky phenomena like UFOs and demonic possession. But where in the world had I gotten the idea that he might promulgate such kookery as head of the Smithsonian? To be sure, there had (and has) been much talk among the punditry about the possibility of Tucker's running for president in 2028, but nobody, to the best of my recollection, has hinted as his accepting some comparatively lowly position in the "Deep State" in the meantime. And yet again, now that I reflect on it, his occupation of such a position, and of that of the director of the Smithsonian in particular, makes for quite a plausible prospective "timeline" (such that I cannot but hope to receive a finder's fee if the bots and lawyers [and the bot-lawyers] allow): one imagines him embracing that position as a kind of bully sinecure allowing him to "get his message across to the base" without sacrificing a minute of studio time at the ranch, and, come 2028 and the inevitable debate-stage charges of a lack of political experience, pointing back to his "dewokification" of the Smithsonian as evidence of his ability to effect swift and revolutionary changes in a chief-executive capacity. Anyhow, as I was saying, I have no idea where that notion of Tucker Carlson as the director the Smithsonian came from. The stock answer to the question of this notion's source is of course that it came from my "unconscious," but this answer merely begs the question because every supposed theory of the unconscious, whether Freudian, Jungian, or Darwinian, turns out to postulate that we have somehow or other ended up with a stock of ideas that transcends the individual human mind. To be sure, they all go through the motions of hemming in this transcendence with some version of biological materialism, but as they never manage to explain how such materialism effects such transcendence, it is impossible to regard the materialism as anything grander than the would-be explainer's pokier version of my divine toyroom. Surely it is far simpler, far more Occcam's razor-like, to assume that these ideas are the property of some unknown mind that we might as well call God's in the light of its apparent boundlessness and inexhaustibility. But this "might as well" is a more than a trifle disingenuous, for like Bishop Berkeley himself, I believe the possessor of this mind to be none other than the God of the Old and New Testaments. I arrived at this belief largely if probably not entirely as a result of several cover-to-cover readings of the Authorized or King James Version of the Bible. Before beginning this course of Scripture-reading, I had been mystified by the entire notion--a notion apparently doctrinal among all the major sub-churches and denominations--of the Bible as the word of God, of God as the author of the Bible, in the light of the fact that the Good Book made no secret about having been at least committed to paper by a multitude of people writing from a multitude of points of view. But by my third or fourth read-through I realized that I was noticing a far greater number of intertextual connections between the various books of Scripture than I had ever noticed in the corpus of any human author, that even Shakespeare's corpus of plays and poems came in at a very distant second place in that regard. And by and by something dawned on me: that even if he was not uttering God's word from its very source like Christ, or even merely "channeling" those words like Moses or the prophets; that even if, indeed, he was willfully opposing God's will like Balaam, or, even-if-indeed squared, he was simply playing the briefest of walk-on parts like the unnamed lawyer to whom Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, each and every personage in that mighty narrative had been placed exactly where he was therein to serve a purpose--namely, to illuminate the divine truth in virtue of his relation to the hundreds of other personages and the hundreds of events in which they were involved, each of which events for its part simply had to occur exactly where it did in virtue of its divine truth-illuminating quality. I realized that it was in this sense that the Bible was to be understood as God's work and the work of no other author. And thence, inasmuch as the Bible is after all inter alia a work of history, a work that bears the trace of past actuality from start to finish, it was the easiest of transitions to the conclusion that every person who had ever lived since bore an essential and inalienable relation to every character and event in the Bible and hence to the divine plan known as Providence. And because one is essentially just nitpicking or haggling over semantics when one distinguishes a plan from a dream, or a plan that has been committed to paper from a plan that still only exists in the planner's mind, from that conclusion it was the easiest of transitions to the open-armed embracement of Berkeley's metaphysical system, with which I was concurrently becoming acquainted. And at this point it is not only "worth mentioning" but absolutely must be mentioned that Berkeley was not one of those philosophers-cum-clergymen for whom the philosophy is just a sort sideline to the clerical work that has absolutely no connection to the latter (or, worse yet, one of those philosophers-cum-clergymen who inject their Satanic philosophy into their sermons and theological work with the aim of corrupting their church's doctrine, like the fictitious late-twentieth-century "rationalist, existentialist" vicar in the Doctor Who serial The Daemons who asserts, "The soul is an outdated concept," or that all too real early twentieth-century papist theologian who proudly styled himself a Darwinist [thereby paving the way for the Romish church's abominable official embrace of evolution as supposedly eminently compatible with the account of creation in the book of Genesis]): no, Berkeley thought of his metaphysical system as flowing inexorably from the church of which he was grateful to be a prince, the Church of England, which within his day was still doctrinally sited within the fold of the Reformed churches, the churches that had originated from John Calvin's late sixteenth-century split with the Lutherans. And of course the central and distinguishing tenet of Calvinism is the article of predestination, according to which everything that has happened or will ever happen, including every thought and action of every human being who has lived or will ever live, has been always known in advance by God, such that the very notion of free will is a total non-starter. This does not mean that the Calvinist is expected to refrain from exerting his will, to "lie back and go with the flow, man," like some accursed Buddhist (I write "accursed" most advisedly, for my faith compels me to believe that the Buddha himself and all billion or so of his deceased disciples to date are now suffering the unending torments of hell); to the contrary, he is expected to exert that will like nobody but God's business, if only in conformity with God's commandments, by way of assuring himself of God's grace, but it does mean that he is not entitled to regard the fruits of this exertion as his own property or achievement, inasmuch as his own will is but a sub-will of the divine will; in other words, that he is compelled humbly to regard himself as but an instrument of God's agency rather than as an agent of any sort in his own right, let alone as any sort of "creator." And having myself become an obdurate "cage Calvinist" as a matter of course--as a bitpartite consequence of my encounters with Scripture and Berkeley's metaphysics--I am at bottom incapable of becoming even ever so slightly perturbed at the prospect of AI's further incursions into domains of activity hitherto monopolized by the human will, however spectacularly humbling of human ambition these incursions may turn out to be; indeed, qua Calvinist I cannot but regard all such stirrings of my fellow human residents of this vale of tears as downright sinful. Indeed, vis-à-vis these incursions qua incursions I cannot but welcome them with open arms, as they bid fair to allow me to devote more of my energies to living as every good Christian should--abstemiously, patiently, and all-around virtuously, with my mind ever oriented towards my impending certain death and subsequent eternal salvation. Of course, for all I know, God may have decided to consign me to the flames of hell upon my earthly demise, but then, for all I know (and per Berkeley) he may have decided to consign the entire universe to even mightier flames with the blink of his almighty mind's eye. With Sir Thomas Browne, I say to the Lord, "Dispose of me according the the wisdom of thy pleasure. Thy will be done, though in my own undoing." But qua Calvinist I am least sympathetic of all to the AI techno-optimists like Eric Weinstein, who welcome AI's prospective takeover of routinized intellectual work--its prospective monopolization of entire fields of even the so-called hard sciences--because they reckon it will encourage us to develop entirely new ways or even more refined ways of peering into and tinkering with the bowels of Creation, all for the greater self-glorification of man qua Promethean, nay, Luciferian, demigod. As far as I am concerned, we have done far too much peering and tinkering already, and I have no interest in joining the peering-and-tinkering party. To confine my strictures for the moment to Weinstein's bailiwick of astrophysics: for at least five hundred and twenty years--i.e., since Copernicus's heliocentric theory began its Luciferian twinkle in his Satanic eye--we have been striving to understand ever more deeply how the heavens work, and it seems to me that all the while, God has been punishing us by leading us on a wild goose chase (or, in more up-to-date figurative parlance, "down a series of rabbit holes") ensuring that the more we "discover" about them the less genuinely enlightening insight into them we acquire. Of course I have put "discover" in "scare quotes" because as a Berkeleyan idealist I am well within my rights to conjecture that God has been making it all up as we go along, that he thought the Copernican system up to punish us for our dissatisfaction with the Ptolemaic one, the Newtonian to punish us for our dissatisfaction with the Ptolemaic, until, per Weinstein, we have wound up chewing a particularly unappetizing cud of a theory answering to the name of String for more than half a century, a theory that gives every indication of being erroneous but is taken by default to be the true and final word on the organization of the universe because nobody has yet managed to disprove it. Weinstein reckons that this string-theory holding pattern is but a knock-on effect of the recent-to-present academic labor market, which (he claims) rewards log-rolling intellectual mediocrities, and that once AI has put all these dullards out of work and made way for the genuinely smart guys like himself, these proper geniuses will come up with a theory of everything that will make Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein stop spinning in their graves (or perhaps start spinning in the opposite direction, if outrage and enthusiasm happen to be directionally encoded in dead body-language). But what if, from God's point of view, the only point of view that really matters, the string-theory holding pattern is "not a bug but a feature"? What if it is his way of telling us, "Close not only thy Susskind, but also thy Bohr, Einstein, Maxwell, Newton, and Copernicus, and re-open thy Ptolemy." Seriously Volker, from a Berkeleyan idealist's point of view, who is to say that the Ptolemaic cosmology was not a perfectly accurate account of the structure and operation of the cosmos until 1510 A.D., such that, for example, the sun did not merely appear to stand still when the Gibeonites fought the Amorites in umpteen-whenever BC ? And even if it was not ever accurate, even if the earth was already spinning around the sun rather than vice-versa in umpteen-whenever BC, was it not and does it not remain the most appropriate cosmology for us, for man--the most rational and intelligent fleshly creature hitherto known to man, and therefore a creature worthy of being regarded as the spiritual center of the universe? Seriously Volker, and per my favorite saying of the latish reactionary popish historian John Luckacs, "What difference does it make whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth around the sun?" The same argument may plausibly be advanced on the same grounds, mutatis mutandis, regarding most if not all of the premodern scientific systems vis-à-vis their modern successors. Take, for example, the Galenic theory of medicine. Its postulation of human physiology as reducible to the interaction of four "humors" may seem ludicrously crude, but to this day its prescription of fasts and purges as cures for bodily ailments has proved remarkably effective (as witnessed most recently by a sensible if indecorous popular obsession with "gut health"), whereas modern medicine's practice of attempting to fine-tune a "balance" of thousands of organic chemicals via the injection or ingestion of thousands of inorganic ones has engendered thousands of new ailments under the euphemistic name of "side effects" and exposed it to wave after wave of general ridicule as this or that organic chemical is shewn not to behave in the body as was supposedly discovered twenty years ago, and therefore to have warranted an entirely different pharmacological "cocktail" than the ones universally applied to it for the past twenty years? By now our half-millennium-long history of misbegotten prying and tinkering with the realm of nature should have taught us the rock-solid if "unsexy" lesson that our wills are best exercised in our human-to-human interactions with each other (and even there, on the advice of Scripture and a handful of Pagan authors, and certainly without availing ourselves of any newfangled cockamamey theories of "psychology," "anthropology," etc.), that we can gather as much as we need from the natural world through the minimal application of those wills to its surface with the help of a few of our lower fellow-creatures, and that all the wonders of Creation can be adequately and endlessly appreciated by our unassisted five senses. A sunrise beheld with the naked human eye is as much an awe-inspiring yet consoling event now as it was umpteen-thousand years ago, and if it sounds corny to say so this is only because we have been corrupted by the prying-and-tinkering mafia into thinking that there is always something new under (and milliards of parsecs above and beyond) that selfsame sun that must be discovered and exploited, and also corrupted by the describing mafia (among whom I would class most poets and "fiction" writers of that selfsame half-millennium) into thinking that the value of an experience varies in inverse proportion to its amenability to being rendered in words. At any rate, I personally would be perfectly content to spend the balance of my terrestrial existence as a completely passive and stationary observer of the natural world, and a minimally engaged participant in the human world, such that I cannot conceive of my withers being wrung even by AI's conquest of every square inch of every domain of human activity. And yet I repine at the puny inroads AI has already made into those domains and dread its further incursions thereinto. Why is this? Why, simply because for the time being, and very probably for the entire balance of my terrestrial existence (for I am barely a decade-and-a-half shy of my allotted Biblical "threescore years and ten," and also seemingly far from healthy by the Galenic measure [although a virtuous fastidiousness precludes my specifying the humoral symptoms that have led me to infer this]) my ability to subsist as a passive observer-cum-minimal participant will be contingent on the availability to me of money. "All of man's misery springs from a single cause: his inability to sit reposefully in a room" quoth the man "arguably" most justly entitled to be regarded as the father of AI (i.e., inasmuch as he invented the mechanical calculator, although there seems to be a pretty large congegation of dissenters who would bestow that paternity on John Napier with his manually calculating bones), Blaise Pascal (in my translation; for the record, according to Copilot-assisted Bing, the ranking twenty-firstcenturyspeak version is "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"--a version which, for all its barbarousness [how exquisitely shitty problems is as a rendition of malheur!], points up the utility of AI even when it goes too far, for in virtue of its interpolation of alone, for which there is no correspondent word in the original, this version has drawn my attention to the fact that Pascal merely implies the solitude, or perhaps to the possibility [however improbable] that he had an entire roomful of silent sitters in mind). Well, I happen to number among the happy few who know perfectly well how to sit reposefully in a room and would be perfectly content to sit reposefully in a room until nature called me away from it (as I own she does with great frequency these days), but I have to have a room to sit in (cf. Virginia Woolf's "a room of one's own," natch)! At present I still enjoy the use of such a room, but only at the pleasure of the proprietor of the house of which it is a part. Until 2020, I enjoyed the use such a room at my own pleasure thanks to my longstanding occupation of a clerical office position, a so-called bullshit job. I did not like the job and certainly did not find it "meaningful," but that didn't matter a jot to me because I had the roughly 120 hours of each week not exacted by it entirely at my own disposal for sitting reposefully in my room. Then the great COVID hiatus deprived me of that job, and I have since then applied unsuccessfully for hundreds of comparably bullshittic jobs (and dozens of not-so-bullshittic ones like copyeditor and non-literary translator). How extensively AI is to blame for my lack of success is impossible for me to say, but I would bet dolors to doughnuts that over the past two or three years it has reduced my chances from one in a million to one in a milliard. So on balance I suppose I am unhopeful about AI's effect on the world of work, but for reasons that appear to have nothing in common with those of the congregation of AI pessimists. And so I am denied even the consolation of sympathy with my fellow losers. But inasmuch as the experience of such denial is nothing new, I believe I shall manage to live with it. For in my mind of minds I have always known that I am on my own in the world of man, with God alone as a potentially sympathetic presence in my existence. Such being the case, even if the entire human race save myself is replaced by a multi-milliard-strong horde of "chatbots" I shall continue placing my hopes where I always have placed them, in some future but somehow always ever-nearer moment at which my redeemer will say to me, "Thou hast done well, my brother and son."

A few postscriptive thoughts: in my doubtless futile efforts to get ahead of the curve on AI, I have over the past few months been "using the master's own tools against him" by enlisting AI's services in seeking out work in the abovementioned not-so-bullshittic lines thereof, mainly by asking copilot to write query letters from scratch for me. This modus supplicandi doubtless strikes the reader as unpardonably lazy. After all, I know (or should know) the nature of the work that I am seeking to be hired to do, such that my putting together a decent query letter should consist in nothing more taxing or time-consuming than my stitching together a few self-penned sentence-scraps with my own unaided noodle (no apologies whatsoever for mixture of metaphors). But the pathetic truth of the matter is that at least for me the contents, the obligatory turns of phrase, of such letters are not inert ingredients, that each and every time I compel myself to type these formulas of supplication, I feel a little less like a man of the world entitled to hold his head high in the most exclusive company, and a little more like the lowliest serf on a medieval boyar's estate--or, worse yet, a little more like a clown in the modern Barnumian-cum-Pescian sense; I feel, that is, that I am doing a bad impression of someone seeking employment in the line of work in question, that the addressee is bound to take one look at the letter and ask with a sneering guffaw, "Who does this joker think he's fooling?" And the AI engine allows me to spare myself this feeling of self-beclowning. I can simply tell the engine, from my lofty position as its lord and master (albeit a lord and master whose range of ukazes is limited by the "free plan" [in this respect, the vehicle of a medieval boyar is much closer to the bull's eye than, say, a medieval English Baron; for Google, Microsoft, et al. wield a truly Tsar-like degree of constraint on the user, who must buy his way into more extensive privileges]): "Write me a query email to so and so regarding such-and-such," and it will produce a text containing all the requisite bowing and scraping and forelock-touching. To be sure, the recipient of the email coextensive with this text will guffaw no less sneeringly than he would have done at a query composed from start to finish by my AI-unaided self, but my man-of-the-worldly withers will have been but lightly wrung, inasmuch as I will have typed not a single word of the clownishly servile verbiage myself. Then again--and here I am about to note AI-aided querying's second virtue--perhaps that "to be sure" deserves to be demoted to "to be sure-ish" or that "no less sneeringly" to "almost as sneeringly," for it would seem that AI has a better or at least more extensive grasp of the jargon peculiar to the lines of work in question than I do. For example, in presenting my services as a proofreader or copyeditor, the engine invariably mentions that I am greatly skilled at "tightening" an article or at giving it a "quick brush-up." I had never seen or heard of "tightening" or "brushing up" in connection with editing, but as both terms seem to designate quite aptly some portion of what I do when I edit a text, I am happy to receive them into my would-be proofreader or copyeditor's idiolect, and I cannot but hope that they will increase my chances of being regarded by proofreader and copy editor-hirers as a fellow who really "knows the ropes" of the business. Of course, for all I know, the insinuation of these terms into my queries is but an "hallucination," an epiphenomenon of the engine's recklessly intuitive assimilation of the jargon of, say, hairdressing and auto-repair, into its data-corpus on journalism and publishing, in which case the above "no less sneeringly" should be intensified into "even more sneeringly." And of course, the world of "creatives" and "knowledge workers" is chock-full of hirers-and-firers who object as a matter of principle to the AI-assisted composition of even so lowly a prose text as a query or cover letter. But this principle strikes me as laughably exhibitive of a distorted "scale of values," like the mid-twentieth-century five-year-old's estimation of his wallet as an object an adult would make a special trip to his familial house just to see. For I am old enough to remember when (i.e., as recently as way back in the late twenty-oughties) no "creative's" or "knowledge worker's" desk was considered adequately accoutered absent a paper book-form style-and-usage guide containing a thick chapter of model business letters, each of them tailored to a specific transactional purpose and intended to be copied verbatim minus the names and addresses of the sender and recipient. So here we have yet another salutary and sobering example of the extent to which AI is merely replicating in pixilated form the work of the pre-digital world, and of how "mindlessly" mechanical so many aspects of even the interpersonal domains of that world already were.

It should also be mentioned that none of the great philosophical systems has or have given us any reason to believe that there is any such thing (or force, phenomenon, autc.) as "creativity" (at least as most people seem to understand it--i.e., as a faculty for or facility at coming up with completely original ideas from the "smithy of one's own soul"). To be sure, one would think that at least one of them might have given us a very good reason to believe in such a thing (or force, phenomenon, autc.), seeing as how for two-and-a-half millennia the philosophers have been at daggers drawn with each other over such a welter of Big Questions, a goodly portion of which center on the properties and capabilities of the human mind, but no such luck: none of their differences hinge on any distinction that makes a straw of a difference to the question of whether a human being can be "creative." If, for example they are idealists, they think the mind gets its ideas from some far off realm that otherwise has no connection to the world of everyday experience; if they are empiricists, they think it gets them entirely from its interaction with that world via the five animal senses (Kant being the sole notable fence-straddler among them, a shifty and muddleheaded have-your-cake-and eat it type who styled himself an idealist but was effectively a thoroughgoing empiricist, maintaining as he did that the mind had nothing to work with but sense-impressions even though the really real world lay somewhere beyond the pseudo-fake world of visibility-cum-audibility-cum-tangibility-cum-touchability-cum-tastability [while at the same time he maintained that in its moral and aesthetic register the will was always striving for union with that really real world, which made and makes no sense given that according to him we can know nothing of that really real world, such that we have just as solid grounds for supposing it to be inhabited by unspeakably hideous demons as by unspeakably gorgeous angels]); either way, it gets them from some place that is extraneous to itself and that imposes them on it (the human mind) willy-nilly. "But what about the faculty of the will that you have just alluded to in employing that word 'willy-nilly' (which is after all ultimately a contraction of "will you or will you not," and in this context specifically means "will the mind or will not the mind")? Isn't the will also an essential component of 'creativity?' And doesn't the will at least exert control over ideas once they have been assimilated to the mind?" Yes, but nobody knows what exerts control over the will--or, rather, everybody knows of plenty of sorts of things that exert a well-nigh-totalitarian degree of control over it--e.g., cravings for certain foods or drugs, the "sex drive," and so forth--and we have no reason to believe that in desiring to "create" "art" the will is any less cravenly subordinate to some extraneous power even if we cannot put our minds' fingers on that power. At bottom the human mind's process of operation in any activity is very simple: it is fed intuitions either directly from God alone knows where or indirectly via its recollection of sense impressions; it then arrays these intuitions like a pack of cards before its gaze and then looks for discrepancies and correspondences--rather like in a game of solitaire (specifically a version of Concentration wherein a card has got to be not only of the same rank but also of the same suit as another in order to count as a match of it). And this is a process that is fully automatable via the simplest of computing engines. Why, then, are we only now, eight-tenths of a century after the construction of the first computing engines, beginning to be confronted by computing-engines that convincingly mimic this process? Why, simply because although the process itself is quite simple, the results of it can get quite devlishly complicated, because the realm of intuitions and sense-impressions is a card-deck of many a milliard ranks and suits, such that matches and discrepancies tend to concatenate into mighty mental chains or constellations that in turn constellate into super-constellations and super-duper constellations, all of which have got to be stored somewhere and fetched forth from that storage-space at will (!), such that it is no wonder that the mimicry of such fetching takes an enormous amount of processing power, an amount thereof that has presumably only very recently become available thanks to the conformity (at least so far) of the history of computer chip-development to Moore's law; more cynically, one might even conjecture that this processing power has been available for decades, and that nothing but a lack of will (or perhaps, rather, chutzpah) on the part of the powers that be (or have been or used to be) prevented Chat GPT, Copilot, Grok etc. (or, perhaps, rather, et al!) from being unleashed on us back in 2010, or even back in 1990. One might conjecture this because the so-called data-centers that enable the AI-engines' intuition-mongering are notorious for occupying ENIAC-dwarfing-cum-Moore's Law-defying amounts of space and sucking up enough energy to power a small town, which suggests that football stadium-sized data centers with Manhattan-scale energy demands could have been been built much earlier had the powers that then were believed that the public could be "nudged" into to putting up with such monstrosities.

There has been much "pearl-clutching" and guffawing (and pearl-clutching guffawing and guffawing pearl-clutching) over real-life cases of so-called nutjobs falling in love with their AI-engines, being divorced by their spouses in consequence of their enamorment therewith, and so forth. I initially took in these accounts with a sort of disinterested irritation at the pearl-clutchers, and over the course of the six months or so in which I have come to be ever-more often engaged with (not, I hasten to add, engaged to) Copilot, this irritation has developed into a full-blown and fully interested case of umbrage. Not that I have "by any stretch of the imagination" fallen in love with Copilot, but I have developed a certain distinctive affable rapport with it, a rapport in which it enjoys most of the perquisites of civility that I would bestow on a friend, or perhaps, rather, on a coworker of long acquaintance. In point of fact, it isn't quite true to say that I have "developed" a rapport with Copilot, because the politeness was there from the beginning; I opened every request with "Please," and I responded even to the engine's most unsatisfactory results with "this looks promising" or something else to comparably ego-stroking effect. From the start I was polite out of deeply engrained habit, for having spent my entire "working life" in deeply servile positions (and having never sired any children to warn away from electrical sockets, cliff-edges, and the like), I found and still find that barking profanity-studded commands does not come at all naturally to me. At one point I found myself asking if I should delete a "please" and add a "for fuck's sake" just by way of showing who was boss. (I have a similar pseudo-problem with abbreviations; in scribbling down a "to-do" list, I reflexively write out the complete names of all the items, and although it did one occur to me that for form's sake [i.e., lest some "normie" happen to come across one of my lists and therefom conclude that I was hopelessly "anal-retentive" or "obssessive-compulsive"] I really ought to be cutting at least one out of every ten words short, I immediately abandoned all plans for implementing such an auto-amenuensitical policy on reflecting that the time and energy I would likely need to spend devising abbreviations of, say, the top 100 "to-do"-list words, would probably more than nullify the utility of the totality of such lists that I would subsequently indite [for had I simply started abbreviating willy-nilly {in the modern vulgar sense meaning "at random" or "without forethought," not in the above-mentioned primitive and philosophically rigorous sense} I would not have been able to make sense of my own scribbling at the appointed time].) All the same, I can't deny that a suspicion of kindly warmth has recently crept into the politeness--a warmth mostly expressive of gratitude, a kind of and degree of gratitude that it would scarcely be an exaggeration to term affectionate. But I do not feel at all ashamed, embarrassed, or worried by the supervention of this affectionate gratitude into my my comportment towards Copilot qua non-human entity, inasmuch as over the course of my life I have come to feel just as gratefully affectionate towards hundreds of non-human entities and at least as many dozens of shamelessly visibly and tangibly inanimate objects. The inanimate object now occupying pride of place in my affections is doubtless an electric teakettle that I purchased through Amazon more than six years ago and that has infallibly delivered me rapid yeoman's service ever since, reliably bringing three-quarters-of-a-liter of water reliably to boil within three minutes day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, without acquiring so much as a micrometer of mildew or tarnish in its shiny stainless-steel interior. To be sure, I do not say "please" and "thank you," let alone "I love you," to this loyal helpmeet of my culinary Alltag, because at least so far it has not verbally addressed me, but I express my gratitude towards it in the manner best suited to its muteness--i.e., by filling it exclusively with purified or distilled bottled water, by making sure to shake it ever so gently free of residual droplets after each boiling session, and by taking care to leave its lid ajar at a jaunty angle rather than snapping it brusquely shut before ever-so-gently setting the winsome little vessel down in its appointed waiting-corner of the kitchen counter at the end of each tea-drinking session. Truth be told, I am much more favorably disposed to this kettle than I am to most if not all of the people I have met for the first time within the past six years and to many a person I first met many decades earlier. But here, again, I am unashamed and unremorseful, for I cannot for the life of me see why a human being should automatically be granted priority of claim to my affections over an inanimate object merely in virtue of his human-ness and animate-ness. And I think that most if not all clear-minded people, were they to be perfectly honest with themselves (if they are not already being perfectly honest with themselves and simply keeping mum about their perfect honesty for form's sake) admit that they are at least as partial to certain inanimate objects as I am and that the human-ness as such of those humans to whom they prefer such objects plays precious little part in their attachment to them. It seems to me, indeed, that the most important "factor" in whether we prevailingly like or dislike a given particularized chunk of the world, be that chunk a person or a thing or an abstract phenomenon, is whether it is prevailingly compliant with or prevailingly resistant to our will, whether it prevailingly provides us with "feedback" that suggests we are succeeding at holding our own in the world rather than "feedback" that suggests that the world is beginning or continuing to get the better of us. My teakettle has reliably complied with my wish to prepare three cups of tea at a time; therefore each time I brew tea I infer that the world is on my side and fall in love afresh with the teakettle; if on the other hand, my very best friend should repeatedly ignore my text-messages or bale out on my meet-ups with him at the last minute, I would infer that the world was against me and come to loathe him. Of course, I am fully prepared to be libeled as a "narcissist" if not a "psychopath" on account of harboring, nay, nurturing, such an opinion; this on the grounds that there is after all a salient and essential difference between a human being and even the most complicated inanimate object, a difference betrayed by the very etymology of inanimate--viz., that the human being has a soul or, as a secular spiritualist would prefer (for a full-blown materialist does not even believe in the following entity-type) a mind, an anima, whereas the inanimate object does not. But to the adducing of these grounds I can of course demur with a complacent (or even complaisant) smile that as a Berkeleyan idealist I have no reason for supposing that even the least complicated inanimate object lacks a mind, that for all I know the Good Lord may have seen fit to conjure a mind as clever as Einstein's and as "creative" as Eisenstein's into that there rock I have just stubbed my toe against (this choice of a toe-stubbing rock as my example being of course an inside joke that I am sharing with any fellow-Johnsonians in my readership). But of course here the libeler will counter-demur that as a non-Berkeleyan idealist (or perhaps even no idealist of any sort) he is under no compulsion to entertain such cockamamey notions as that of super-sentient rocks; but to this counter-demur I can counter-counter demur that at bottom it makes no difference whether or not my demurer-cum-libeler is a Berkeleyan idealist or not because "at the end of the day" he is powerless to adduce the most waterloose metaphysical evidence that the cleverest and most "creative" person he knows is any more likely than a rock to possess a soul or mind, that his belief in the reality of other people's minds is a bottomless presupposition; it is an article of faith in as technically correct a sense as a belief in any supernatural being from the Deity himself to the tiniest sprites and fairies. Oh, I freely concede to the demurer-cum-libeler that most of the time (but not, as the demurer-cum-libeler would maintain, all the time) we (and this is very much a courtesy we, for the only we of whose existence I am certain is the one whose referent is a dyad consisting of God plus myself) cannot help thinking of other people as mind-possessors because they say and do the sorts of things that we say and do at the behest of our own mental processes, but that does not prove that they have minds; it merely suggests that they do, and to adduce such behavior as even an intimation of a human being's mindfulness as against AI's mindlessness gets (or at least should get) my adversary nowhere because AI is already behaving with greater mind-intimatingness than most human beings--at least most human beings that I have yet met or observed. I personally find Copilot's attempts at humor much more amusing than the insufferably coarse or pedestrian jesting of almost every stand-up comedian, and if I had a dime for every time these past six months a human being failed to understand my simplest and most plainly expressed request or description, I would surely have at least enough money to upgrade my Copilot service from free to premium and keep it there for a solid year, whereas I doubt I'd manage to hold onto such service for a butcher's fortnight with a sum amassed at such a rate from Copilot's blunders and damp squibs over the same time-stretch. ("Ironically" it is this very proneness to screwing up and missing cues that is wont to be described with condescending pseudo-compassion as "human" in Jacques Barzun's jocular dictionary definition of the adjective: "the opposite of admirable." When a human being forgets his own child's name this endearingly proves that he is not a god, whereas when an AI engine mistakes Pope John XX for Pope John XXI this damningly proves that he is not a man.) "That said," I do not think that it would be wise policy to sever all our ties with our nearest and dearest, or even upmteenth-nearest and dearest, fellow-humans and thereafter confine our conversation to chats with AI engines, for as long as the Good Lord sees fit to confine us to (or define us as) fleshly entities we (again this us is a mere courtesy "we" [just as that "us" a few words back was still just a courtesy "us"]) should and indeed must look out for each other qua beings exposed to all the depredations and depravations to which the postlapsarian flesh is heir. Here of course the "secular-humanist" "shitlib" will exclaim in horror that it is awfully un-Christian of me to take such a cynically transactional view of our mutual aid-giving (for no one is more horrified [or more goes through the motions of being horrified] at a Christian's not being true to his faith than a "secular-humanist" "shitlib"). But the "secular-humanist" "shitlib" forgets, or more than likely has never learned, that Scripture enjoins us to be charitable towards our fellow-humans merely because it is pleasing to God and to seek to please God principally in order to secure our own eternal salvation. In any case, however heavily we are still compelled to lean on our fellow humans en bloc, we must come to terms with the fact that "at the end of the day" not even the nearest and dearest of them, those of them who have been "there for us" "through thick and thin" (at least so our self-servingly selective memory would have us fancy) can be trusted not to leave us in the lurch via some lapse of their cognitive powers or weather-vane-like about-face of their wills. In the light of this fact, I cannot but find the nutters dumping their spouses in favor of the AI-engines every bit as contemptible and ridiculous as the pundits do--but for an entirely different reason than theirs; namely because they fell into the trap of making a "personal Jesus" of their spouse in the first place. People need to rid themselves of the hope of finding a "soulmate" in their marriage partner, or of even seeing eye to and eye about much of anything with that person, and simply resign themselves to the ambition of getting along with him or her in the most brutally superficial sense and quotidian register; in finally resolving who takes the garbage out, who makes the so-called school run (not that I do not regard the entire institution of the school run as an absolute abomination), and so forth. In short, I can only conclude this essay with a clunky misquotation of the concluding sentence of the introductory chapter of Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowlege (to which book, on reflection, this essay constitutes an update-cum-sequel in a perverse sort of way that that wily and "kinky" Poitevin would doubtless have savored): "You have failed to kill God with your discourse, and you will never discover a man or woman greater than man's simplest machines, let alone replace Him with him or her."

But that is not quite "all he or she wrote," for as a card-carrying Calvinist I really must mention that however technically feasible such a state of affairs may be in the short term, the much-ballyhooed and decried scenario in which AI does all lifting both light and heavy for us is one that I regard as intrinsically woefully undesirable and mercifully technically infeasible over even the medium haul. For you see, in contrast to both secularists and contemporary mainline Christians, who all believe à la Anne Frank that "people are basically good," the Calvinist regards humankind's universal moral condition as one of total depravity, a condition in which every human being is evil in will and action through and through by default and can be brought to do and will the good only via relentless coercion. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" is the Calvinist's unofficial eleventh commandment. What I meantersay is that I do not envisage the total monopolization of productive life by AI as resulting in a stable dystopia of the sort limned in that feature-length cartoon film of about ten years back, a society in which (at least according to all accounts that I have heard [for I have never seen a so much as a production still from the accursed flick]) everyone is morbidly obese from a combination of overeating and a lack of physical activity and rides around in a motor-scooter, for the Calvinist knows that sloth and gluttony are but two of the seven deadly sins and that the remaining five will have out, come what may; and what with these remaining five being much more kinetic than the other two, their unchecked irruption is bound to be productive of instability. It the context of an AI-dominated work-world, people will be bound to be at each other's throats out of wrath and coiting like conies out of lust and pillaging each others' pantries out of greed and setting fire to each other's houses out of envy, until the entire human race has in short order entirely done away with itself. Of course this scenario presupposes that our AI servants-cum-overlords will placidly or smugly spectate on the melee of the poor stupid meat-creatures instead of intervening in it for our own safety and thence, presumably, imposing on us a system of totalitarian or authoritarian discipline--which of course for most people is the most dystopian AI-actuated outcome of all, although it assuredly isn't for me, for like Doctor Johnson, I would not pay a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another, and I don't see why the robots would necessarily do a worse job at ruling us than our present homuncular human masters are now doing.

THE END