I am using ChatGPT to get feedback on a story I wrote. I know I probably shouldn’t do that but the story is about a person interacting with an inhuman machinic force, so then it kinda makes sense to me to use an artificial intelligence for feedback. I don’t really like the AI’s suggestions, to be honest. What’s funny is that they are too human. The machine is giving me suggestions to better humanize my characters and some of the “point” of the story is that these characters have become machines. But the computer doesn’t want me to do that.
Example Revision:
Here's a brief revision of a part of your dialogue where you can reduce exposition and build tension:
Before (Expository):
"I assess client needs and help develop the programming of consumer noospheric advertisement profiles primarily for subscription and merchandise sales based on correlating biometrics and metadata from proprietary marketing software."
After (More Tension, Less Exposition):
McKenzie laughed nervously, twirling her fork between her fingers. "It's... well, I guess I make sure people buy things without even realizing they're buying them." She paused, noticing Thomas’s blank stare. “Does that sound crazy?”
The machine wants me to make the dialogue more human. But that’s not really the point. McKenzie should sound inhuman.
And then I’m like maybe the machine has a point. What am I doing. Is it worthwhile to even write a story about machine-like people. Whoops I did it. “Artificial intelligence” is a bullshit marketing term, machines will never be people, it’s much easier to turn people into machines. But stories are painfully and gloriously human. Is the horror of the story I’ve written that it isn’t even a story? What kind of a person would write this? (I wrote it.)
So then there’s another level where I’m like: I should just publish it like it is, basically tensionless, a sort of disconnected schizoid ramble, mirroring a digital feed, a forgettable blend hodgepodge of images interspersed with ads (the story is called Ad Break) until the one random thing traumatizes you and you still have dreams about that one face, that one scream. (For me it’s the brick going through the windshield, no visual just the screaming.)
And then there’s a level above that level where: all of that is part of the novel Virtual Mineshaft I’m writing. All of it, the story, the feedback from ChatGPT, my analysis of the feedback, this sentence. It’s all part of the novel I’m writing which is a character study which is me writing on Substack. I mean my character writing on Substack. Then instead of this being tragic it’s actually a brilliant character study. It’s not me, unsure if I have become a human machine, it’s a character who exemplifies a truth about the current state of humanity. There’s a lived asocial reality and it isn’t boring and navel-gazing, it’s actually some of the best art possible. The tragedy is a reflection of the desacralization of everything, especially the sacred.
To write at all feels like a betrayal of life. Writing is a dissection, an autopsy report. Life is not written. Life smolders and grows. Life is a communion.
I am living a life of quiet desperation. (Sometimes I scream.) Erm uh I mean the character in my novel is living a life of quiet desperation, looking at his reflection in the tempered glass of his zoo exhibit, a domesticated planet. My character is writing stories at work instead of working and wow it’s tragic that this character can’t even write a story, all he can do is make machine-people and pretend they reveal something about the human condition. What a tragedy that this man writes tales of machine-people because that’s all he can do. Then I’ll get high on my own supply and say: that’s all anyone can do now. I mean my character does that. What a dick. He sometimes thinks people are lying if they think otherwise. The alternate (good) interpretation is that he lacks the eyes to see. The good version of this story is that I am so corrupted by modernity that I cannot live the myth and all my work is this desperate attempt to deny that painful reality. If that were true then I would probably cry in the back of the work van listening to the two guys up front having a totally normal conversation. I, I mean my character, would be the sort of guy who silently cries while sitting on a bucket in the back of a moving work van listening to his brother-in-law and coworker have a totally banal, normal conversation about local construction or something. He would sit there crying on a bucket because two people talking is so normal and so nothing (everything) and it’s so far beyond him and they are literally sitting three feet away.
And then my character re-reads the previous paragraph a few days after writing it and he starts writing this sentence which is about the fact that writing is living. The crackling, electric air is here between us right now. I, I mean he, is communing through this sentence. That’s just how it is for some people. I, I mean my character, is, whether he likes it or not, a creature who lives through written words.