Once, many years ago, I was on a panel discussing something for a new redundant culture publication with a few different writers of my cohort concerning the topic of “Fake News” — a panel which I gladly participated in, not because of any particular specialist knowledge I would have held on the subject, but on account of my moneylessness and endless desire for love and attention. At some point we found ourselves running short of things to offer — I’m sure our ideas were not particularly original. My colleagues were all widely published, and very experienced, with a reasonable degree of renown in our (admittedly very small) publishing ecosystem. But, of course, what occurs upon a panel’s culmination is fascinating, and usually more telling than the conversation itself.

There is something I mean to say here about the way ideologues, talking heads, writers, fabulous guests (etc) can be good at preparing lines, studying up on the angles, and consecrating any official opinions on “what is to be said about what is to be done”. Anyone who’s been at a writer’s festival can identify the intellectual posture one needs to adopt to fill fifty minutes of talking. The transference of these notes across parallel lines can happen awkwardly, or seamlessly, but it is more or less a case of speaking in turn. Thinking on the spot, which is to say, thinking quickly, deliberately, and with feeling — is a different form of knowledge altogether, more revealing than speaking from mental cue cards. It is what separates an active mind from merely an educated one.

Toward the end of our conversation we had somehow got on to the topic of algorithms, as is probably logical given the subject matter and the moral panics that circulated widely during 2018, precisely one million years ago. The official conversation had been wrapped up at this point, and so we found ourselves at a juncture where one of the participants, who is now somewhat of a successful online writer known for having “takes” that correspond uncannily well with what the online world wants to hear, responded with bafflement to someone else’s query. 

We were saying: how troubling was it, and how uncanny really, that algorithms so heavily surveilled our movements and digital footprint as to easily market back to us what we wanted quickly and without reservation? Working, as they did, to offer an image of ourselves back to us in the shape that we “wanted” to exist in the world?

Yet, in the face of this concerning cultural development — the mining of our data and the manipulation of information and the narrowing of our echo chambers, our colleague said: no problem. This panel member decided — actually — that we might even be overreacting, saying rather blithely: “I just see no issue with this kind of thing. I like it when I see an ad on Facebook and it shows me a product that I want to buy. It’s very convenient”.

I can’t remember how I replied to this, or if I did at all, but the comment stayed with me, like a scab, where almost nothing else that my reasonable, intelligent and accomplished panel members said remained.

A technically proficient columnist, this person had, in their work, begun to embody a sort of living breathing algorithm. They could detect and apprehend motifs. They had succeeded on account of their lack of apprehension. Yet it was clear based on responses to their work by followers and peers that accruing bylines, followers, or even producing “good articles” could not (FKA Twigs voice) make someone a thinker, even if it technically made you a writer. (What divides the two types of people basically comes down to how I personally feel like defining this on any given day.)

Style — once considered a tidy sum of our tastes, habits, desires, and hesitations, the asymmetries that distinguish us from other people — is now a feature that we surrender to a digital pattern recognition machine, which attempts to replicate our own but often falls short, feeling convincing enough but too superficial in its noticing to get to the heart of human concerns. It sees enough to imitate, but not to understand. Of course, humans are trained for pattern recognition, but it has become clear we had surrendered our innate comprehension for an external one and believed it wholly to be ours. I’d occasionally read perfectly gorgeous, well-reasoned pieces by writers only to be completely confounded by what they would say publicly, be it on panels or elsewhere. The voice didn’t quite match the mind that was supposed to produce it. They, too, had mistaken extraneous pattern recognition for intelligence.

To be a writer in the digital ecosystem increasingly means being “tapped in” — more of a trend forecaster than a poet laureate of the times. I’ve published things that I knew were mid but technically magnetic, encouraged by editors, and they occasionally did well. That which feels buzzy, prophetic, reactive, but or trend conscious thrives in the ecosystem of digital publishing. In this economy truth could be bent to suit an (as of yet unexpressed) consensus, which increasingly feels wrong, and totally inappropriate to the times. (Recall the criticism of Lauren Oyler wanting to be the “Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot”.) Everyone loves a pithy quote that has been graciously extended to the tune of 800 words. What passes for “critical” writing now is really just social temperature-taking, which means value itself is unstable, and little more than a mood.

To say this, however, only poses the question of what defines value, what makes a “writer” or even a good one.

There is no use in implying that literature should be beholden to a universal set of standards, given that it is, of course, subjective. Still, “good writing” might approach an issue from the perspective of a problem-solver or an armchair philosopher, but that, I think, is not its primary goal. The writing that activates me is the writing that demonstrates someone doing their “working out” in public — which makes it seem, on the face, somewhat mathematical. But to say that writing is like math couldn’t be further from the truth. This is a Flaubertian idea, that “poetry is as precise as geometry”. More often than not I think this “working out”, especially done with others, more or less constitutes what Lauren Berlant might call “the story” animated by “expressive and emancipative forms of love”. It has less to do with arriving at a conclusion, or even necessarily having a clear one, which is altogether different from having a strong beginning, middle and ending. The goal is not to be a calculator, but to illustrate the hand approaching paper to do the “working out” as it attempts a kind of long division. It is to illuminate how the human mind works, to not even solve a problem or extract meaning from circumstance but to engage with the elan vital and see what is produced from that engagement, to illustrate the connective thread between the heart, body, world, and brain — in short, to showcase “the human heart at conflict with itself”, which, in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner argued was the only thing worth writing about. In fact, sometimes the conclusion of a piece written by a writer I respect might be something I totally disagree with, or maybe I would have come to a totally different conclusion based on their experiences. Sometimes that is even preferable.

What am I saying? To be let into the inner world of someone with a capacious mind, to be taken with them to some deeper place, is as relevant as the ability to arrive quickly to the right decisions, the right conclusions, the right opinion. It is remarkable that a specific form of sensitivity can be imbued into something only to be felt by someone else 100 years later. What is wrong, jagged, and pointy in someone’s work becomes their hallmark, and should be celebrated. It is an act of grace on behalf of the writer to allow witnesses unto their slow, deliberate ascent. “We choose an utterance, a gesture.” Says Marianne Robinson. “By these means we identify ourselves, and in the same moment, discover and create ourselves.”

When I read words like those, I’m entering into a dialogue with a faded language, getting a feel for the routes a writer has laid out and being given a chance to follow those same discursive pathways I may not have had a chance to understand previously — as Roland Barthes said:

I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metronomic labor.

*

If a conversation with oneself is what produces truly great writing, then what is to be made of this new vernacular — of a writer in conversation with the algorithm, or in this case, AI? All the writing we do, now, exists in perpetual comparison, or competition, with its stylistic trademarks. But it’s not unreasonable to expect that a writer sound like a human, with eccentricities and tics and unpredictable turns of phrase, that is — they should sound like themselves. Of all my favourite comments on “artificial intelligence”, actually, one of them has less to do with AI but with the concept of intelligence generally, and comes to me in the form of a quote by Miss Susan Sontag:

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence’.

That this quote has been sounding off in my mind for the last few months seemed somewhat random, and at first I did not attribute it to my growing discontent with AI-style writing, whose influence has become overbearing.

In recent months I’ve noticed an almost overwhelming amount of Substack essays, infographics, and fashion articles which carry with them the surreptitious but no less foul hint of ChatGPT style phrasing, like a scent that seems at first to belong to no one and then, suddenly, to everyone. It’s in the text box below a Julia Fox Halloween outfit, claiming that Jackie Kennedy keeping on her Chanel suit was “about trauma, power, and how femininity itself is a form of resistance”. It’s in the Instagram captions for Potts Point gay guys as they reflect on living their life poetically amid the zeitgeist.

You know the tone. It’s self-aggrandising. It’s cheap profundity that fancies itself as something more, angling towards the clear, embodied and fulsome wisdom of Joan Didion but reading more like Rupi Kaur — a desire to achieve “literariness” rather than to create the lucidity of thought we associate with literature. A performance of wisdom rather than a demonstration of thinking. A presumptuous kind of affect that doesn’t live up to the gravity of what is being stated. A very strange kind of enjambment that can’t find its centre and repeats the same two or three rhythms without diversifying, like a strange mix of slam poetry and sophomoric autotheory or student essay.

A thought expressed by AI overwhelmingly seems to overstate its claims while doing very little to convincingly substantiate them. What’s stranger is that, on account of the easy consumability of this style, I actually believe people have come to write like this, unconsciously, because they have (accurately, depressingly) come to believe that others will perceive this style of writing as “intelligent”. It’s rare that people who are shallow will properly realise that people who aren’t shallow can tell they’re shallow. Quick to give themselves away, minds of this stature believe believe that writing is as easy as it looks and can be convincingly faked, which of course is not true. Many people have the ability to write, yes. Very few people are actually good writers.

We have arrived at a moment in time where “The feed” reveals more of the world outside it than it does even of how we respond to its original dominion, that is, how we might respond to a news article, tweet, or meme. We remain affixed to the culture of the online ecosystem even as we exist in the negative space of the IRL world — which now seems less “true” than its counterpart. Maybe I am saying this because it is easy to underestimate how much “algorithmic thinking” has colonised our own thinking even outside of the screen, to the point that we can’t speculate into new, as of yet uncharted directions. To quote Nathan Jurgenson, in his article “The IRL Fetish” for The New Inquiry:

If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected … The logic of social media follows us long after we log out. There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.

A “thought” is only ever as good as the thinking that produced it. One thought is not thinking. Two, three more thoughts arranged horizontally on a page can do little to convince me a writer is intelligent. That barely qualifies as writing: it’s typing. Yet so much of the writing I expositionally described in the beginning of this essay — the writing that describes itself —  reads to me as if it has been produced in this fashion. Writing designed to flatter the image of the person creating it rather than to demonstrate their inner workings — a form of collected opinions by other people that the writer saw on the internet and strung together, like a patchwork, to market cynically back to people. “Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth”. Wrote Ursula Le Guin: “A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it”.

*

All this is not necessarily new. But what is uncanny about this writing is how highly it thinks of itself, and thinks so little of the kind of person who would otherwise be producing it, or of the life of mind required to exact it. Sometimes a “viral” Substack essay will read to me like little else than a litany of popular tweets that have been arranged to confirm the reader’s worldview. The “work” is condemned to obscurity.

What should present a standard contradiction is indeed the setting of our times. More often than not, what the writer is saying is not necessarily “incorrect.” They may have accurately described, or diagnosed, a problem. They may have spoken toward something absolutely real. But invention is not the same as originality, and originality, as I mean to refer to it, is not about novelty. It’s about contact. Occasionally the prose might even flare — a line break here, a clever adjective there — if not completely obfuscate the complete lack of thinking taking place on the page, or the proposal of new ideas, or “original” ideas. By which I mean ideas that were authentically generated from the author, the author’s “thinking”. That requires a kind of legibility, however unfashionable the term has become, and in regard to its readers, a desire to be seen, understood, and interpreted. It demands that the writer risk a certain level of exposure in the desire to connect with a reader, and the possibility of being criticised. That is, it requires vulnerability.

Maybe that sounds a little unscientific. Still, what else would you call it? The exposure implicit in real writing isn’t cosmetic. It should approach the erotic: that “fully lit up” quality of attention, the knowledge that the writer would give the reader the same kind of focus that they give their subjects, instead of lazily submitting it to a generative text app. Instead, what we often meet is an almost hand-wringingly anxious tone that either says what everyone else is thinking, or pre-empts what they think everyone else is thinking, instead of attempting to be interesting. What’s stranger is the way this form of stylistic cowardice is seen as superior — some altruistic admission of not knowing, which frees you, in effect, from accountability. Though I have some issues with the essay and it’s claims, it reminds me of a passage from Merve Emre on Mary Gaitskill:

For her, there exists no obvious relationship between the complexity of human experience and the profusion of prose; no need for qualification or subordination, the pile-up of pretty phrases to approximate an awful truth that will only recede before us. For Gaitskill, part of growing up as a writer has been learning to accept “my own stringent limitations when it comes to giving form to impossible complexity.” For her reader, it feels refreshing to finally have a grownup in the room, laying down the law but not really caring whether you follow it or not.

I’ve often written catalogue essays for friends, mostly artists, and usually the writing begins as a conversation that never really ends. Their work begins as a sort of prompt: it opens up a space for a viewer to engage with, and I try to enter it without trampling anything. What comes out is part anecdote, part theory, part personal history, a hybrid form that keeps the work tethered to life. It’s a sort of attempt to write about art without flattening it into critique, or to feel like I’m reading off a menu, or writing a cover letter for a friend to make the audience feel that this person is a real artist. When an acquaintance mentioned that they prefer this rather than reading something expressed entirely in artspeak (often I’ll integrate historical queue or some such thing, but only to illustrate a point), I felt surprised, even though I don’t find that there’s much to engage with when it’s clear something is thinking within the constraint of a textbook.

The pieces tend to be scattered, which is fine. I suspected that the little tics and turns of phrases might not be appropriate for the art world. I didn’t think it was actually preferable, so when that feature was pointed out by readers, I took it to be a form of assurance: theory can illuminate, but it can also dim the light it’s meant to describe. It became clear to me that I was writing this way because it was a trait I admired in others, not because I necessarily considered it superior.I learned it by reading people who wrote as though their minds were still attached to their bodies, that is to say, in conversation with the world and with other people. Mary Gaitskill, among others like Vivian Gornick, Jamaica Kincaid, Margot Jefferson, Harry Crews, David Wojnaricz, Kate Jennings etc, have done some profound thinking on the page, and done it such a way that cannot be faked, layered over with pretty affectations, or spun into prose so dense that it obscured its intentions. That is not to say that they sacrifice style, but that the style (or form) enhances, serves, and integrates the implicit demands of the content. The point is not to obfuscate the work but to write alongside it.

Intellectual vulnerability is something I’ve often craved in my relationships — be they familial, platonic, or romantic. In “Intimacy: A Special Issue” Lauren Berlant defines intimacy not as private or emotional closeness but as an aspiration for a narrative about shared knowledge and understanding, arguing that “intimacy builds worlds; it creates spaces where people can imagine themselves and others as connected through shared affects and orientations”. During the pandemic, I was not productive, as many artists and writers were; I felt that the tap had run dry without any real sense of connection with others, and craved this kind of open-ended, collaborative, free-flowing exchange with others who were dissatisfied with superficial interpretations of the world and the actions of others, and who found intimacy in the asking of questions rather than rushing to Google in order to know. It would make sense that without this my world would have felt smaller, more restricted by the limited imaginations of others during these cold years.

So much of what makes me feel alive is that electric charge that emerges between myself and another person who also shares a certain curiosity about the world, with a near desperate desire to know what it reveals about a new direction. Deprived of this essential thread, it felt like I was lost in the world, psychologically adrift with no way to hold fast, or be rooted in a shared reality — one that could be touched, understood, or felt, even though what we were all experiencing seemed universal.

The overenthusiastic deployment of AI writing has revealed how little curiosity there is for this form of connection, and how rarely people can identify how its absence in their life makes them unhappy, unsatisfied, unstimulated. Good writing has always been an aftereffect of that encounter, the sense that an encounter has taken place, the residue of having brushed up against someone else’s mind. Good writing isn’t just borne from these connections. As the kind of chatter that follows a popular book or article proves, it may actively encourage them. For The New Yorker, Cal Newport has reflected on writers who use ChatGPT, and found that it worked less as a tool that substituted the thinking of the writer than it did as a “sounding board”:

For the writers [Stacey] Pigg studied and the students I interviewed for this article, ChatGPT was not so much a perfect plagiarism tool as a sounding board. The chatbot couldn’t produce large sections of usable text, but it could explore ideas, sharpen existing prose, or provide rough text for the student to polish. It allowed writers to play with their own words and ideas. In some cases, these interactions with ChatGPT seem almost parasocial. Chris told me that Chat — his nickname for ChatGPT — was a “good conversation partner.”

I’ve said before that many of the issues with AI aren’t necessarily exclusive to AI as much as they are a particularly dispiriting endpoint in cultural transformations at large — the perfectly admirable desire for “representation” morphing uncannily into a desire for what is instead “relatability”, the acquiescence to algorithms and group-think as a substitute for collectivity and collaboration.

The cheapness of much of Substack writing comes to mind when I consider the above. Substack, to me, feels no different to blogging; which in it’s time produced many gorgeous forms of writing, both lowbrow and highbrow, whether it be Mark Fisher’s k-punk blog or Tavi Gevinson’s “the style rookie” and the many imitators that fell far and in-between. Yet Substack has done very little to offer any sense of similar intimacy or innovation. It fundamentally exists within a different time and vastly different ecosystem. As a subscription model, writers are incentivised to care less about process than what can reach the farthest. All we get is endless ruminations about “girlhood” or “slop” that capture the worst parts of blogging without any of the necessary interiority, and the worst parts of legacy media thinkpieces, without the touch of an editor. If the image once belonged to the people, perhaps the essay, too, has been democratised, stripped of its aura, hurried along into shareability. Perhaps the poor essay still reveals, through its derivative gestures, the outline of the writer it tried to replace. If AI prose is haunted by the scent of intelligence, perhaps that deficit is, realistically, its only true human quality — a yearning for thought that cannot quite think itself. What we read now may be something like a ghost of thought, but a ghost still suggests there was once a body.

Michelle De Kretser, in her book Theory & Practice, describes working at a market research company where she had to collect data from consumers and delineate it piece by piece into discrete categories — “sorted, classified and assigned a numerical code”. The voice of the poor essay demands we view information as accumulative, as a collection of apposite thoughts, ideas and trends into what amounts to a literary graph. But I love what Michelle Kretser writes after, and how she distinguishes the pursuit of knowledge in a way that challenges the raw strategy of accumulation:

Knowledge was different: unbounded, endlessly renewed. I wanted the roll and slosh of its depths beneath me, the risk of drowning. I wanted to carry me beyond the limits of myself.

Image: Johnny Briggs