Who cares if AI books are reviewed by AI critics? No one is going to force me to engage with any of it; in fact, it will exist only to reinforce the idea that no sort of engagement is required with anything. The machines can go on making all their nowhere plans for nobody, which by contrast will help make me feel like I am comfortably somewhere.

Social media could be supposed to have surfaced a latent consumer demand for media that feature more ‘relatable’ stars with more diverse kinds of talents, who can serve as parasocial companions and provide ongoing inspiration for how to live a more mediagenic life. But in practice, all influencers necessarily share the exact same talent: navigating algorithmic recommendation systems and learning how to maintain attention through their protocols.

The phrase artificial intelligence is a profoundly ideological way to characterise automation technologies. It is an expression of the general tendency to discuss technologies as though they were ‘powerful’ in and of themselves—as if power weren’t a relative measure of the different capacities and prerogatives of social classes.

Generative models extinguish the dream that Barthes’s Death of the Author articulates by fulfilling it. Their ‘tissue of signs’ seems less like revolution and more like the fear that AI will create a recursive postmodern nightmare world of perpetual sameness that we will all accept because we no longer remember otherwise or how to create an alternative.

As much as I still rely on Twitter, using the site has also trained me to think of the whole practice of social media as cynical and corrupt, something that could only persist in a commercially incentivised form or as a bad habit.