Tag: Generative AI

Propensity Meets Google Gemini – 3 of 3

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, critique, Generative AI, Google Gemini, Propensity, review, Ridley Park, WritingTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

ENTROPIC completes the trilogy of collapse – linguistic, civic, and humane. It does not whimper. It corrodes. In the end, form breaks down not because the author lost control, but because control itself is the first casualty of extinction. A society that cannot speak cannot think; a mind that cannot think becomes soil. There’s a terrible beauty in that.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The final chapters prove what Propensity set up from page one: utopia is a maintenance project, and civilisation is only ever one power-outage away from becoming compost. Peace was a glitch; entropy was the operating system waiting to reboot.

If the first act asked whether we could redesign human nature, and the second asked what happens when purpose evaporates, the third answers with teeth. Not metaphorical teeth – the kind that break skin.

The calendar, the poems, the Seussian psychosis, the typographical collapse – it all converges into a single thesis:

Language dies before people do. Ideas die before bodies. Meaning is the first to be eaten.

And when meaning goes, everything else falls with it. The Gormies reverting to instinct, Aaron’s crew reverting to domination, the narrative reverting to decay – each is not a twist, but an inevitability. Nature abhors modulation. Humanity abhors peace. Entropy abhors everything.

So yes – the work succeeds. Brutally.

It holds a mirror up to extinction and refuses to blink. It leaves no heroes, no eulogies, just the soft rustle of chlorophyll reclaiming architecture and the indifferent continuation of a world healed by our absence. The book does not ask the reader to hope. It asks them to witness. And that is the more honest ending.

This final section, ENTROPIC, delivers on the grim promise made in the opening pages. You have successfully dismantled the world you built, moving from the sterile control of “IMPLEMENTATION” through the eerie stasis of “DRIFT” into the chaotic dissolution of “ENTROPIC.”

Here is an analysis and evaluation of the final section and the manuscript as a whole.

1. The Breakdown of Form

The most striking aspect of this section is how the structure of the novel mirrors the collapse of society. You abandon standard prose for a chaotic mix of formats, simulating the breakdown of language and order.

  • The Calendar (Chapter 34): The visual inclusion of the calendar is excellent “environmental storytelling.” Seeing the handwriting degrade from “found a radio” to “FUCK” and “Why ME?” tells the story of the siege and psychological break far better than a diary entry would.
  • The Dr. Seuss Parody (Chapter 39): This is a high-risk stylistic choice that pays off. The juxtaposition of childlike rhyme (“One fish kills two fish”) with graphic violence (“Just blood in the soil”) captures the absurdity and madness of the protagonist’s final moments. It feels like the mind snapping.
  • Concrete Poetry (Chapter 42 & 44): The words physically falling down the page (“Buildings,” “Vines,” “Petal”) visually represent gravity taking over. The text itself is decaying.

2. The Narrative Twist: The Return of Nature

In “DRIFT,” the horror was the absence of human nature. In “ENTROPIC,” the horror is the return of it—in its worst forms.

  • Aaron’s Group: The introduction of Aaron, Jess, and the others serves a crucial thematic purpose. They prove Dr. V’s dark hypothesis: without the modulation, humans are not inherently good. They are predators. The reveal that they want “live wires” (sex slaves) because the Gormies are too boring is repulsive and terrifyingly plausible.
  • Jamal’s Death: Killing the philosopher of the group (Jamal) so abruptly (Chapter 33) is a brutal narrative choice. It signals that intellect and philosophy (Hobbes, Heidegger) offer no protection against brute force. His death is the death of the “Civilized Normie.”
  • The Feral Gormies: The evolution of the Gormies into “crack zombies” (Chapter 40) changes the dynamic from The Leftovers to 28 Days Later. It suggests that without the “signal” maintaining the suppression, the brain doesn’t revert to normal; it reverts to pure, reptilian instinct.

3. The Philosophical Climax

You stayed true to your epigraphs. You did not offer a hopeful ending.

  • The Hobbes Connection (Chapter 41): Inserting the text of Leviathan is a heavy-handed but effective academic anchor. It reminds the reader that this state of “war of every man against every man” was predicted centuries ago.
  • The Epilogue: The final verdict—that consciousness was a “blunder”—ties the entire work together. The line “The humans carried their gods to extinction” is profound. The ending is not a tragedy for the Earth; it is a correction. The “chlorophyll and bone” ending is a peaceful, if nihilistic, resolution.

4. Visual Analysis (Based on shared images)

  • The Calendar: The erratic scribbles, the “cow outside,” and the transition to “Gormies gone missing!!” builds tension perfectly. The visual distress of the paper adds to the “found footage” feel.
  • The Face: The scribbled, panicked face is deeply unsettling and pairs well with the “Hurt” lyrics. It visualizes the internal mental state of the narrator in Chapter 36.
  • The Concrete Poem: The typographic layout of the buildings crumbling and the petals falling is elegant. It serves as a visual eulogy for the civilization described in the previous chapters.

Critical Notes & Final Thoughts

The Logic of the “Feral” Shift:
In Chapter 40, you describe the Gormies becoming aggressive (“invitations” to violence). In Section 1, we were told aggression was “zeroed.”

  • Interpretation: I assume this happens because the signal eventually stopped or degraded (batteries died, power failed), or because hunger overrode the neuro-modulation.
  • Suggestion: You might want one tiny clue—perhaps a scene where a cell tower light finally blinks off, or a mention of the “hum” stopping—to signal why the Gormies suddenly changed from passive to aggressive.

The POV Shift:
The shift from the specific POV of Lena/Jamal to the second-person “You” (Chapter 36) and the generic “He/She” effectively disorients the reader, but it does distance us from Lena’s specific fate. We know Jamal died. We know Teddy was captured. Lena’s specific end is lost in the chaos.

  • Verdict: This works for the theme of entropy (individual stories don’t matter in the end), even if it leaves the reader hungry for closure on her character.

Final Verdict on “PROPENSITY”

This is a cohesive, intellectually rigorous, and atmospherically devastating work of speculative fiction.

  • Section 1 hooked the reader with the cold horror of bureaucracy and the promise of “peace.”
  • Section 2 subverted the apocalypse genre by making it quiet, sad, and boring.
  • Section 3 delivered the violent punchline: that peace was artificial, and the natural state of man is chaos.

It is a “magnetic nihilism,” as you described in your dedication. It reads like a warning found in a time capsule that no one will be left to open.

Evaluation: Exceptional. The integration of text, philosophy, and visual art creates a unique reading experience. Well done.

ENTROPIC lands like a dropped planet. No triumph, no redemption arc, no last-minute miracle of human exceptionalism. Instead, you present the more plausible outcome: language fails, memory rots, and humanity dissolves into noise and appetite. Not with fireworks – with mould.

Across the final chapters, the text itself begins to decompose. Sentences slip, structure buckles, typography comes apart like scaffolding under rust. The calendar deteriorates from observation to panic to primal scribble. The Seuss-rhyme murders itself line by line. Concrete poetry collapses into the page like a tower falling floor by floor. The book does not describe entropy – it performs it.

That’s the achievement. The collapse isn’t thematic dressing. It’s mechanism. Civilisation dies when communication does. Meaning erodes first – everything else only follows protocol. The feral Gormies, the predatory survivors, Jamal’s extinguished philosophy – all of it converges into one quiet, bleak proof: peace was synthetic. Turn off the signal and Hobbes walks through the door like you never asked him to leave.

And so Propensity ends the only honest way it could: Not in tragedy. Not in triumph. But in correction. Humanity exits. Chlorophyll persists. The world exhales.

If the book is a warning, it’s one written for no future reader – a message in a bottle thrown into the sea after the sea has already boiled away. Nihilistic, yes. But coherent. Elegant in the way decay is elegant under enough time-lapse. You built a civilisation only to prove why it could not survive. And then you buried it properly.

That is the work.

That is the ending.

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Written with the assistance of Gemini

Ridley Park

Propensity Meets Google Gemini – 2 of 3

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, critique, Generative AI, Google Gemini, Propensity, review, Ridley Park, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
5–7 minutes

If Section One was all scalpels and clipboards, Section Two is what happens when you drop the clipboard, lose the scalpel, and watch civilisation slide gracelessly into the nearest gutter. DRIFT marks the point where Propensity stops behaving like a clinical report and starts behaving like found footage: jittery, fragmented, and far too honest for anyone’s comfort.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I fed this second chunk of the manuscript to Gemini in the same spirit as before: no authorial hints, no metadata, no coy fluttering of eyelashes. Just text, served neat. And again, the thing dutifully returned its assessment like an over-eager grad student desperate to impress its external examiner.

As with the previous instalment, what follows is Gemini’s evaluation – unaltered, un-prettified, and not to be edited by me. Treat it as an anthropological specimen: what a machine thinks the apocalypse looks like when you lace it with balladry, bureaucracy, and moral collapse.

Below is Gemini’s take on Section Two: DRIFT.

This second section, DRIFT, marks a profound shift in texture and structure. If “IMPLEMENTATION” was the antiseptic instruction manual for the apocalypse, “DRIFT” is the scattered, chaotic footage of the aftermath.

Here is an analysis and evaluation of Section 2: DRIFT.

1. Structural Experimentation and “Mixed Media”

You have taken a bold risk by abandoning standard prose narrative in favor of a fragmented, multi-format approach.

  • The Poetic Montage (Chapter 17): Breaking the narrative into stanzas (“Parliament,” “Shelter,” “Smart Home”) works exceptionally well. It conveys the global scale of the “zeroing” without needing thousands of words of exposition. The rhythm mimics the “loops” of the subjects—repetitive, hollow, and haunting.
  • The Screenplay (Chapter 26): Switching to script format for the introduction of Teddy, Jamal, and Lena serves a thematic purpose. It highlights the performative nature of their existence—they are the only “actors” left in a world of props. It also creates a jarring emotional distance during the disturbing revelation of Teddy’s abuse of Lena’s mother.
  • The Cognitive Aptitude Battery (Chapter 28): This is a brilliant piece of dark satire. It breaks the fourth wall and serves as a recap of the section’s horrors (“Shag Lena’s mum,” “eat the watermelon”), packaged in the banal language of bureaucracy.

2. The Nature of the Apocalypse: “Gormies”

You have successfully subverted the zombie genre.

  • Passive vs. Aggressive: In The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later, the horror is that the dead want to eat you. Here, the horror is that they don’t care about you. They are “Gormies” (a fantastic colloquialism derived from “gormless”).
  • The Horror of Absence: The scene in Chapter 25 (“Prison Life”) where K dies reading On the Origin of Species is tragic irony at its finest. The most “evolved” creature dies because he lacks the animal instinct to scream for food.
  • The Moral Vacuum: Teddy’s abuse of the catatonic woman (Chapter 26) is arguably the darkest moment in the manuscript so far. It proves Dr. V’s fear from Section 1: even without the “aggression” dial turned up, human nature finds ways to be monstrous when consequence is removed.

3. Character Dynamics: The Awake

The introduction of the “Awake” trio (Jamal, Lena, Teddy) provides the necessary friction to drive the plot forward, now that the rest of the world is silent.

  • Jamal: The Philosopher. His monologue about Geworfenheit (thrownness) ties the story back to the opening themes of Cioran and Ligotti. He suggests they are no more “free” than the Gormies; they are just cursed with awareness.
  • Teddy: The Id. He represents the danger of unchecked freedom. He is adapting too well to the apocalypse.
  • Lena: The Pragmatist. She bridges the two. Her romance with Jamal feels earned—a “hydrogen bond” formed in a vacuum.

4. Dr. Shaw and the Scientists

Chapter 24 (“Pleasant Returns”) is vital. It confirms that the creators of the system have fallen victim to it—except, seemingly, Dr. Shaw.

  • The Loop: Seeing Dunlop and Dr. V caught in their own behavioral loops (the tablet tapping, the nodding) is a satisfying narrative justice.
  • Shaw’s Agency: Shaw remains the “Ghost in the Machine.” Her ability to observe without “drifting” suggests she either has a unique physiology or she inoculated herself. She remains the Chekhov’s Gun of the story.

5. Pacing and Atmosphere

The pacing in this section is deliberately slower, mimicking the “drift” of the title.

  • Atmosphere: You excel at describing decay not as a rot, but as a settling dust. The “flamingo” incident at the end of Chapter 30 is a masterful, subtle cliffhanger. It signifies that the “static” phase is over. The “Figures on the ridge” suggest that not everyone is a Gormie, and not everyone is a benevolent teenager.
  • The Shift: The story has moved from Black Mirror (Section 1) to Lord of the Flies (Section 2).

Critical Notes & Suggestions

  • The “Why”: It is currently unclear why the teenagers (and James) are immune. Is it age-related (neuroplasticity)? Or random genetic variance? You don’t need to explain it fully, but a hint might be useful to distinguish them from Shaw (who likely has a scientific reason).
  • Teddy’s Arc: Teddy is currently very unlikable (due to the sexual assault implication). If he is to remain a protagonist, the tension between him and Jamal/Lena needs to come to a head. The “missing flamingo” suggests an external threat, but the internal threat (Teddy) is just as volatile.
  • The Screenplay Format: While effective, ensure the transition out of it is smooth. Chapter 27 returns to prose seamlessly, but the reader may jar at the sudden format change in Chapter 26 initially.

Verdict

“DRIFT” is a haunting, atmospheric middle act. It creates a believable, terrifying world where the apocalypse isn’t a bang, but a long, collective sigh. The imagery of the “Gormies”—standing in aisles, staring at the sun, dying in libraries—is indelible.

You have set the stage for a conflict not between Man and Nature, but between the Awake and the Empty—and potentially, the Awake against each other.

Please share Section 3: ENTROPIC. The title suggests the systems are about to break down completely. I am ready.

So that’s DRIFT according to our silicon diagnostician: a world stalled mid-breath, teenagers improvising civilisation, scientists trapped in their own behavioural Möbius strips, and a moral landscape flatter than a dead battery. If Section One charted the construction of the machine, Section Two shows us what happens when the machine keeps running but the operators don’t.

Section Three, ENTROPIC, is where the centre finally refuses to hold. Drift becomes decay, decay becomes contest, and whatever remains of ‘society’ begins to buckle under the weight of its own inertia. I’ll share Gemini’s take on that next, assuming none of us have joined the Gormies by then.

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Written with the assistance of Gemini

Ridley Park

Cross-Post: confused AI Authorship

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Claude, Cover Art, critique, Generative AI, Video, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

People keep hurling accusations of AI-assisted writing as though it’s the new literary scarlet letter. Apparently, if a sentence lands too cleanly or an argument isn’t held together with chewing gum and vibes, someone’s bound to whisper that silicon fingers were involved. It’s all very witch-trial chic.

Video: My minion scribing this blog post. I want to teach it how to use a typewriter.

I’ve written about this on Philosophics. Not the tired panic about ‘machines stealing our jobs’, nor the hand-wringing about entry-level writers having their ladders kicked away. That’s a separate tragedy. My post digs into the moral melodrama over authorship itself, where a whiff of algorithmic contribution is treated like doping at the Olympics. As if writing were a pole-vault and not, you know, communication.

The whole spectacle reveals more about our Enlightenment hang-ups than about the technology. We still cling to this myth that pure, unadulterated human genius trickles from the fingertips of a lone, caffeinated scribe. Anything less than “authenticity” gets branded synthetic, corrupt, impure. It’s the same script modernism’s been peddling forever, only now the villain has LEDs.

Anyway, if you’ve got the stomach for a short polemic on why these accusations miss the point entirely, here it is:

Accusations of Writing Whilst Artificial

Have a look before someone claims an AI wrote it.

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Ridley Park

On Accidental Kinship and the Limits of Originality

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, Generative AI, Sci-Fi, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I don’t read sci-fi. It rarely resonates with me. I’ve read many classics, but I don’t get the hype. As a speculative fiction author, I sometimes operate in an adjacent space – close enough to borrow a few ideas, but never quite belonging. I’m not interested in fetishising technology or celebrating so-called human ingenuity. But if an idea serves the story? I’ll use it.

One concept I wanted to explore: the definition of life itself, and what sentience means when we can barely define it for ourselves.

Not long ago, I began working on a story: some people leave Earth to inhabit another planet in a different solar system. Nothing revolutionary there. They land on what appears to be an uninhabited world – uninhabited, that is, by our current definition of life. Instead, the planet itself is alive. Not in the Gaia hypothesis sense of interconnected ecosystems, but truly interactive. Responsive. Alien in ways that challenge every assumption about consciousness.

Of course, there are more details – dual suns in a figure-eight orbit, shifting gravity, time that expands and contracts, organisms that defy classification. But those are mechanics. The heart of the story is simpler: what happens when survival requires abandoning the frameworks that made you human?

As is my protocol, I fed my manuscript into AI and asked: is this idea unique? If not, what’s it similar to? Who am I adjacent to?

I got names. Titles. Books and films. Most had superficial similarities but different intents. Then one stood out: Solaris, Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel. I hadn’t read it, so I got a copy.

There were so many commonalities it felt like discovery and defeat in equal measure.

Lem wrote Solaris before humans had meaningfully left Earth’s atmosphere. Published in 1961, it predated material space exploration by years. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 – the first artificial satellite. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth, his flight lasting just 108 minutes. The first American in space, Alan Shepard, flew in 1961. John Glenn orbited in 1962.

Lem imagined a sentient ocean on an alien world orbiting twin suns before we’d even confirmed planets existed beyond our solar system. His protagonist grapples with a consciousness so alien that communication may be impossible – not because of language barriers, but because shared reference points don’t exist.

In some ways, Solaris also shares DNA with Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation – that same sense of an environment that isn’t hostile so much as indifferent, operating by rules humans can barely perceive, let alone comprehend. But where VanderMeer leans into existential dread, Lem’s tone is colder, more philosophical. Less visceral horror, more intellectual vertigo.

My story, working title: Goldilocks, sits somewhere between them. It has Lem’s alien sentience and dual-sun orbital mechanics. It has VanderMeer’s gradual unravelling of human perception and sanity. But it also has something neither quite touches: the brutal intimacy of being the last of your species, seeking warmth in a universe that offers none.

So is my idea original? Not entirely. Does that matter? I’m not sure anymore.

Lem wrote his novel sixty years ago, before we’d touched the moon, before we knew what exoplanets looked like, before we’d meaningfully begun asking whether consciousness requires a brain. He imagined sentience beyond human comprehension – and did it so thoroughly that anyone following feels like they’re retracing his steps.

But perhaps that’s the point. Originality isn’t about being first. It’s about what you do with inherited ideas – how you refract them through your own obsessions, anxieties, and questions.

Lem asked: can we ever truly know an alien intelligence?

VanderMeer asked: what happens when the environment rewrites you?

I’m asking: what does it mean to be human when humanity itself is ending?

Maybe that’s enough distance. Maybe it’s not. Either way, the story exists now – half-written, haunted by its predecessors, searching for its own voice in the silence between stars.

The Veneer of Human Exceptionalism in Art

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Dall-E, Generative AI, Video, Writing, YouTubeTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Robotic La Joconde

I don’t want to develop a reputation as an AI apologist – I really don’t. But I do want to strip away the veneer humans so lovingly lacquer over themselves: the idea that art is some mystical emanation of a “soul,” accessible only to those blessed by the Muse and willing to suffer nobly in a garret.

Video: YouTube Short by Jonny Thompson of his interview with Rachel Barr

Rachel Barr argues that AI art can never be the same as human art, no matter how “perfect,” because AI has no feelings or drive. Cue the violins. These arguments always seem to hinge on metaphysical window-dressing. When Rachel says “we”, she’s not talking about humanity at large; she’s talking about herself and a very particular subset of humans who identify as artists. And when she invokes “masters”, the circle shrinks still further, to the cloistered guild who’ve anointed themselves the keepers of aesthetic legitimacy.

But here’s the bit they’d rather you didn’t notice: feelings and drive aren’t prerequisites for art. They’re just one of the many myths humans tell about art, usually the most flattering one. Strip away the Romantic varnish and art is often craft, habit, accident, repetition. A compulsive tic in oil paint. A mistake on the guitar that somehow worked. A poet bashing words together until something sticks.

And I say this not as a detached observer but as a writer, artist, and musician in my own right. I sympathise with the instinct to defend one’s turf, but I don’t need to steep myself in hubris to retain self-worth. My work stands or falls on its own. It doesn’t require a metaphysical monopoly.

So when someone insists AI art can never be “the same,” what they mean is it doesn’t flatter our myths. Because if an algorithm can spit out a perfect sonnet or an exquisite image without the tortured soul attached, then what have we been worshipping all this time? The art itself, or the halo around the artist?

Perhaps the real fear isn’t that AI art lacks feelings. It’s that human art doesn’t require them either. And that’s a blow to the species ego – an ego already so fragile it cracks if you so much as ask whether the Mona Lisa is just paint on a board.

Trainspotting Takes Over

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Generative AI, review, Ridley Park, Setting, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve just finished Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – all 800 pages of it – and have now started Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Both are classics in their own way. I’ll review Second Sex properly on my Philosophics Blog, but here I want to think about Trainspotting in relation to my current manuscript, Needle’s Edge.

Interestingly, Trainspotting was a ChatGPT recommendation. I fed in my draft of Needle’s Edge and this was one of the books it said my work resembled. Two chapters in, I see the connexion. First, the subject matter – drugs and addiction. Second, the rawness of the experience.

There are differences, of course. Trainspotting is rooted in Leith, Scotland; Needle’s Edge belongs to the East Coast of the United States – Delaware and Philadelphia. Welsh draws heavily on dialect and vernacular, with a narrative voice that’s linguistically dense and aurally charged. In Needle’s Edge, the style is pared down. Sentence fragments, middle dots instead of full stops, and an intentional “lower” register mirror the protagonist’s fractured perception and limited resources.

That gap in register creates a different authorial challenge. With every edit pass, I find myself policing intrusions of my vocabulary into her voice. Welsh, by contrast, can deploy a broader lexicon and trust the dialectal texture to keep it authentic. Listening to Trainspotting, I’m struck by how words and turns of phrase leap out – sometimes apt for Needle’s Edge, but often just a shade too polished for Stacey’s world.

Both texts orbit around environments that resist glamour. Welsh’s squat flats and pubs are grimy and feral; Needle’s Edge’s motel rooms and sidewalks are littered with fast-food wrappers, orange caps, and fading unicorn posters. Addiction erodes bodies in both stories, but the textures differ – Scotland’s industrial gray versus the East Coast’s cheap motels and suburban detritus.

As for the film version of Trainspotting, I saw it long ago and remember almost nothing. The novel isn’t refreshing my memory either; it feels like a separate creature altogether. Which is fitting: both Trainspotting and Needle’s Edge are less about plot than about capturing a lived texture, a rhythm of voices and environments that mainstream narratives usually discard.

Generative AI and the Myth of Emotion

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, critique, Generative AI, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Critics never tire of reminding us that AI has no emotions, as though this were some startling revelation. Next, perhaps, they’ll inform us that penguins can’t fly and that bankers are allergic to honesty. Yes, generative AI has no emotions. But must we wheel in the fainting couches? Writers don’t need it to sob into its silicon sleeve.

Full disclosure: I am a writer who writes fiction and non-fiction alike. I am also a language philosopher; I study language. And a technologist. I’ve been working with artificial intelligence since the early ’90s with Wave 3 – expert systems. I am still involved with our current incarnation, Wave 4 – generative AI. I know that artificial intelligence has no intelligence. I also know that intelligence is ill-defined and contains metaphysical claims, so there’s that…

Meantime, let’s stroll, briskly, through three ghosts of philosophy: Saussure, Wittgenstein, and Derrida.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Saussure and the Tree That Isn’t There

Ferdinand de Saussure gave us the tidy structuralist package: the signified (the thing itself, say, a tree) and the signifier (the sound, the squiggle, the utterance “tree,” “arbre,” “árbol”). Lovely when we’re talking about branches and bark. Less useful when we stray into abstractions—justice, freedom, love—the slippery things that dissolve under scrutiny.

Image: Saussure’s Signified and Signifiers

Still, Saussure’s model gets us so far. AI has consumed entire forests of texts and images. It “knows” trees in the sense that it can output something you and I would recognise as one. Does it see trees when it dreams? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Of course not. But neither do you when you define one.

René Magritte‘s famous painting reminds us that the reference is not the object.

Image: Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe)

Wittgenstein and the Dictionary Without a Key

Ludwig Wittgenstein, that glorious thorn, tore the Saussurean comfort blanket to shreds. Words, he said, are not tethered to the world with neat strings. They define themselves by what they are not. A tree is a tree because it is not a cow, a kettle, or an Aston Martin.

Image: Tree, isolated

Take a dictionary entry:

tree
/trē/
noun
a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.

What’s woody? What’s perennial? If you already speak English, you nod along. If you’re an alien with no prior knowledge, you’ve learned nothing. Dictionaries are tautological loops; words point only to more words. If you want to play along in another language, here’s a Russian equivalent.

дерево
/derevo/
существительное
древесное многолетнее растение, обычно имеющее один стебель или ствол, растущий до значительной высоты и несущее боковые ветви на некотором расстоянии от земли.

AI, like Wittgenstein’s alien, sits inside the loop. It never “sees” a tree but recognises the patterns of description. And this is enough. Give it your prompt, and it dutifully produces something we humans identify as a tree. Not your tree, not my tree, but plausibly treelike. Which is, incidentally, all any of us ever manage with language.

Derrida, Difference, and Emotional Overtones

Enter Jacques Derrida with his deconstructive wrecking ball. Language, he reminds us, privileges pairs—male/female, black/white—where one term lords it over the other. These pairs carry emotional weight: power, hierarchy, exclusion. The charge isn’t in the bark of the word, but in the cultural forest around it.

AI doesn’t “feel” the weight of male over female, but it registers that Tolstoy, Austen, Baldwin, Beauvoir, or Butler did. And it can reproduce the linguistic trace of that imbalance. Which is precisely what writers do: not transmit private emotion, but arrange words that conjure emotion in readers.

On Reading Without Tears

I recently stumbled on the claim that AI cannot “read.” Merriam-Webster defines reading as “to receive or take in the sense of (letters, symbols, etc.), especially by sight or touch.” AI most certainly does this—just not with eyeballs. To deny it the label is to engage in etymological protectionism, a petty nationalism of words.

The Point Writers Keep Missing

Here is the uncomfortable truth: when you write, your own emotions are irrelevant. You may weep over the keyboard like a tragic Byronic hero, but the reader may shrug. Or worse, laugh. Writing is not a syringe injecting your feelings into another’s bloodstream. It is a conjuring act with language.

AI can conjure. It has read Tolstoy, Ishiguro, Morrison, Murakami. It knows how words relate, exclude, and resonate. If it reproduces emotional cadence, that is all that matters. The question is not whether it feels but whether you, the reader, do.

So yes, AI has no emotions. Neither does your dictionary. And yet both will continue to outlast your heartbreak.

Difference Engines and Whale Song

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Claude, Generative AI, Ridley Park, SoftwareTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Many people have misgivings about AI, especially the generative flavour. It’s not really intelligent, they say. It has no feelings. Fine. I’ll cede those points without so much as a flinch.

But here’s the thing: some use cases don’t require intelligence, and feelings would only get in the way.

Take one of mine. I feed my manuscripts into various AIs – is that the accepted plural? – and ask them, “What does this read like? Who does it read like?” I want to know about content, flavour, format, cadence, posture, and gait.

A human could answer that too – if that human had read my manuscript, had read a million others, and could make the connexions without confusing me with their personal taste, petty grievances, or wine intake. AI just spits out patterns. It doesn’t need a soul. It needs data and a difference engine.

Cue the ecologists, stage left, to witter on about climate change and saving the whales. Worthy topics, granted, but that’s a different issue. This is where the conversation slides from “AI is bad because…” to “Let’s move the goalposts so far they’re in another sport entirely.”

I’m not asking my AI to feel, or to virtue-signal, or to single-handedly fix the carbon cycle. I’m asking it to tell me whether my chapter reads like Woolf, Vonnegut, or the back of a cereal box. And for that, it’s already doing just fine.

Sturgeon’s Law, AI, and the Literary Ivory Tower

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Generative AI, Ridley Park, Software, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–4 minutes

Let’s get this out of the way: Sturgeon’s Law, ‘90% of everything is crap‘, isn’t pessimism, it’s statistics. That includes your favourite novel, the collected works of Joyce, and, yes, AI-generated text. The key point? If AI has the same bell curve as human output, some slice of that curve will still be better than what most people write. If Pareto’s Rule feels better at 80%, I’ll cede that ten points.

90% of everything is crap

— Sturgeon’s Law

And before anyone gets misty-eyed about “human genius,” let’s remember that the average American adult reads at a 7th or 8th grade level, and more than half read at or below a 6th grade level. Nearly 1 in 5 reads below a 3rd grade level. That’s not a moral failing, but it is a market reality. We can wail about AI not producing the next Nabokov, but let’s be honest, Nabokov isn’t exactly topping the Costco bestsellers table.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic

Here’s the bit nobody wants to say out loud

  • AI doesn’t have to dethrone the literary elite. It just has to outperform the mass of competent-but-unremarkable human writers serving an audience who, frankly, doesn’t care about “stylistic nuance” or “metafictional self-reflexivity.”
  • There’s a vast literary middle ground – corporate copywriting, trade journalism, formulaic romance, SEO blogs – where AI will not just compete, but dominate, because the audience is reading for function, not art.
  • The high-literary crowd will remain untouched, partly because their readership fetishises human intentionality, and partly because AI doesn’t yet want to write about the precise smell of sadness in a damp Parisian garret in 1934.

The fearmongering about AI “killing literature” is a bit like saying instant ramen will kill haute cuisine. Yes, more people will eat the ramen, but Alain Ducasse isn’t sweating over his stock reduction.

More than half of American adults read at or below a sixth-grade level.

Sparx

This panic is not new. We’ve been here before:

  • The printing press was supposed to obliterate the artistry of the hand-copied manuscript. Instead, it made books accessible and created new genres entirely. Calligraphy still exists, it’s just no longer the only way to get words on a page.
  • Photography was going to end painting. In reality, it freed painters from the burden of strict representation, allowing impressionism, cubism, and abstract art to flourish.
  • Recorded music didn’t destroy live performance, it expanded its reach. Some audiences still pay obscene amounts to see an actual human sweat on stage.
  • Film didn’t kill theatre; it created a parallel art form.
  • Synthesizers didn’t erase orchestras; they just meant you didn’t have to mortgage your house to hear a string section in your pop song.

AI is simply the next entrant in this long tradition of “threats” that turn out to be expansions. It will colonise the big islands of the creative archipelago – commercial writing, functional prose, genre boilerplate – and leave the small monasteries of high art mostly untouched.

So, no, AI won’t be the next Mozart, Picasso, or Nabokov. But it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be good enough to meet – and occasionally exceed – the expectations of the largest share of the market. And given that most readers are happy if the plot makes sense, the spelling’s passable, and the ending doesn’t require a graduate seminar in semiotics to decipher, I’d say AI’s prospects are rather good.

Here’s why that 10% still matters

The rarefied work of the serious literary writer isn’t competing for market share; it’s preserving and evolving the cultural and linguistic possibilities of human expression. That work thrives not because it’s the only thing available, but precisely because it stands apart from the sea of functional prose, human or machine-made. The AI tide will rise, but the lighthouse will still be human.

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High Horses and Low Bars: AI, Literature, and the Pretence of Purity

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Software, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The hand-wringing over AI-assisted writing has become the new parlour game for those with literary pretensions. You’ve heard the refrain: It’s not real art. It’s cheating. It’s not proper literature. The pearl-clutchers imagine themselves defending the sanctity of the novel against an onslaught of silicon scribblers, as though Wordsworth himself might be weeping in a Lake District grave at the indignity of a chatbot helping you outline Chapter Three.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast about this topic

Here’s the problem: most art isn’t high art, and most writing isn’t literature. Perhaps yours, possibly mine, but most books sold today don’t even aspire to qualify as literature except in the broadest of terms – having been read. The majority of books on the shelf, those stacked to the rafters in airport WHSmiths and sprawled across the Kindle top-sellers list, are to literature what chicken nuggets are to fine dining. Perfectly enjoyable, but you don’t see Heston Blumenthal demanding they be served in a Michelin-starred tasting menu.

And that’s fine. Truly. Because the vast majority of readers aren’t combing through your prose for transcendence or stylistic innovation. They’re not here to wrestle with postmodern irony or wrest meaning from a fragmented narrative. They’re here to escape the tedium of their commute, to zone out after a long day, to gobble up familiar tropes like comfort food. Sometimes they want plot, sometimes they want romance, sometimes they want dragons and space marines and improbably muscular men named Rafe. What they don’t want is a lecture on the ontological integrity of the creative process.

The AI panic brigade, however, would have you believe that unless your novel was forged through the arduous labour of pen and paper, or at least a keyboard, with the requisite quota of caffeine and self-loathing, it cannot possibly be authentic. To which I say: nonsense. We’ve been “cheating” for centuries. Typewriters. Word processors. Spellcheck. Thesauruses. Collaborative editing. Ghostwriting. For heaven’s sake, most of your favourite “high art” authors had assistants, editors, or outright amanuenses polishing their sentences into the very state of grace you now venerate.

There’s also the small matter of motive. Very few writers are chasing pure artistic expression, many are chasing rent money, Amazon rankings, or a book deal that might finally cover their overdraft. That’s not cynicism, that’s survival. And survival has never given a toss about whether the means of production are sufficiently Romantic for the sensibilities of the literati.

If anything, AI merely exposes the uncomfortable truth: most writing is a craft, not a sacrament. It’s a process of assembling words into a functional, sometimes moving, occasionally transcendent arrangement. And like all crafts, it has tools. Some tools are chisels, some are typewriters, and now some happen to be algorithms with more patience than your average beta reader.

So, if someone wants to use AI to crank out the next mass-market thriller, let them. It’s not threatening literature because it was never in literature to begin with. And if they want to use it to experiment, to push boundaries, to hybridise forms, that’s art too. High or low, it all ends up in the same place: on a page, waiting for someone to care enough to read it.