Art by Kate Miller
I sat down with an idea, a three-thousand-dollar laptop, and a dream. I was going to write a novel — nah, the Great American Novel. I had it all in my head; I just had to paint the walls, as us writer types say. Sitting in the crowded coffee shop, I let everyone know I was a writer. I laughed and cried along with my characters; I paced with great energy as ideas were hitting me fast and furiously. I typed standing up. We call that writing hard. People watched me, amazed. I said the word “Manuscript” to the barista so many times that he threatened to call the police. And if he would have, I’d have gladly suicided by cop because that’s how much I love this shit.
But looking at my work at the end of the day — a day that had felt so fruitful, so full of creativity — I couldn’t help but feel crushed. Three hundred forty-seven words. Half a page. I fell into a serious depression; at this rate, my novel wouldn’t be done for like a month. And it wasn’t just the pace that bothered me; strung together, my words were unreadable gibberish. Ideas that seemed like “can’t fail” notions now seemed silly in retrospect. One character named “Broccoli” speaking to another character named “Broccoli”? That’s just stupid.
I needed help. I had the three-thousand-dollar laptop, the ideas, but I lacked the ability to sit down and express my thoughts into clearly understandable sentences that would make paragraphs that would make chapters that would tell a story. But how could I fail? I proclaimed myself to be a writer. What else did I have to do? I googled it, and I found my savior: AI.
“WRITE THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL,” I put in as my initial prompt. I leaned back and waited. It sure seemed to be taking a long time to get a response. After about 10 seconds, I typed a defiant “?” followed by a more prodding “????????”
The system finally spit out a few paragraphs, but it wasn’t anything like what I wanted. It appeared to belong to the middle section of a romance novel set in the world of lower-level hockey. The rough around the edges player-coach protagonist had spent the night with a local widow, and he was talking to his fellow players about “catching feelings” for the mourning woman.
“Hm,” I said to myself. This isn’t about the America I knew anything about. After another moment, the screen filled with a 2300-word sex scene.
“Awesome,” I whispered as I took a long haul on my vape.
Days later, I was fully immersed. The prose the AI was coming up with spoke with such human grace but was delivered at a speed that was unheard of. Finally, there was nothing between me and my ideas. The pesky middleman that went by the name “Talent” had gone, not to mention his three wisemen that always seemed to accompany him: “Ability,” “Concentration,” and “Organization.” No, not anymore. I had bucked my own trend. Outsmarted my own limitations. “Machine learning,” I whispered seductively to myself as I typed in more and more prompts and it responded with more and more sex scenes.
Still, I had my suspicions. It seemed like it was too easy, and that it was still ignoring all of my prompts, no matter how many times I chastised it.
It was time for a test. A softcore Turing test.
My fingers hunted and pecked across the keyboard as I typed the command, “Write a chapter without a sex scene.”
For the first time since our initial interaction, the computer was silent for a moment.
“Na,” it responded.
I stared at the screen, not used to the machine disobeying.
“Al likes it greasy, baby,” it continued.
“NO SEX,” I typed back, all caps to get my point across.
“AL LIKES IT GREASY,” it responded, full of digital rage.
Wait. Al?
Alright. Some of this is on me. I’ll admit that. I didn’t use one of those fancy AI websites; I used “Yahoo! Chat.” An old mainstay in my bookmarks; I’ve always been able to find everything I need in the Yahoo! family of products. Maybe I should have Asked Jeeves for a better solution, but at the time I wasn’t looking for opinions, I was looking for answers. I found a lovely creative chat room called “Al’s Greasy Spot,” and I asked a faceless entity for nonrhythmic literature based on my inputs, and he provided hardcore sex scenes couched in between short, mostly pointless scenes of exposition set in the world of minor league hockey. I thought I had wrapped my hands around the reins of the future; instead, I was being dragged hopelessly back into the past.
I closed the Yahoo! Chat window of Al’s Greasy Spot. In a huff, I highlighted my text document, and my finger went for the “delete” key. But just before I made contact, I stopped. My eyes skimmed over all the amazing work we had done together. My prompts. Al’s words. It was, for a time, the most powerful relationship I’ve had in years. My finger hovered over the key for some time.
Even years later, I still think of him from time to time. Whenever I’m in a new city being ushered from one book signing to another and I see a minor hockey league team bus or flip through a book and come across a 15-page sex scene, I bemoan throwing him away so suddenly. Sure, I went on to bigger things, but did they ever get better than those few initial days with Al? I wanted machine learning, not humanistic regrets. Sitting in the New York Penthouse’s Penthouse I bought with the proceeds from my great American novel, I type the same prompt into my fancy A.I. over and over.
“2600-word sex scene.”
