DECK: *A girl called Marian is introduced by caption in a single uninflected breath of eighty-one words, with further characters pledged.*

BYLINE: By Julian St. John Thorne / Literary Editor, Slopgate

    **T**he specimen arrives to this desk from a Reddit forum devoted to images produced by machine learning—a forum whose title announces, with admirable candour, the nature of its offerings—and consists, properly speaking, of two artefacts presented as one: a picture of a figure designated "Marian," rendered almost certainly by the Midjourney engine and bearing that engine's customary symptoms (a symmetry too exact for the animal kingdom, an epidermis of confectionary finish, joints assembled with the sincerity of a child reconstructing a doll from memory), and, beneath it, a caption of approximately eighty-one words, unpunctuated save for the terminal nothing where a full stop ought to reside. It is the caption, not the picture, which rewards attention—or, more precisely, which exacts it—and therefore the caption which shall here be treated as the primary text, the image demoted, as the medium so often demands, to its own illustration.

    One hesitates, in the ordinary course of criticism, to dwell upon a single sentence; one does so here because the specimen *is* a single sentence, and because that sentence, through sheer refusal to pause, achieves a kind of grammatical weather-system—a low pressure into which cosmogony, character introduction, and franchise announcement are drawn, churned, and expelled in one undifferentiated exhalation. "MARIAN A GIRL WITH THE POWER TO DESTRUCT A UNIVERSE," it begins, and one notes at once the neologism "destruct," which is neither destroy nor construct but their unhappy child, a verb that has slipped its moorings and drifted, as so much of the output of these engines drifts, into the nearby estuary of the almost-word. The title proceeds to disclose that this universe is one "WHERE THEY ARE KNOWN AS THE YELLOWS"—who *they* are, and by whom they are so known, remains a matter between the author and his unattended referents—and informs us further that within it dwell "BEINGS WITH POWERS THAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS," a formulation so perfectly circular that it admits of neither refutation nor interest.

    Whilst the uninitiated reader may by this point expect the sentence to draw to its close, he underestimates the ambitions of the genre. The author, having established his universe in six clauses, now asserts possession of it—"A UNIVERSE CREATED BY ME"—and, with the confidence of a man who has mistaken the act of naming for the act of making, proceeds directly to the marketing apparatus: "MORE CHARACTERS WITH VARIOUS POWERS WILL ARRIVE SOON." Here the specimen achieves its essential form. The work is announced and franchised in the same respiration. No interval separates the premise from the promise of its extension; no period intervenes to permit the reader the courtesy of consent. What one is offered is not a text but a prospectus—and a prospectus, moreover, for a concern whose sole asset is its own forthcomingness.

    This is the literary condition of the production at hand, and, one suspects, of a great deal of what the machines and their handlers currently deposit upon the public shore. The absent comma is not an oversight of typography; it is a statement of epistemology. To punctuate is to distinguish—between subject and modifier, between the thing and the claim made upon it, between a work and the puffery attached to its sleeve—and the author, having no such distinctions to draw, produces accordingly a sentence in which none obtains. The vulgarity of the specimen, if one may recover that useful word from its modern dilutions, lies not in its enthusiasm, which is blameless, nor in its grammar, which is merely absent, but in its unearned assumption of scale: that a universe may be declared rather than built, that characters may be inventoried rather than written, that the announcement of a sequel may precede the achievement of a first.

    As to the picture itself—the figure, the symmetrical hair, the textureless cheek, the hand that cannot quite resolve upon a count of fingers—it is adequate to its caption, which is to say it is the caption's equal, which is to say it says nothing the caption has not already said twice. One awaits, with the particular dread reserved for announced continuations, the promised arrival of more.

*Specimen: Image posted to r/AIGeneratedArt depicting a figure identified as "Marian," accompanied by an eighty-one-word unpunctuated title. Recovered from Reddit, r/AIGeneratedArt, submission 1sko6g8; poster handle not displayed at time of capture, submission date unrecovered at press. Probable Midjourney origin; anatomical errors, uncanny symmetry, and overly smooth texture present in the customary proportions.*