DECK: *A forum post advocating the use of a machine, composed in the unmistakable cadence of that machine, is received without incident by its intended readership.*

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

The specimen, retrieved on the eighth instant from the subreddit r/ChatGPT under the title "What's your most productive ChatGPT workflow right now?", comprises some eighty words of prose, a bulleted enumeration of four steps, and two closing interrogatives of the sort a man poses to a room he has already decided is listening. It is offered by a human hand—or so the convention of the platform insists—and it recommends, with the mild enthusiasm of one who has recently acquired a kitchen appliance, the use of a large language model for the organisation of thought. The recommendation is the whole of the post. The post is the whole of the recommendation. That these two sentences are interchangeable is the first of the specimen's several embarrassments.

Consider the opening: "I feel like most people including me probably using only a small fraction of what ChatGPT can actually do." The sentence is ungrammatical in a particular way—the participle "using" orphaned from its auxiliary—which one might, in a more generous hour, attribute to the haste of a sincere correspondent. One is not, this afternoon, in a generous hour. The construction is the tell of a draft composed at speed and posted without rereading, which is to say, composed by someone for whom rereading is not a habit, because rereading is the habit of a person who suspects his sentences might betray him. The author of this post does not suspect his sentences. He has not written them with sufficient attention to entertain suspicion.

What follows is the workflow itself, which I reproduce with its original typography preserved:

— Brain dump an idea or problem — Ask ChatGPT to turn it into a structured outline — Go through each part one by one — Ask for improvements, examples, or better alternatives

The attentive reader will note that this four-step procedure consists, in its entirety, of the following instruction: use the product, then use the product again, then attend to what the product has produced, then use the product once more. It is a recipe whose sole ingredient is the recipe. One recalls, perhaps, Borges's map coextensive with the territory, though the comparison flatters the specimen—Borges's cartographers were at least ambitious.

The prose surrounding the list exhibits the characteristic tics of machine production: the confessional opening which confesses nothing, the reassurance ("really well for me," "really quickly") doing the structural work a verb ought to do, the studious avoidance of any concrete particular. What idea was brain-dumped? What problem was structured? One is never told. One is not meant to be told. The specimen is a demonstration of workflow in the abstract, which is to say, a demonstration of nothing, since a workflow divorced from the work it flows through is merely a diagram.

The closing—"How do you usually use ChatGPT to get the best results? What's your workflow?"—completes the circuit. The post has not described a practice; it has solicited a comment section in which others may describe theirs, producing, in aggregate, a corpus of identically structured testimonials on behalf of the machine that, one begins to suspect, composed several of them. The forum is a hall of mirrors in which each mirror politely asks the others what they see.

Whether this particular specimen was typed by a human hand in imitation of the machine, or produced by the machine in imitation of a human hand imitating the machine, is a question the prose itself cannot answer, and this is the specimen's genuine literary achievement, if one is prepared to grant it one. The Turing test, in its received form, asks whether a machine can pass for a person. The specimen proposes a subtler instrument: whether a person, having used the machine long enough, can any longer produce prose that would fail to pass for it. The answer, filed to a forum of the satisfied, appears to be settled.

I note, finally, the melancholy of the artefact—not contempt, which would require a worthier object, but something gentler. A man has written a short letter recommending a tool, and the letter is indistinguishable from the tool's own output, and he has posted it among others who will not notice, and this is, whatever else one wishes to call it, a kind of solitude.

*Continued on Page 6*