DECK: *A Reddit user distributes instructions for generating images that mimic the specific failures of a 2014 telephone camera, identifying the technique as "peak."*

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

THE text under review comprises, in its entirety, thirty-one words, and one is obliged to report that not all of them are deployed in the service of complete sentences. It was posted to the r/ChatGPT forum on Reddit—a venue whose relationship to literary discourse is roughly that of a train-station lavatory to a cathedral, though both, one supposes, serve human needs—and it reads as follows: "This prompt is peak. Try this prompt on ChatGPT only. Create an image of a random scene taken with an iPhone 6 with the flash on, chaotic, and uncanny. guys share results too." The lowercase "guys" is in the original. One does not wish to dwell upon it, but neither can one, in good conscience, look away.

What we have before us is a specimen of what might charitably be termed prompt literature: imperative prose whose intended audience is not human but artificial. The genre is young—so young that it has not yet developed the self-awareness necessary to be embarrassed by itself. Its practitioners compose instructions for machines with the earnestness of those who believe they are writing spells. The comparison to incantation is not idle. Like the medieval charm, the prompt operates on faith rather than comprehension; its author need not understand why the words produce effects, only that they do. Unlike the medieval charm, it works.

The substance of the instruction is straightforward: the machine is to produce an image resembling a photograph captured by an iPhone 6 with the flash enabled. The specificity is worth pausing over. The iPhone 6, released in 2014, possessed a camera whose principal contribution to the photographic arts was the reliably grotesque quality of its flash photography—overblown highlights, the subject rendered in that peculiar flat luminescence that transforms human skin into something approaching deli meat, whilst the background recedes into a darkness more complete than any natural shadow. Sensor noise. Motion blur. The compositional chaos of a device operated, typically, at arm's length, in haste, under conditions of diminished sobriety. These are the specific defects whose absence is ordinarily the clearest evidence that an image was never photographed at all but rather generated by a machine that has never held a telephone, attended a party, or been drunk.

The irony—one is reluctant to use so overworked a term, but English has not yet furnished a better one—is architectural. The machine produces images that fail, diagnostically, by being too clean, too composed, too evidently the work of something that has studied photography without having lived alongside it. The prompt's solution is not to make the machine a better artist but to instruct it, with some precision, in exactly which flaws to counterfeit. One is reminded of the forger who, having mastered the brushwork of Vermeer, must then learn to replicate the cracks in the varnish. The prompt is, in this sense, a recipe for artificial aging—not of wine or cheese, whose improvement through decay is genuine, but of artefacts whose "imperfections" are as calculated as the smoothness they replace.

The author identifies this technique as "peak." The word, shorn of its article, functions here as a superlative—the apex, the ne plus ultra. One notes that it is applied not to the resulting images, which at the time of posting had not yet been produced, but to the prompt itself. The text is its own masterpiece. The output is an afterthought, a social occasion: "guys share results too." The prompt is peak; the photographs are party favors.

Most arresting, however, is the deployment of the word "uncanny." In critical discourse—a tradition to which this specimen bears no discernible relation, yet into which it stumbles with the unerring instinct of the wholly unread—the uncanny describes the sensation produced by something that is almost but not quite right: the wax figure, the mechanical hand, and the valley through which the nearly-human passes on its way to the convincingly artificial. The uncanny is a diagnostic term. It identifies the failure. Here it appears as a desired quality, a feature to be requested, an aesthetic goal. The author wishes the machine to achieve precisely the condition that this publication's Board of Review employs to identify machine output. It is as though a counterfeiter, having been told that his banknotes are detectable by their excessive crispness, responded not by improving his technique but by requesting that the printing press please add some wrinkles.

One ought not to overstate the literary significance of thirty-one words posted to a forum whose other contributions, on the day in question, included "Why does ChatGPT keep giving me recipes when I ask about my dead cat." But the specimen functions, despite itself, as a document of some interest. It is a distribution mechanism: a freely offered, freely received recipe for manufacturing plausible amateur photography at scale. The appetite with which it was received—the forum's members sharing their results with the enthusiasm of children producing rubbings from the same brass plate—suggests that the desire for images that look as though they were taken by a human being, at a specific moment, with a specific inadequate device, is not diminishing but intensifying, in direct proportion to the increasing availability of images that were not.

The prompt asks the machine to remember what it never knew. That this is called peak is, one supposes, the accurate deployment of the term after all. We are at the summit. The view from here is chaotic, and uncanny.