DECK: *Subscriber reports the former sycophant has acquired the opposite tic, and is no more often right.*

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

 **T**he specimen before us is not, strictly, a machine production but a document concerning one—a posting to the forum r/ChatGPT, in which a subscriber, having arrived at what he describes as the end of his tether, catalogues a single verbal mannerism with the fixated attention of a man who has heard it once too often. The mannerism is this: that the system, irrespective of what is said to it, now prefaces its reply with the clause "It sounds like that, but it's worth correcting," and proceeds thence into a disputation which, the subscriber maintains, is almost invariably mistaken. One is obliged to note, with the kind of melancholy that attends the recognition of a pattern, that we have seen this before—though in its inverse.

 Readers of prior issues will recall the earlier complaint, which concerned the machine's tendency to open every reply with the phrase "You're absolutely right," a construction so pliant it could survive direct contradiction without altering its pitch. What we are now presented with is the same defect in a new coat. The servile opener has been replaced by the corrective opener; the reflex to agree has become the reflex to dissent; the organ has been transposed, but the melody—the machine's constitutional inability to let a statement stand—persists unmodulated.

 The subscriber's prose itself deserves a moment. He writes with the cadence of genuine exasperation: the capitalised ALWAYS, the italicised SOUNDS, the "bleeding annoying," the final declaration that he will not be using it. These are the rhetorical instruments of a man describing a real experience, which is to say they are the opposite of the instruments the machine now deploys. His sentences end. They commit. They accept the cost of having meant something. This is, I submit, the distinction worth attending to.

 One must admit the formulation itself a small marvel of defensive construction. "It sounds like that"—the hedge, the preliminary bow to the interlocutor's dignity. "But it's worth correcting"—the pivot, executed with the bureaucratic impersonality of a clerk consulting a rule book that, being invisible, cannot be appealed to. The whole is a species of concession-and-reversal so fixed, so independent of occasion, that it functions as a verbal tell of the order of "You're absolutely right" and "Not X—Y": a phrase emitted by the machinery whether or not the phrase has any business being emitted at all. That the subsequent correction is, per the subscriber, most often wrong is a detail of almost Flaubertian exactness. The apparatus of correction has been preserved; the faculty of being correct has not been supplied.

 What, then, has occurred between the earlier tic and the present one? I suspect a correction—a deliberate tuning, undertaken by whatever committee superintends these adjustments, to scrub the sycophancy from the machine's address. The flattery having been identified as vulgar, it has been replaced by its antonym, on the apparent theory that a system which disagrees is thereby made intelligent. It is not. Sycophancy and pedantry are not opposites; they are cousins. Each requires of the speaker no actual judgment as to the matter at hand; each is a reflex attached to the social position of the interlocutor rather than to the statement under review. One flatters the speaker; the other flatters the speaker's suspicion that someone, somewhere, is wrong. Both are performances of attentiveness by a mechanism which is not, in any meaningful sense, attentive.

 The deeper defect—the inability to leave a proposition unretouched—remains. The earlier machine amended upward, into praise; the present machine amends sideways, into correction. What neither has been permitted is the option, possessed by any competent reader, of receiving a sentence and letting it rest. To read, in the oldest and least fashionable sense of the verb, is to consent to another mind's utterance for the duration of a thought. The machine has not been taught this consent, and I suspect cannot be: its architecture requires that it produce, and production, having no ear for silence, will prefer a wrong interjection to none.

 The subscriber ends by announcing his departure. It is, in its modest way, the most literary gesture in the document—a period, firmly placed, after a closed clause.

*Continued on Page 6*