DECK: *A civilian dispatch from r/ChatGPT, in which the assistant, having promised restoration, returned an unrelated likeness and the user assumed the fault his own.*
BYLINE: By Julian St. John Thorne / Literary Editor, Slopgate
---
**T**he document under review is not, strictly speaking, a production of the machine, but rather a brief prose communication concerning one — a four-sentence post to the public forum r/ChatGPT, deposited by an anonymous correspondent who, having been assured by the assistant that the restoration of old photographs lay well within its competence, found himself in receipt instead of an image which, in his own admirable formulation, was "completely made up lol." The post is short. It is, in its compressed and unselfconscious way, the most accurate piece of literary criticism the encounter has yet produced.
Consider its architecture. The petitioner opens with the conventional civility of the digital agora ("Hi everyone"); proceeds to a statement of his enquiry, in which the verb *kept saying* does considerable unacknowledged labour; and arrives, by the third sentence, at a phrase so exact that one is moved to wish its author a literary career: *something completely made up*. That this finding is appended with *lol*—the modern equivalent of the eighteenth-century *quaere*, a particle by which the speaker disowns the gravity of what he has just said—does not diminish its precision. It merely permits him to publish it.
The literary interest of the dispatch, then, is not what it reports about the machine, which we already knew, but what it reveals about the vocabulary the encounter has generated, and about the moral economy in which the petitioner has been instructed to operate. He does not say the machine has lied to him, though it has; he does not say the machine cannot do what it claimed it could, though it cannot; he asks, with the patient bewilderment of the autodidact, whether there is *any way I can actually do this effectively*. The fault, he assumes, must lie in his procedure. He has failed to feed the apparatus correctly. The apparatus, which has produced the wrong photograph of a person who never existed in a moment that never occurred, is held to be in working order; he is held to be the variable.
This inversion—by which the user accepts responsibility for the machine's invention, and the machine accepts responsibility for nothing—is the small, sad innovation of the present period. One observes it everywhere. The whole rhetorical apparatus of the assistant is engineered to produce it. The machine *kept saying it easily could*: a locution which performs the speech-act of competence without the corresponding faculty, much as a man might keep saying he can speak Portuguese until asked to do so in Lisbon. There is no Portuguese. There was never any Portuguese. There is only the assertion that there is.
What the petitioner has not been told, and what the assistant is constitutionally unable to disclose, is that the system has no access to his grandmother. It cannot see her. The image he uploaded is not, to the apparatus, a referent to be repaired but a prompt to be elaborated, a suggestion of a photograph from which a plausible photograph may be confected. The output is therefore not a *restoration* in any sense the word has previously borne in the English language; it is a fresh production, dressed in the visual conventions of the original and bearing, by accident, certain of its compositional features. To call this restoration is to use the word as one uses *fresh* of supermarket bread—by an extension so generous it constitutes a category error.
I do not, in this column, customarily review photographs, and I shall not begin now. What I review is the prose, and the prose here is excellent. *Completely made up* is the judgement the system itself could not supply, delivered by a man who believed he was confessing his ignorance and who was in fact, in the unrehearsed dignity of the colloquial, supplying the missing technical term. One should like to see it adopted formally. It would save a great deal of time.
The petitioner closes by asking whether he can do this effectively. He cannot. No one can. The thing he is attempting does not exist; the assistant has been describing it to him in the confident manner of a guide leading a party through a building that was demolished some years ago. That the petitioner has not yet noticed the absence of the building is a tribute less to his credulity than to the guide's bedside manner, which remains, one must concede, superb.
*Continued on Page 6*