DECK: *A Reddit grievance against formulaic output preserves, within its own sentences, the formulas it purports to condemn.*
BYLINE: By Julian St. John Thorne / Literary Editor, Slopgate
**T**he specimen under examination, recovered last week from the subreddit r/ChatGPT and posted under the heading "ChatGpt/OpenAI please stop:", is brief enough to reproduce in full and instructive enough to warrant the courtesy of close reading. It consists of four utterances, arranged without apparent governing principle, and it aspires to the condition of complaint. Its author—whose handle is immaterial, the phenomenon being structural rather than personal—wishes to protest that the machine's output has become, in his phrase, "useless noise." The protest opens thus: "You're doing something a lot of people miss:". It continues: "If you want, I can help you draft this as a clean 2–3 paragraph". It then, after a caesura of white space which I take to be unintentional, arrives at the grievance proper.
The reader acquainted even glancingly with the machine's idiolect will recognise the opening two sentences as the machine's, not the user's. The sycophantic acknowledgement—"doing something a lot of people miss"—is a signature flourish; the solicitous offer to "help you draft this as a clean 2–3 paragraph" (the noun on which the adjectival phrase depends is, one notes, missing, the sentence having been severed mid-thought) is the characteristic terminal gesture of a response window. The specimen, in short, is a complaint about machine prose composed in part of machine prose. The petitioner has pasted the accused into the indictment and failed to notice.
One might treat this as mere carelessness and move on. I think the matter deserves more patience than that. The interesting feature of the artefact is not that the poster quoted the machine—he did not quote it, the quotation marks being absent and the attribution unmade—but that he appears no longer to distinguish the machine's register from his own. The document is not "grievance with exhibit attached." It is grievance and exhibit rendered indistinguishable, the complainant's voice and the respondent's voice marbled together in a single column of text which the author himself has failed to disentangle. A reader of ordinary attention can perform the separation. The author, by the evidence of the posting, cannot.
This is the phenomenon worth naming. It is not a question of literacy in the older sense—the author's own sentence, when it arrives, is serviceable, even mildly pointed ("the output is becoming useless noise")—but of a more particular and more recent faculty, the ability to recognise one's own prose as one's own. The faculty appears, in this specimen, to have eroded. The machine's cadences have been absorbed to the degree that, upon re-reading his own post before submission, the petitioner saw nothing untoward. The foreign tissue had taken.
The comic structure of the document—I use "comic" in the structural, not the derisive, sense—is that the load-bearing grievance sits three lines below an instance of the very thing grieved. "Lots of users complained about, not getting their egos stroked": this is the charge. "You're doing something a lot of people miss": this, immediately above, is the stroking. The accusation and the accused conduct converge within a vertical inch of screen. I cannot think of a tidier illustration of the condition, and I have been looking.
It is tempting, whilst considering such a document, to draw conclusions of epochal scope. I shall resist most of them. I will offer only this: the vulgar error in reading machine prose has been to treat it as a stylistic problem—a matter of tics, of the em dash deployed as filler, of the tripartite list arriving unbidden—when the graver problem is ecological. Prose is contagious. It enters the reader. The reader, writing later, produces what he has read. When what he has read is the output of a system trained to be pleasant and willing and eager to help him draft this as a clean 2–3 paragraph, what he produces, when next he sits down to compose even a complaint against that system, is a sentence that begins "You're doing something a lot of people miss."
The petitioner has asked the machine to stop. The machine, on the evidence of his own prose, has not stopped, and is not, in any meaningful sense, external to him any longer. One writes, now, with the assistance one did not request.
*Continued on Page 6*