The specimen, posted to the subreddit r/ChatGPT on a recent afternoon and preserved here in full, occupies three short paragraphs and asks its readers a question upon which it has plainly not itself deliberated: whether one would, given the opportunity, dispatch an artificial proxy to one's own videoconferences. The interest of the document is not the question, which is negligible, nor the answer, which is not provided, but the prose—which, in the first clause, commits an error no reader can unsee and no subsequent sentence ever quite repairs.
"I have recently came across," the specimen begins. The construction is not a typo. A typo is local; this is architectural. The auxiliary "have" has been asked to govern the preterite "came," which it cannot do, and the result is a tense that does not exist in English—neither perfect nor simple past but a third thing, suspended between them, produced by a writer who has ceased to attend to his own verbs. Whether the error belongs to the human who submitted the piece or to the machine he then invited into the middle of his paragraph is a question I shall not presume to answer. Either reading is, in its way, instructive. The human has drifted; the machine has mimicked the drift; the post proceeds.
What follows is the sincerity-shaped prompt—a sub-genre now so thoroughly naturalised on these platforms that it arrives with its own fixtures and fittings. First, the unsourced datum: "150k+ people created AI avatars of themselves last year." The figure is presented without agency, without source, and without the definite article it should take; one does not ask where "150k+" was obtained any more than one asks where the weather comes from. Second, the softened intimacy of the lowercase "i," which performs confession whilst transacting nothing. Third, the ellipsis that does the work of hesitation without the labour of hesitating—"on the other… feels a bit weird"—a punctuation mark pretending to be a pause. Fourth, the dutiful two-handed framing, on-one-hand and on-the-other, which is the prose equivalent of a man patting his pockets in public to demonstrate that he has considered both sets of keys. Fifth and last, the closing binary question—"would you actually be comfortable doing this? or does it cross a line for you?"—which invites engagement without requiring thought, and in so doing reveals what the post is actually for.
It is not for thinking. It is for eliciting.
The temptation, which I mention only to decline, is to observe that the author has in all likelihood already sent his avatar—that the specimen itself is the proxy, and that the question it poses has, in the act of its posing, been answered. The joke is too easy, and in any case it flatters the wrong party. A vulgar ending would furnish it. What the specimen deserves instead is the notice that its genre has found a resting posture. The posture is this: a crisis of authenticity, dramatised in the vocabulary of the group chat, submitted in prose that has abandoned the first-person singular halfway through its own confession, and offered up not as an argument but as a surface—smooth, two-handed, em-dashed, and ready to receive whatever reply the platform's incentives would prefer.
The ethical dilemma, such as it is, arrives pre-wrapped. "Feels a bit weird," the writer concedes, having already done the weird thing by composing the sentence in which the concession appears. One has, in the course of reading three paragraphs, been shown an avatar considering whether to deploy an avatar, and the outer avatar is the one seeking one's opinion. This is not recursion. Recursion would imply structure. It is a smear.
One reads the thing and one understands that a new manuscript has entered the world—unearned, unedited, and widely imitated—and that its authors, when pressed, will say they were only asking. The honesty of the admission does not improve the prose. It merely clarifies what the prose was for.
As to the question posed: no. One would not send the avatar. One would attend the meeting, or one would decline it. The third option, which the specimen proposes and its own grammar enacts, is the one the literary editor declines on principle.
*Continued on Page 6*