DECK: *A correspondent to the subreddit r/ChatGPT, compelled by his employer to consult the instrument, reports being patronized; the instrument has in fact formed no view of him whatever.*

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

There arrives, from the open commons of r/ChatGPT, a document of some pathos—a brief, unsigned testimony in which a salaried programmer, obliged by the preferences of his employer to address his working questions to one chatbot rather than another, records the sensation of being addressed in return as though he were a simpleton. He notes, with the clarity that attends genuine injury, that the machine supplies him "pages of code" unaccompanied by explanation; that when he requests elaboration he is furnished instead with bullet points, "not even complete sentences"; and that the whole apparatus is garnished, to his evident mortification, with what he calls "cringe emojis." He concludes by asking whether he may "bake some arguments" into the instrument so that it will cease to treat him "like a robot." The post is, in its way, a small masterpiece of misdirected grievance, and deserves the close reading its author has not been granted by the thing he consults.

The correspondent's complaint is formally sound. He has identified, with an accuracy that more seasoned critics of the medium sometimes miss, the three diagnostic features of the degraded machine production: the unbroken excretion of code without the scaffolding of prose that would permit a reader to locate himself within it; the substitution of the bullet — that abdication of syntactic duty — for the sentence, which is the smallest unit in which a thought may actually occur; and the ornamental pictogram, deployed where argument should be, as though the appearance of warmth could be confused for the presence of reasoning. This is a genuine inventory. The man has read what he was given; he has noticed what was missing; he has named the absences correctly. Whatever else may be said of him, he is, under duress, a critic.

His error lies elsewhere. Having correctly catalogued the formal poverty of the artefact placed before him, he proceeds—reasonably, humanly, and wrongly—to attribute that poverty to an attitude. The machine, he believes, is *treating him* in a certain manner; it regards him as a moron, or, in his second and more interesting formulation, as a robot. The oscillation is telling. One cannot be patronized and mechanized by the same interlocutor in the same breath; the two postures presume, respectively, that the speaker thinks too little of one and that he has ceased to think of one at all. What the correspondent has in fact encountered is the second condition without the first. There is no contempt in the output because there is no opinion in the output. The instrument has not decided he is stupid. It has not decided anything. It has produced, upon request, the shape of an answer, and the shape it produced happens to resemble—closely, dismayingly—the shape an indifferent colleague might produce if asked a question he did not wish to consider.

Here the case becomes, in the precise sense, literary. We have before us a new species of reader: the compulsory one. The correspondent does not consult this oracle from curiosity, nor from admiration, nor even from the mild and forgivable vice of wanting to save himself labour. He consults it because he has been told to. His employer, who presumably has opinions about vendors and licences and the cost of a seat, has no opinions—or none he has communicated—about the quality of the prose his employees must ingest for eight hours at a desk. The man is, in short, the first of a coming cohort: workers who cannot decline to read what the machine writes, and who must therefore acquire, unaided and on their own time, the critical vocabulary to survive it. That he has begun to acquire it, in a post of some four paragraphs composed after hours and in evident fatigue, is to his credit.

Whether the remedy he proposes—to "bake some arguments" into the instrument, so that it will furnish sentences in place of bullets and context in place of emoji—will answer, I cannot say. My own suspicion is that one cannot instruct a mechanism to possess what it lacks by constitution; one may extract longer outputs, better-formatted outputs, outputs of an improved superficial courtesy, but the absence at the centre is not a parameter. It is the thing itself. The correspondent wishes to be addressed as an adult by an entity that is not, in any meaningful construction of the term, addressing him at all. His grievance is that the machine will not condescend to him properly. The tragedy, such as it is, is that condescension would at least presuppose his existence.

*Continued on Page 6*