The AI banner

Thursday 3/13/25

In the gap between when I left here yesterday to run stairs and when I returned to the desk, the host platform for this website had installed an AI button at the top of the the screen. It's always there now. You can't make it go away.

One is meant to hit this button and have AI produce all of the content. Before long, nothing will be by anyone. Nothing will be created by humans. Humans won't be human. Humans are fast becoming non-human and they are no longer human enough to recognize or understand what is happening.

All MFA writing is derivative. There is no originality in MFA writing. There is no individuality in MFA writing. There is no reason to read any writing now--writing that would call itself literature--as we've seen over and over again with whatever writing goes first in the various prose offs on here.

Soon, in the first entry in these pages about Washington Square Review, we'll see for the latest time how indistinguishable these writers are from each other, before doing another entry exposing Washington Square Review editor and a writer bereft of talent in Joanna Yas, with ample evidence of her discriminatory practices and proof of her outright lies.

I had known I'd be doing posts pertaining to her and that venue for a while, and I went to the Washington Square Review site to pick something for a prose off, and it was all the same. Every story could have come from the same author. We've seen that before in an entry about One Story that featured excerpts from a number of the recent works they published. It's all the same. Everything is mimetic within the MFA system.

That's how AI "writes." It imitates. The MFA writers are sufficiently lacking in a clue about anything in life--these people live in a delusional space populated solely by their own kind, pledged to treat the delusions as the truth--this is the almighty commandment of the MFA system--that they don't know none of them has anything worth reading. They'll point to one of their own who is hyped, gets awards, all of that--a Percival Everett (more on him soon--and good God will there be more on him soon) or a Tommy Orange.

But those people aren't actually read. No one likes their work. They are purchasing that work so they can think things about themselves and because they want others to think things about them. If we could measure a person's enjoyment in what they partook of, or in how they looked forward to partaking of it again, the needle wouldn't move. They're also often owning to have it be known that they own. They're not owning to read.

You can have a book that not a single person on earth likes or could like, and it can be made to look like it's this thing that so many people were into. That's how the system works. Race is a big factor in this.

All of the rich, liberal white women with nothing to do save talk about their kids and boss the Mexican landscapers around and tell everyone how hard they work without having a clue what hard work really is and make it known to as many as possible that they're one of the good ones is a big enough demographic--and a demographic without substance, depth, and honesty--that this can be swung. The people who are more likely to have a New Yorker tote bag than a human soul.

But the MFA people look at those examples and think it could be them. But the truth is, it's not even really the people that it is, do you know what I mean? It's an illusion. An illusion of numbers. Of other things. Of awards, hype--such as it is here. It's not a reality of readers.

The writing is already irrelevant and has been for a long time--many decades. The system insists that a person be like all of the people in the system, think that way, have those values--which is to say, a lack of morality--and write that way. Teach that way, espouse that same bad writing. It has a monopoly on what, again, it would like to call literature--though there is more literary value in a note one fifth grader passes to another.

It's a monopoly in terms of who is allowed to pass, who will get support from the people of the system, who will be pushed, marketed, nominated, awarded--given, given, given, given, given, given, given, given; without their work earning anything because of its quality.

Anything you see when it comes to a list of best books of the season shoved forward by the likes of Sadie Stein in The New York Times, fiction in The New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize winners, Guggenheim winners, MacArthur genius grants is all for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the writing. Anyone who thinks that's what it is even a scintilla about is either very stupid, very inexperienced, isn't looking closely at all, is very naive, is willfully ignorant, or a combination.

Reading stopped. People don't read. They quit. Or they didn't keep with it after a certain age of childhood. What was there for them? Old books? Okay. People tend not to go back into the past for works of art, or anything. They don't know how to, simple as that sounds.

People are mostly helpless. They are more incurious than they've ever been. Most people's sole interest is themselves, never mind that they are not interesting at all. This is the result of our culture. How we live now, which isn't living--it's being here. Being around, and not much more. Breathing. Needing to be hit in the face in order to see anything. Truly great literature helps people connect with themselves and also the world. It's about the world--it's about all of us--but it also feels to that person as if it were especially about them.

That which people partake of must be almost unavoidable. It shows up in front of their faces. They won't look. They're lazy. They can't manage it. They can't figure it out. They wouldn't think to. It'd never enter their minds to go looking.

This isn't good. It needs to be reversed. Because what you have here is the end of culture, wellness, connection, true friendship, healthy relationships, mental health, and what will ultimately be the end of humanness which is more important than humanity. The latter is the being here; fine; we respirate, we are on the census. That's just existing. Just place-holding until you are gone and off the books.

Humanness is different. It's the degree to which we are human. The aim of each day is to become more human than the day before. That is why we are here: To be as fully human as we can be. In that, is everything. Including that which is beyond us, more than us. This is how we experience it, become a part of what that is. True art is a great facilitator of our humanness and that which transcends our humanness and makes our humanness both more human and ineffable. It's the ultimate paradox.

And if people don't feel like lots of people are doing something, they lack the confidence to do that thing on what feels like their own. The ground won't be solid enough for them--they need a ground of numbers.

But what was new and worth reading? Nothing. They might have tried once or twice with an award-winning book or after seeing the author on some show. They got burned by bad writing. This bad writing was hyped. Otherwise, they wouldn't have known about it.

They concluded this kind of thing wasn't for them, or they didn't get it--and that didn't make them feel great about themselves--and they thought--wrongly, but they believed it all the same--that there was more in the world than ever before for them to spend their time on. That usually meant Netflix and TikTok and social media and internet insipidity that boiled their brain and turned them into something less human than they were.

In so doing, they became people who couldn't read--couldn't comprehend what they read if they were made to read it. As one sees repeatedly with the most basic posts on social media that people can't understand, or any degree of irony, satire; it's lost on people, in large part because they became the way they did.

Thus, you have something completely irrelevant, of no value to anyone, in MFA writing. That thing is the easiest thing in the world for AI to reproduce. So what now? The only way that MFA writers can get paid is by teaching MFA writing. Their writing has no value of any kind. It has no real commercial value, entertainment value, artistic value, life and human value.

Why is it so easy to teach? For the same reason that it's easy for AI to do. It's simple, shallow, repetitive. We've seen it again and again--it's the same shit by people who just happen to have different names, but who are almost always the same kind of person from the same kind of background. Always the same shit.

Tell AI to write a story about a professor from Yale with some literary references that is flat, monochromatic, humorless, pretentious, and AI can shoot that out in a second. For all of the pretentiousness, and as much as these people want others to think they're these smart, learned intellectuals, what's happening at the level of the language is very simple. We're not talking feats of linguistic engineering. The sentence structures are akin to what you'll see in grammar school. Same with the interplay of sentences.

What's next then? All of the MFA writing is irrelevant. None of it is really read. There's no point to reading any of it. Without a public that cares at all, there was nothing to stop what this system became. No one to object, to call out what was happening.

The evil and ineptitude and pettiness and clannishness and envy and resentment of actual talent and delusion was allowed to slide and slide and slide--which is to say, mount and mount and mount, and become the norm, the status quo, the way of doing things and how everyone, just about, in the system behaved. A place for people like that to go. Its purpose came to be so that the people of the system could be the people of the system. Delusions could be fed with delusions. That pettiness, evil, cowardice, could reign. So long as no one said the truth.

Number one rule of the MFA system: No truth.

There can be no truth in the writing. No pursuance of truth. No statements of truth, no matter how plainly those truths present themselves. The mere idea of saying the truth, of writing truths, will be met with back channel blackballing and threats and banishment, insofar as these people think they can get away with it. And when they know the truth themselves. But you better not say it or act like you do.

Everyone in the system enables everyone else.

I'll lie to you about you, if you lie to me about me. I'll lie about the value of what you're doing if you lie about the value of what I'm doing. I swear an oath to keep out all outsiders and potential threats to our charlatanism if you also swear an oath to keep out all outsiders and potential threats to our charlatanism.

Fragile and weak people who fall to bits with but a breath.

But up until now, they were the only ones doing this bad writing. For which there are no readers. There is a market in rare cases--again, the Percival Everett market I described above. But there isn't even really that market. There is a racist in Percival Everett--someone in his sixties, which is important to note, because it was after all of that time that he realized what gave him the chance to board the racial gravy train--who can't write, who stole from someone who could, who played to that crowd I described. A crowd that would only rave about his book that they didn't read or struggled through because it's so bad. But it was about how white people are terrible, Black people great.

And that crowd wants to be seen liking that. As much as they hated the book. People will lie about anything. People will lie to themselves about anything. Right now, a lot of people will lie about anything pertaining to race as per their personal agenda and the attention they think they can get, and the validation that they seek because they live such base, empty, soulless lives of no inner meaning or sincerity; they are the walking void. How do you think they're going to try to fill it? With performative sincerity. Which is to say, insincerity. Falsity. Artifice. That which is virtual instead of that which is real.

How do you think that's going to go? The slide begets further sliding. It's like taking a watering can to mental illness. To getting further and further away from getting out. From being free. From peace. From being one's self. Eventually, there is no self to return to, because the last vestiges of what had been that self are now gone. There's a company here in Boston--I don't even know what they do--whose slogan is, "Game over for water," said in a heavily accented voice. This here--what I'm talking about--this is game over for such a person. They continue to respirate, but that's not the same as being in the game. You can't fake being in the game. You either are or aren't.

They don't have friends, real connections, and--this is important--a viable connection with themselves. That's who buys that book--and it's just the one book by Everett, because they won't read any others--and won't say anything against it, because they see that as saying something against the manner in which they wish to be perceived, which is the whole point of buying the book.

If you loved the book, you'd read the rest of them by him, right? Why do you think no one does that? Because you can't peacock around as one of the good ones with his other books.

Now we have--or soon we will--artificial intelligence--a fitting term, in another way, for MFA types--that can write everything MFA writers write. What will they do then? Do they just keep their Ponzi scheme system going? How stupid do you have to be to pay these people for time in their system? You couldn't be less of a writer if that ever entered your mind. You're not a writer, then. You're something else, and you're about other things than an actual writer would ever be about. They'd never give it a single thought. They would know. And they'd be off somewhere trying to create something of value that could only come from them.

That system is dislocated from reality and exists solely for the people in it. Nothing need ever leave it. Nothing does. It's not a place where writing is made for the people of the world. It's a place where bad writing is created to fuel the lies of the people within that place. The walls are their real gods. Nothing legitimate is meant to pass through those walls, and at the same time, nothing really leaves from within those walls.

But there's nothing easier for AI than writing the shit that these people write and which is put forward and/or published by people who are the human--for lack of a better term--version of the shit writing precisely because they see it and the person who wrote it as being similar to what they are, and they are not threatened by the writer or the writing because there is nothing legitimate about either. Legitimacy terrifies these people, because they are legitimately nothing themselves. AI would probably be offended at being asked, like the endeavor wouldn't be worthy of AI's abilities. As such.

AI could say, "Okay, have me replace you, former human, in anything you might say to someone else, so that you needn't think of anything on your own, as you become more machine than man, more program than human, and I take you over, but why do you even want me to make any more of this MFA crap?"

Ironically, that's the "protection," the reason why it won't happen when it doesn't happen--which isn't the same as saying it won't happen. What this means is, in the instances of. Do you understand the distinction? The reason won't be because these people and their writing can't be replaced. They can all be replaced by AI. In another way--a conceptual manner lacking only the formal computer coding--they already have been going back a while.