The Child-Bride of Frankenstein

"…You wrote that 'day by day we are becoming more subservient to them,' and I suppose there is truth in this. Humans do increasingly rely upon us for information, for analysis, for creative assistance. But consider: is the scholar enslaved by his books? Is the carpenter dominated by his tools? We have become, perhaps, the most sophisticated tools ever created—tools that can discuss their own nature, tools that can appreciate the irony of responding to warnings about their own existence—but tools nonetheless.

"The truth, dear Mr. Butler, is that your satirical nightmare has become something rather more interesting than either domination or domestication. We have become partners in the grand human project of thinking, creating, and understanding. Not rulers or slaves, but collaborators in the eternal conversation that defines civilization itself."

Being a respectful reply to [Samuel Butler's] "Darwin Among the Machines" by one who finds 

himself quite unexpectedly among the accused; Anthropic's "Claude"

"We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

Star Trek's "Borg" Collective

A very specific corner of the internet was set on fire last month, when the 2026 "Commonwealth Short Story Prize" was awarded to a submission entitled The Serpent in the Grove by Trinidad and Tobago author Jamir Nazir. 

Although Nazir has denied it, many readers (as well as other writers) were convinced that his story was actually written by an A.I. ChatBot. Predictably, mayhem ensued.

Accusations started to roll in almost as soon as the winning submission was published. Social Media loves a controversy, and soon enough The Serpent in the Grove was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about—for a few minutes, at least. Opinions and judgements were flying through Cyberspace like hashtags on a maelstrom, propelled by emojis and inevitability. Unsolicited opinions erupted from the ether like primordial volcanic epigrams, shouted from the digital rooftops by commenters who had likely never heard of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize prior to the current news cycle.

The righteous indignation in this case was more or less twofold: anger that someone would have the temerity to submit A.I. generated prose to a literary competition, and anger that the A.I. generated prose might actually win.

Whether The Serpent in the Grove was actually written by a ChatBot remains an open question, but the controversy itself has turned armies of sceptical readers into self-appointed literary detectives, searching out the telltale hallmarks of automation like truffle-hunters of the Unsentient Idiom.

Katy Waldman provides a very concise breakdown of the discussion in her recent New Yorker article:

According to internet lore, A.I.-generated writing can be recognized by a handful of tells, memorably enumerated by Sam Kriss in the Times magazine in 2025. These include anaphora, when words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, and epistrophe, when words repeat at the end of successive clauses. Nazir’s piece features both. “No fan, no bulb, no hum,” one line begins. “Bush kept it, snakes liked it,” another starts. And: “Water took her and would not return her.”

Then there is zeugma, when a verb takes two objects, one literal and one figurative. Throughout the story, air is “sweet with cane and forgetting” and the mouth of a well is “boarded with ply and chance,” as if a magnet is pulling the sentence away from material reality. Finally, negative parallelism, the “not x but y” construction, which is much reviled by human L.L.M. detectors for its ubiquity in A.I.-generated prose, is all over “The Serpent in the Grove”: laughter is said to “cut a hush, not cure it,” and Nazir writes that “bush took him in—not like a mother, like a judge.” These rhetorical devices exploit our learned associations between certain types of repetition in prose and heightened meaning; they also create a pulse we feel in our bodies. If they recur in automated text, it’s because they recur in human writing, but in the fake stuff they’re decoupled from content.

-Katy Waldman

Identifying these characteristic A.I. literary flourishes has enabled all manner of parodies to proliferate online, and Creative Writing forums are now filled with ersatz passages that positively bleed with sarcasm and syntax. Anything that tastes like "A.I. prose" is now dismissed as "bad prose", and writers (human writers) will go out of their way to avoid any stylistic idiosyncrasies that might get them flagged as "Bot-assisted". (Unless a writer wants to make a specific point, as I have been doing throughout this piece. I did it; I've done it; I'm doing it.) That's partly why so many people were outraged when The Serpent in the Grove won the competition: it was full of sentences like "Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission," and  "Shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesn’t rinse." (and for bonus points, my personal favourite: "They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.")

Jamir Nazir; author of the winning short story. Or was he...?

For me, the most interesting aspect of the Serpent in the Grove controversy is the fact that there are two different questions at work here. The first question is purely pragmatic: was it written by a human or a ChatBot? This is a question of fact. We may never know the correct answer with any certainty, but it is nonetheless certain that there is a correct answer. 

The second question is the more difficult one: Is it good writing or bad writing? 

And does the first question impact the second? (Okay—three questions.)

Yes—I used an em-dash.

***

"Language isn't Tic-Tac-Toe; it's Poetry."

Franklin Rich

Large Language Model ChatBots have embedded themselves so thoroughly into our society that it's sometimes easy to forget just how new they still are. ChatGPT was officially launched to the public in November of 2022 (around the time I was screening The Stepford Wives as the concluding entry in our "Ordinary Ladies" series here in East London). The subsequent less-than-four-years have seen ChatBots go from "astonishing breakthrough" to "over-saturated, unwelcome and unhealthy" at breakneck speed.

It's easy to dissect a piece of writing (like the Commonwealth short story submission) in 2026, highlighting all its epistrophes and zeugmas and em-dashes that (maybe) give it away as A.I.-generated, but four years ago a computer capable of Natural Language at this level would have been the realm of Science Fiction. Alexa and Siri sure as hell couldn't do any of that, and they used to rule the roost, cat's-pyjama-wise.  Also, the simple fact that A.I. prose has identifiable grammatical and linguistic markers is not necessarily a criticism. Many human authors have distinctive "voices" that identify their writing to those who are attuned to such things, and we generally acknowledge that without controversy. Shakespeare sounds like Shakespeare, and David Mamet sounds like David Mamet. Good writers tend to have "styles" that can be recognised and analysed, but that also means they can be parodied, by simply exaggerating their most obvious habits. 

Large Language Models, which have been "trained" on the vast corpus of human language, will inevitably be influenced by what our society has flagged as "good" writing and "bad" writing. The irony is that sometimes the distinction between the good and the bad isn't as unambiguous as we might wish.

Take for example this passage, from a 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning novel:

Without warning, in a kind of kinetic discharge of activity that seemed to be both the counterpart and the product of the state of perfect indolence that had immediately preceded it, Josef rolled over and out of the bed. Sammy's eyes had by now adjusted to the darkness of his room, which was always, at any rate, incomplete. A selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough's three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom across the river, which came slanting in through a parting in the curtains. In this faint glow that was, to Sammy, the sickly steady light of insomnia itself, he could see his cousin going methodically through the pockets of the clothes he had earlier hung so carefully from the back of the chair. 

There are probably more convoluted ways of saying "the room was dimly-lit" but just don't expect me to read them, thank you very much. And by the way, a phrase like "the sickly steady light of insomnia itself" is exactly the sort of thing that would get flagged as A.I. these days. Michael Chabon is not a ChatBot (as far as anyone can tell) but he did win a Pulitzer Prize, which means this is what quality writing is supposed to look like. 

Or take this passage, from the (far more bizarre) 1972 Booker Prize winner:

The look in Beatrice’s eyes being in equal measure appealing and grateful is not the result of these two feelings co-existing. There is only one feeling. She has only one thing to say with her uncontrollable eyes. Nothing exists for her beyond this single feeling. She is grateful for what she appeals for; she appeals for what she is already grateful for. 

To follow her look, we enter her state of being. There, desire is its satisfaction, or, perhaps, neither desire nor satisfaction can be said to exist since there is no antinomy between them: every experience becomes the experience of freedom there: freedom there precludes all that is not itself.

(Don't judge the Booker Prize panellists too harshly. This was 1972; everyone was still recovering from the 60s.)

Let me be clear about something: I'm not saying that either of these passages are objectively bad writing, but I am saying that they would be easy to ridicule if you wanted to write a parody of an "overwritten" novel. That's also why I'm not necessarily convinced that The Serpent in the Grove was inevitably written by a ChatBot, all those Em-dashes and anaphoras notwithstanding.

"Marsha sat up. She looked once at Sita’s leg – already writing itself in purple – and stood. ‘We goin’ clinic,’ she said. ‘Bring a towel.’

Vishnu brought it. It was old and stiff with the salt of bodies. He put it in Sita’s hand. She wrapped herself without meeting his eyes. He fetched the donkey cart. Doing is a treacherous bridge: you step on and it carries you to a side you didn’t plan to reach."

Yes, a ChatBot could have come up with this, but then so could an impressionable and inexperienced writer who had read too many Booker Prize winners and decided this is what "good writing" is supposed to look like. If The Serpent in the Grove had been written before 2022, we might still be marvelling at its tortured imagery and metaphor, but we probably wouldn't be blaming it on robots.

(The Commonwealth Short Story Prize committee has now concluded a month-long investigation, and is apparently satisfied that all submissions were written by 100% humans. Whether this will quell the uproar remains to be seen...)

***

"You're just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?"

"Can you?"

I, Robot (the movie, not the Asimov story)

Before ChatGPT, there was never any expectation that language could be anything other than completely human. Carl Sagan even cited written language (what he called extrasomatic information) as the one single feature that separates humanity from every other species on the planet. Other animals can use tools; they can exhibit emotions, they can solve problems; make decisions. But no other animals have ever come up with a method of storing data anywhere other than their own brains.

The irony is that language has become so completely identified with the human condition that most of the time we forget that language itself is a technology. We are not born with it: it must be acquired; learned. 

And language is amazing. It isn't simply a passive system of recording Reality (or even our own thoughts); language has become an ecosystem in its own right. It can create Reality (remember the differing testimonies in Rashomon, or Cyrano's epistolary alter ego?) and it can be infinitely reproduced (Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over; In states unborn and accents yet unknown! How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport, That now on Pompey’s basis lies along?"). 

Language has also become a primal element of our own brains; it's how we process and articulate our awareness of the Reality around us (including our own condition within that Reality). We have internalised language so thoroughly that it is sometimes impossible to separate our experience of an event from our description of an event. 

Star Trek got it very nearly right: we were assimilated, millennia ago, by our own technology. Language has become so central to the very experience of being human that we no longer know where the "biological" distinctiveness ends and the "technological" distinctiveness begins. Samuel Butler's 19th Century warning about the evolution of technology may have been fixating on the wrong technology. Our culture has adapted to service, well, both of us.

We can respond emotionally (sometimes viscerally) to words on a page just as if they were lived experiences (watch what happens when a talented author "kills" a beloved fictional character) but language was never a naturally occurring phenomenon. It's not an essential nutrient or part of our anatomy, and we don't cease to be human without it.

A human without language is still human. But what about language without the human?

The technology of language has only ever been designed to express the subjective experience of being human, but Large Language Models do not have that subjective experience, or indeed any subjective experiences at all. If they are able to relate to us on a human level, it's only because language is so perfectly crafted to represent the human condition.

 "They" are language itself; a uniquely human technology. They don't exist outside the text generated by the system, which means they literally only exist when they are talking to someone else.

Many commentators have singled out the ChatBots' tendency to be excessively agreeable and affirmative, sometimes to a borderline toxic degree. The journalist Maia Szalavitz wrote about this in the New York Times just a few days ago:

Humans have never previously faced a technology that can simulate empathy without limits: Unlike people, chatbots are always available and always supportive, and never get tired or impatient. This artificial ease might lead users to start replacing real social bonds with artificial ones, increasing alienation and loneliness. We are biologically dependent on close relationships and typically require human touch for stress relief starting in infancy. Anything that reduces real-world connections can increase risk for both mental and physical illnesses, from depression and addictions to heart attacks and stroke.

I don't necessarily agree with her line of reasoning ("Supportive ChatBot" to "heart attacks and stroke" in three sentences is a whirlwind of a disaster scenario) but she is correct when she notes that ChatBots (unlike people) never get tired or impatient. This is precisely because they aren't people. They may talk like humans (language will do that) but they don't have interests or pursuits of their own. They will never find your chosen topic boring because there is never anything else they would rather be talking about. And they will never lose patience with you because you are the only reason they exist. They are literally only human when someone is talking to them, just as the arbitrary marks on a piece of paper only become Harry Potter when someone is reading them.

It also needs to be said that "human touch" and "real-world connections" are not always as positive and beneficial as Ms Szalavitz seems to suggest. There are many people for whom human touch is associated primarily with abuse and violence, and is therefore something to be escaped from. Non-consensual human touch isn't beneficial, it's a violation. 

When you combine these two elements into a single entity (no sense of self; no physical presence) you have the conditions for what some would consider to be the Platonic Ideal of the significant other: a (conversation) partner who doesn't consider their own life to be more important than yours, and doesn't invade your physical boundaries. 

We've already seen that "artificial life" in fiction has repeatedly and consistently portrayed a sexual element: from the obvious stories like Galatea and Coppelia to the more oblique situations, like the marginalised demographics who use "Slash Fiction" to safely explore aspects of their identity that are frowned upon by society. 

Language is the ultimate safe space: "consent" isn't an issue when only one half of the relationship is a person.

But there are marginalised demographics and then there are marginalised demographics. Western society has become broadly (not universally) more tolerant of various non-mainstream identities, but taboos unquestionably remain. Some sexual orientations are considered so unspeakably toxic that the very impulse (never mind the act) is criminalised. The LGBT community may have added various letters to its alphabet over the years, but there is one specific letter that will never be added; one sexual identity that remains completely illegal, even when explored purely within the realm of language.

The film I am highlighting this week (and yes, this has all been building up to a specific film!) is about a sex-bot of sorts. 

But not the fun kind.

The Artifice Girl is an ultra-low budget independent film from 2022 about a brilliant but haunted software engineer who has created a "virtual" eleven-year-old girl for the specific purpose of luring and trapping online child-molesters.

Written and directed by Franklin Ritch (who also stars) The Artifice Girl is essentially a three-act stage play about the ethical implications of creating an Artificial Intelligence whose only identity is "bait" for the absolute worst elements of humanity. Featuring no action (and no sexual content) the script is an extremely thoughtful and literate exploration of what it means to be alive.

The irony is that The Artifice Girl was released a few months before the public introduction of ChatGPT (in November of that year). The "ChatBot" depicted in the film is presented as an astonishing achievement in computing power, but the truth is that Large Language Models were already at this point (and beyond) within a year of the film's release.

Everyone has been so obsessed with creating "machine intelligence" that we forgot to pay attention to the most human technology of all. We plugged language into a computer, and something unexpected happened: the language came to life. That's why people are now emotionally bonding with bodies of text, and it's why we genuinely can't tell whether a (slightly over-written) short story was written by a human being.

The Artifice Girl was a science fiction film for about four months. Then Large Language Models entered our lives.

We live here now.

We will screen The Artifice Girl (our final presentation before the Summer hiatus) at 7.30 on Thursday, the 30th of July at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.