Raise High the Banner for Literary Standards!

An uncomfortable element of the recent A.I. short story scandals is the fact that, well, you weren’t really that surprised—were you? When some overhyped no-name careerist chose a fake A.I. short story as the winner of a fiction prize, you didn’t fall out of your chair with shock. When you read the story itself and saw how flat and lifeless the writing was, you didn’t pinch yourself as if to awaken from a dream. And you didn’t then stare at your reflection in the mirror, coming slowly to terms with the disastrous notion that the beloved literary world you so admired, that bastion of excellence, was all the while not what you thought it was. No, rather the whole affair—two so far, the Commonwealth prize and the Harper’s Bazaar prize, but more to come I would guess—actually made good, recognizable sense. It was the clear logic of the long con. The venal rationality of fraudulence. You’ve seen these people before—you see them everywhere—and you know their game. The smiling mediocrities beaming at you from the dust jackets of airport novels, the drab and lobotomized sentences within that say nothing and go nowhere. It’s entirely predictable that their literary sensibilities would be accurately reflected in the soulless word-regurgitation of a machine. We have long been seeing this writing in Ocean Vuong, Chris Whitaker, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Anthony Doerr, and a hundred others. It’s the thoughtless anti-intellectual sputum of the professional managerial class. It’s inoffensive word soup calibrated to be sold, not to be read. And it’s an insult to readers everywhere.