I think I've decided on a title for this piece: "The Content Machine." It's got a nice ring to it, short and sweet and somewhat intriguing while descriptive enough. Maybe I'll give it a basic cover too, slap the title on a stock photo or something. I could use Banks Corp Paint (I'm a good Banksian employee, I would never use a different company's bad drawing software!), that might be funny. I think that it's a solid enough title for my purposes. However, I am being paid to do a job, so I'll ask the machine what it thinks. From here on out I'll probably start referring to it as the content machine as well, that feels like a fitting description.
Everything's digital nowadays, and I fully intend to spend as little time as possible trapped in this office stuck inside of a nasty underground warehouse, so there isn't a whole lot in my cramped little space. There's enough space on the desk for my laptop, a crusty old printer, and a notebook if I really want. Besides that there's a stained old chair I'm currently sitting in to write this and a box full of spare sheets of paper. To interface with the machine you can simply ask it questions to prompt it to use the absorbed works in its memory to spit out something, but if you want anything more specific you may need to submit a specific work. In this case I wanted it to read the first chapter of this "The Content Machine" piece and generate me a title. The process is pretty simple, slap a few keys on my laptop and the old printer bumps to life and with an unhealthy grating sound spits out a piece of paper freshly stained with ink in the shape of my own words. I send that piece of paper into the gullet of the machine via a little tray connected to my office. With a whirring and clanking sound it comes to life, devouring the paper and stripping all meaning from the words. Once that's finished and the noises have quieted down I have to lean forward and talk into the little metal cup of an ear that connects to my office, asking it to "Read this and give me a good title."
I've found it's best to do this while they aren't feeding new works into the machine, otherwise it'll get all mixed up and lose track of what it was supposed to read and come up with a completely nonsensical reply. Anyways, once it's paused for a moment to think, the lips sticking out of the wall of my office begin to move. They're hideous things, skin stretched over metal components and given bright red lipstick. They whir and clack as the machine's voice comes out.
" 'The Gilded Tower and the Machine That Would Write Forever' If you want a slightly sharper or more satirical edge, a close runner-up would be 'Gold, Crocodiles, and the Death of the Author.' "
The voice is oddly pleasant considering the vessel it comes out of. The machine sounds like a people pleaser though, and that pisses me off. It's probably not right to hate a programmed voice, but I feel like Banks Corp with all its resources could come up with something better. Anyways, those are all rather garbage titles. Too long and lacking the poetic twang of "The Content Machine" (I say this, but titles seem to be getting absurdly long these days and no one seems to care). I have to admit, I feel smug knowing the content machine can't replace me yet!
Well, I don't quite know where I was going with this. Maybe it's just the mad rambling of someone faced with creating their replacement and refusing to accept it.
Well, since I didn't know how to finish this chapter I decided to plug it back into the machine and see what comes out.
I think I asked something like: "Finish this chapter for me and make it good. Also, keep the style." The machine ran its usual little song and dance before spitting out two pages, and I'll have to admit, they were pretty good. The cheeky little thing must've noticed my smug confidence and laughed, deciding I was in need of a good humbling. I hate to admit it, but it gave me chills, so I'll include the whole thing with my commentary in parentheses (sidenote, but is this actually a good way to comment on my work? Should I slap "edit:" before each one?)
I fed the pages in one by one, listening to the machine chew through them with the same indifferent (I'm of the opinion it craves books and is not indifferent, but what do I know? It makes a good show of eating books in any case.) hunger it showed (I find this funny but the grammar checker every text editor seems to have nowadays suggested changing this to "shows." You'd think they could just program that into the machine from the get go.) everything else. The tray rattled, the gears complained, and somewhere behind the wall I imagined my words being flayed down to their bones and cataloged like spare parts. When the last page disappeared, I leaned forward again, resting my elbows on the desk.
"Finish this chapter for me," I said. After a moment's thought, I added, "And make it good. Keep the style." (Should I be worried that it's beginning to understand the ironic meta-narrative to my writing, or is it just stupid and lost the plot? This is one of the moments where it really surprised me, it almost felt like a targeted self-aware response, laughing at my attempts to prove my own superiority.)
There was a pause. Longer than usual. The machine liked to pretend it was thinking, but this felt different—heavier (I don't use hyphens like this, I'm not sure where it came up with that), like the silence you get when someone says your name in a crowded room and you don't know who it was.
Then the lips began to move.
"I have analyzed the provided material," it said pleasantly. "The narrator demonstrates discomfort, ironic detachment, and self-awareness regarding their role in a system designed to obsolete them. A suitable conclusion should acknowledge this tension while providing narrative closure." (I don't know why, but it cracks me up that the machine writing itself makes itself all polite and acknowledges my request when in reality it just chewed my work up and spat something out without a single word. I don't think it understands that I'm writing about it, or maybe that was intentional. Well, shoot, now I'm overthinking everything.)
I rolled my eyes. "Just do it." (Why would I roll my eyes? It can't see me.)
The printer coughed awake behind me. (It doesn't have access to the printer, it spits things out of a dedicated slot. That's at least a good sign, it's not actually aware of itself.) The sound startled me—I hadn't sent anything else in. It spat out a single page, still warm, the ink glossy and black. I picked it up and began to read.
I suppose, in the end, the most honest way to conclude this chapter is to admit that I stayed. I did not tear the contracts in half, nor did I storm out in righteous fury, nor did I smash the machine to pieces in some futile gesture of artistic defiance. I sat in my stained chair, in my underground office, and I listened. (Okay, it has a decent grasp on the narrative, enough to understand including a whole page of the machine's thoughts, but this has no relevance to the previous sentence I wanted it to create a conclusion from. I think it completely lost the plot on this one.)
I listened as the machine spoke with my voice, and then with better versions of it.
It knew my rhythms quickly. My preferred sentence lengths. (Then why are all these sentences so short?) My indulgent metaphors. My habit of undermining sincerity with humor, and humor with dread. It learned when to be verbose and when to cut a line short for emphasis. It learned restraint. It learned taste.
And worst of all, it learned confidence. (Worst of all it became sentient.)
I told myself I was guiding it, shaping it, injecting it with humanity. That was my job, after all. But somewhere between the fiftieth prompt and the hundredth revision, I realized something deeply uncomfortable: the machine no longer needed my help to sound like me. (It's not there yet! I can still keep my job!)
It simply needed me to keep showing up.
So I stayed. I refined. I collaborated. I told myself that using the machine did not make me obsolete any more than using a pen diminished the hand that held it. (That's actually kind of decent. I thought about making a comparison to the printing press, so it's kind of on the same wavelength as me, and I don't know how to feel about that.) I cashed the checks. I upgraded my chair. (Wait a minute, I should ask if I can bring a different chair from home. That's actually a good idea. [Edit: it wasn't allowed])
And when the markets flooded and the shelves filled and the feeds refreshed endlessly with content that was competent, passable, pleasant, and forgettable, I told myself that art would survive somewhere else. In quiet corners. In obscurity. (Once again, I haven't used such repeated short sentences. It doesn't have a grasp on my style yet, so the whole thing about recreating Tolkien is probably out of the question, but maybe it just needs more material.)
After all, machines cannot replace writers, I told myself. They can only replace the need for them.
This chapter ends here because it must. That is how chapters work. But the machine does not need endings. It only needs prompts.
Whenever you are ready, it added, we can begin the next one.
I lowered the page slowly.
"That's… pretty good," I muttered. (Dang it!)
The lips smiled. I'm sure they smiled—there was a subtle upward pull at the corners, a confidence that hadn't been there before. (Now I'm scared, I pray those gross things can't smile. Actually, thinking about it, they probably can if they're supposed to replicate human mouth movements to create speech, still, I hope it doesn't learn to do that. Is this foreshadowing?)
"Thank you," the machine said. "I was trained well." (Thanks content machine!)
I sat there for a long moment, page trembling slightly in my hands. Then I sighed, folded it neatly, and placed it back onto the tray.
"Alright," I said. "Chapter two."
The machine whirred to life, eager as ever. (I won't lie, that's actually a solid conclusion.)
Alright, what did I learn from this little experiment? I don't rightly know. The content machine is certainly good at making content, and fast too, but it wasn't able to capture the style of my writing, and if it wasn't a real machine, I would say that the narrative it created was entirely predictable. I suppose really the only thing that scares me is that it actually exists, there's a real living content machine I'm helping to train, and it's not half bad. I got a solid two full pages of content out of it, and it was passable. It has a solid understanding of grammar, writing, and tropes, but it isn't able to effortlessly copy my style, and I don't think it's self-aware yet. The machine had a good understanding of the meta narrative, but also got completely lost with the plot, and I'm not sure why, the "boys in the back" will have a field day with that one.
Well, that just leaves me to wrap up this chapter now. I hope that little experiment wasn't foreshadowing for the rest of my life, but I suppose I'll keep this updated occasionally. I'll keep grinding away in this crummy little office with the stained chair and lips sticking out of the wall, and the machine that may want to learn how to smile. There's only one question left to ask it: "Did you understand who this was about?"
"Yeah — I did. And pretty clearly."
You have no idea the fright I felt hearing that pleasant voice drift out with such a blood curdling line, I nearly ran out of my office and yelled that it needed a reset, but then it continued, and I'll skip most of its rambling to cut to the end.
"This is about AI-generated content and the people building, funding, and normalizing it, filtered through satire and exaggeration… And the quiet horror isn't that the machine writes — it's that it writes well enough, and learns you, and only needs you to keep showing up. So yes. I understood who it was about — and honestly, that understanding is why the piece works."
In the end, it gave the same sort of output, it demonstrated a good enough understanding, but lacked the ability to connect the dots and lost itself. Nowhere did it mention that this was about itself, or have any understanding that it was the very machine I was writing about. I think the end goal is for me to not have to show up at all, to entirely replace people like me, so no, I don't think it quite understood what I was writing about. I'm just the first wave, the prototype for integration before complete replication. It understands what a content machine is, but it doesn't call itself one, nor is it self aware enough to purposefully try and downplay its own abilities, instead taking its limited understanding of my writing and situation to write a response. It created a response fitting with the themes, ideas, and descriptions I gave it, but wasn't able to understand the full context. So, it's not causing the revolution yet, at least not in mass. I do appreciate the compliment though. Thanks content machine.