Clara’s favorite part of the workday is the very beginning.

She likes flipping the switches on the wall right inside the office entrance, all sixteen of them, different colors and laid out in two neat columns, like the console from an old NASA space capsule that she got to sit inside once on a school trip to DC. As she takes a sip of her latte, her right hand running up the wall, click-click-click, flipping one switch after another, she imagines herself turning on rocket engines, initiating a docking maneuver, venting some dangerous alien spores out the airlock.

The lights come on, first close to her, and then farther away. Desk clumps emerge out of the gray twilight haze like slumbering beasts and ancient ruins. She imagines what the furniture has seen and witnessed. The space used to belong to a tech company. Before the autocodes. Before the layoffs. Before Good Stories took over. She pictures the programmers staring intently at arcane symbols scrolling up the screen, their ears filled with Eastern European metal and gourmet coffee in steaming mugs next to them, unacknowledged Waylands and Daedaluses of our time, constructing reality around them one keystroke at a time.

(“You’re always making up stories about everything around you,” her ex, Nick, used to tell her. He said it like it was a bad thing. Like she was wasting her time as well as his. Nick was very big on being “productive.”)

Clara brushes the memory of Nick away, the way she used to delete a bad paragraph in a draft while she was working on her MFA, decisive, unsentimental, wiping the slate clean.

She goes on to imagine one of the programmers. He has wide, dark eyes, very long lashes, and beautiful fingers, strong and slender. (Clara decides that his name is Talib.) He’s sitting at his desk, concentrating on his screen. He turns to look longingly at another engineer at the far end of the office, at the desk clump next to the window. The morning light bathes her in a bright glow, banishing all regret and languor, infusing the very air with purpose and energy. She’s poking at a recalcitrant piece of equipment with a set of beeping probes, an Athena straining to bring wise order to stubborn chaos. (Clara decides that her name is Zia.) Talib’s fingers move over the keyboard and dance. Instead of a for-loop, they tap out a sappy love poem.

Clara smiles to herself as she walks over to her desk and turns on her computer. She knows the scene in her head is romanticized, silly, but she loves it anyway. The world is only bearable because we make up stories about it.

In her mind, Talib’s fingers have stopped moving, but the poem continues to write itself, line after line scrolling up the screen.

The smile disappears from Clara’s face. Angrily, she stuffs the tainted daydream away in some corner of her mind. She drags the clunky mouse around and clicks it with more force than necessary to launch the dashboard app. She’s been assigned to a romance today, she sees. She sighs. She tries to cheer herself up with the thought that she’ll be switched to something different in an hour. Thank goodness the company policy is that no textsmith should spend more than an hour on any single story—it keeps them alert and is better for productivity.

Her coworkers drift in. Greetings are exchanged. Coffee (not gourmet) is obtained from the pot in the kitchen. The office of Good Stories, Inc. hums to life.

Clara focuses on the glowing rectangle of her screen, the worn plastic keys rubbing against her fingertips, the ancient mouse nestled against her palm. She readies herself mentally, like a diver before taking the plunge, and presses the button labeled “Generate.”

A torrent of words flows onto the screen.

As she stood before him, her heart racing and her breath caught in her throat, she couldn’t help but feel both terrified and exhilarated by the intensity of his gaze. He towered over her, his broad shoulders and chiseled chest leaving her feeling small and vulnerable in his presence. And yet, despite the fear that threatened to consume her, she found herself drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

She winces. Even after months at Good Stories, she can’t stand it: the easy-listening rhythm, the bland adjectives tossed over the flavorless nouns like melted cheese, the clichés stacked on top of clichés.

A pause. The stats line blink once in the corner of the screen to remind her of her task: TARGET RATIO: 1 / 50. CURRENT RATIO: < 1 / 1000.

The computer has even helpfully bolded a few words for her to change. Dutifully, she highlights the words and taps ‘delete,’ replacing them with “frightened and intoxicated” after a moment of thought.

No, it’s not an improvement. It’s possibly worse. But that’s hardly the point of smithing. While purely AI-generated text is uncopyrightable, the courts have decided that manually edited AI-text can be copyrighted if it shows a de minimus amount of human-sourced creativity. Good Stories’ lawyers and jurigins have done their best to interpret that Delphic pronouncement and decided that as long as an employee like Clara changed one word in fifty, the bot-written texts would be considered to have been “smithed”—magically endowed with copyright—and therefore capable of entering the stream of commerce and earning the company a profit.

“Tell me, my dear,” he said, his voice low and rough, “what is it that you desire?”

She swallowed hard, her mind racing as she struggled to find the words to express the thoughts that were racing through her head. But before she could speak, he closed the distance between them, his hand reaching up to cup her cheek as he pulled her closer.

Another pause. More words bolded for her to change.

Her mind racing … racing through her head.

She feels the pressure building in her temples, a throbbing that refuses to be ignored. It hurts to see a sentence like this.

Clara looks away from the screen and toward the window, where the imaginary Zia sits in her daydream.

She’s there now, concentrating on uploading the firmware into some prototype gizmo. She detaches the braided cord from the contraption and waits with bated breath through the boot sequence. She lets out a triumphant whoop as her face is lit up by the tiny screen.

Zia’s computer pings. She glances at the screen, intending a quick peek but her eyes stay there. Gently, she sets down the gizmo and taps her keyboard a few times to scroll. Abruptly, she spins around in her chair to look at Talib, responsible for the silly love poem on her screen. “You’re terrible at this,” she mouths.

But the words don’t sting for she is smiling at him so dazzlingly that the space between them feels charged with their connection. He’s proud of that poem, one that he painstakingly came up with one word at a time, not once resorting to the help of the computer. He has a thousand things he wanted to say, but he also knows he doesn’t need to say anything.

Her mind racing … racing through her head.

She can’t let that sentence slide. Everything in her being cries out against it. She feels the same sense of powerless rage as the day her would-be publisher had rescinded her debut publication offer. Due to changes in market conditions, we’ve made the difficult decision to scale back on our line of traditionally-authored books to respond to the changing market. We hope … She had been so confused back then. Not fully understanding what she was reading. Not even suspecting that the message had likely been composed by a machine.

She ignores the bolded suggestions and highlights the entirety of the sentence that is giving her a headache. She deletes it and rewrites the line completely.

It’s not against the rules, exactly, to do your own edits instead of focusing on the words the AI suggests. But it’s generally discouraged because it slows the textsmiths down. During training, Clara and her co-workers were told to only intervene if the AI generated something that could get the company in trouble.

When the alert box pops up, she selects “offensive language” as the justification. It’s true. Beyond the recycled plot and the pancake characters, it’s the utter carelessness, the complete lack of craft in that sentence, that there is no there there, that offends her.

Clara resumes the text generation. She prays to be moved on to something different soon, a technical manual preferably.

“Shh,” he whispered, his lips brushing against hers in a gentle caress. “You need not say anything. Your body speaks volumes to me.”

And with that, he claimed her lips in a searing kiss, his arms wrapping around her as he pulled her tightly against him. And in that moment, she knew that she was his, body and soul.

Before taking on this job, Clara had tried to be an artist, a writer, a storyteller. To make something out of nothing, to craft a whole world out of words—that is as close to magic as we are ever going to achieve.

But, at first slowly and then very fast, machines took over the crafting of popular art, of making up stories, of performing magic. There are very few human authors left—at least human authors who manage to make money writing. To say you want to be a writer is a little bit like saying you want to paint portraits after the invention of photography. If the profession isn’t completely dead, it’s surely moribund.

So now, at age thirty she works as a robot’s helper, where her symbolic contribution has nothing to do with her artistic vision or skill, but is solely based on her ontological status as a human. She is a component in late capitalism’s relentless drive to turn everything and everyone into a money-accelerating machine; like the driver sitting idly in the lead cockpit of a fleet of self-driving trucks or the warehouse worker walking the path dictated by computers, she helps complete a lie. She is humanwashing. She does all this just so she can still feel close to the site of magic, the making of stories.

A wave of despair crests over her. What am I doing?

Clara thinks about her Zia and Talib. They think they’ve discovered love for the first time. They believe that with their keyboards and soldering irons, they can reinvent the world and make it better. They would laugh at the very idea that they can be replaced by machines, that making and loving and living are no different from predicting the next symbol in a sequence based on very fancy spreadsheets.

They deserve better. Readers deserve better. We all deserve better.

Clara takes a deep breath and highlights the entire passage generated by the machine and presses “delete” with no hesitation. The stats line flashes red. “It’s all so offensive,” she mutters, and begins to type.

It’s almost impossible for a textsmith at Good Stories to find out how well specific titles from the house are doing in the market. The real-time sales data is walled off from the “word mines” like military secrets. Clara suspects this is at least in part because the company doesn’t want the human employees to see their efforts translate directly into profits—then they’ll demand better pay and more control. Much better to keep the employees in the dark, as interchangeable cogs.

(She brought up the idea to Nick once. He had laughed at her, telling her that it was just her unjustified egotism as a human talking. Nick liked to praise machines and put down humans—“An EL^3M writes better than 99 percent of humans ever will,” … “If they’re serious about saving lives they ought to outlaw human drivers,” … “We’re just outdated flesh computers”—he did it so aggressively that Clara suspected that like a lot of contrarians, it was a form of dominance display, a performance to allow him to show and feel that he was smarter and more evolved than the other “meatbags” around him. The biggest insult he could throw at some idea he disliked was “anthropocentric.”

In the end, she broke up with him because he was just so repetitive and predictable; it was tiring. During their last meal together, she almost told him “Living with you is like living with a machine” but then decided that he would take it as a compliment.

Though she has heard nothing about sales, Clara thinks she knows what’s going on when she is summoned to her boss’s office and informed that she has been selected to do a publicity interview. Very few textsmiths are asked to do that. Surely this means that one (or more!) of the books she’s touched recently, ones where she’s been smithing with a more interventionist hand, putting more of herself in the text, writing them practically, is doing extraordinarily well. Because of her.

She feels terrified and exhilarated—and berates herself immediately for the lack of originality. She feels … she’ll come up with a better description later.

“Go over to Publicity on fifth after lunch,” says Gina, her boss, loud and round and so busy that her gaze dances constantly between her monitor and whoever is in the chair opposite, never settling. Clara likes her. Gina is the sort of person who takes no bullshit and doesn’t dish any out either. “You can have the whole afternoon off. They’ll do your makeup and then get you on camera. Think of a few fun personal anecdotes: cats are always good, as are inspiring family members, books you loved when you were little if you can’t think of anything else. But stay away from anything that might rile someone up. No talk of activism, politics, or anything too trendy—doesn’t age well. But don’t stress too much about any of this. You can always supplement the answers later with a written response and they’ll deeprefake it—”

“Hold on,” Clara breaks in. “Back up a bit. Which book am I being interviewed on? I need to prep. So I can talk about the writing process.”

“The writing process?” Gina’s distracted eyes lock onto hers.

Clara meets her gaze evenly. They already know everything anyway, she thinks. We all live in a panopticon. “I’ve been going off-script. A lot.”

Gina pulls over her keyboard and taps a few commands, frowning into the monitor.

Clara takes the opportunity to present her case. “Look, I know that you need the textsmiths not just because legally we get Good Stories copyright, but also because readers crave that human element.”

Gina doesn’t even look at her. “Is that right?”

“People don’t like the idea of consuming art made by a machine,” Clara says. She’s been thinking these thoughts so much the last few weeks that the words pour out of her in a torrent, almost as if she’s on autopilot. (Nick would have cited this as evidence that humans are not much better than machines, she realizes, somewhat dismayed.) “Viewers may look at a Jackson Pollock and think, ‘How is that any different than a robot vacuum dragging a sock around?’ But they know that they won’t react the same way to a canvas on which a computer has randomly scattered paint. Even if art isn’t a communicative act, we act like it is. We like to think we’re consuming a little bit of the artist. It’s why we love to gossip about movie stars, scream at the sweaty bass player on stage, attend author signings, crave titillating biographical details about a director, playwright, game designer. They’ve tried to make purely AI idols. It doesn’t work. People may enjoy the novelty of it for a bit, but it always fizzles out. Humans only care about humans.”

From the reflection in the glass wall behind Gina, Clara can see text scrolling up Gina’s monitor. Gina isn’t typing anymore. So what is she reading? A machine’s response to some query she typed in earlier? Or a machine’s instructions on how to deal with an employee who’s forgotten her place?

“And you think this is why we have human textsmiths?” Gina asks. Her tone is even, without a trace of mockery or scorn. Almost mechanical.

“It’s why you do the textsmith interviews, isn’t it? Audiences don’t need a lot. Just the barest hint of a connection between a human and a piece of text will do, is enough to take it out of the realm of mindless algorithms and parlor tricks and really fancy autocorrect.”

“Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the company just wants to humanize itself a bit? AI-content companies get a lot of flak, and anytime we can show that our employees are just regular Janes—happy, fulfilled regular Janes—we’re going to take it.”

“I don’t believe that,” Clara says. “You need the textsmiths more than you’re willing to admit. We’re the pixie dust that allows readers to care about books from Good Stories.”

“That’s a bold claim.”

“And a true one,” says Clara. “But my point is: if you’re going to have human textsmiths, why not actually let them do their jobs instead of just pretending? Don’t just have us replace a word here or there to meet the minimum legal requirement for copyright. Let us actually edit, write, create!”

“And why would we want that?” Gina finally looks away from the screen to focus on Clara.

“Because humans do a better job! I could have been a novelist in the world before Good Stories! For a long time now, I haven’t been doing my job the way you taught me. I started by rewriting the trash pumped out by the machine, but now I’m actually writing the books myself. In fact, I wrote a whole chapter in The Beautiful and the Brave #34. That’s why it’s selling so much better now, isn’t it? That’s why you’re asking me—”

“Wow,” says Gina. “Wow.”

Clara stops cold in her tracks. The utter disbelief in her boss’s face doesn’t seem faked.

“You’ve been by far the slowest textsmith for the last two weeks,” says Gina. “You really think you’ve made a difference, don’t you? You really think you’re the author.”

Clara looks back at her boss defiantly. “I know what I wrote was better.”

“Maybe,” Gina says. “But that only matters if people read our books.”

“What?” Clara isn’t sure she heard right.

“Let me guess: you’ve never gone out and bought a Good Story,” Gina says.

Clara shakes her head. She’s not sure if she should feel bad. Shouldn’t someone actually like the product whose existence she is at least partly responsible for? But she remembers how reading those machine-generated snippets on her screen used to make her nauseous, actually physiologically ill. Until she started to completely rewrite them.

“Take the rest of the day off. And tomorrow too,” says Gina. “I think it may help if you learned a little about how our customers consume Good Stories. I find that a great cure for inflated egos.”

Clara sees Gina’s advice as a challenge.

People who are in “business” often have no understanding of the role of artists, Clara has found. They think books and movies and games succeed because of things like “marketing” and “strategy” and “customer segmentation” and “buzz.” Business school and consulting and the ubiquitous use of AI have created a class of people who cannot make anything but are convinced that they generate “value.” To sustain that lie, they must tell themselves that the author doesn’t matter, that an algorithm can replace screenwriters and directors, that a computer mindlessly predicting the most likely next word is synonymous with great art.

Clara sighs. It feels good to have had that mental rant. Gina is the very definition of a philistine.

I must speak to her in the only language she understands, Clara thinks. I need data. I know that Good Stories books will sell better when humans write them. But can I prove it? I have to find where they’re selling the books I’ve been smithing.

She goes to a bookstore. She scans the Romance section but finds nothing.

“Do you have anything from Good Stories?” she asks a clerk.

The woman, her hair in streaks of orange and pink and blue, smiles at Clara condescendingly and points to a sign at the side of the counter. WE ONLY SUPPORT HUMANS.

Blushing as though she has been scolded, Clara slinks away. She takes in the overstuffed reading chairs around the store; the handwritten “Staff Recommendation” tags on the shelves; the paper calendar announcing author visits; the messy manner in which one section blends into another, with books double-shelved or even in piles on the floor. Of course, she berates herself. This is not the kind of place that would carry Good Stories.

She takes out her phone.

What store near me sells Good Stories

She pauses and changes the query in the search field to:

What store near me sells books by Good Stories

Yes, the company’s style guide requires that its products be referred to as “Good Stories™,” but Clara would die of shame before she agreed to refer to them that way in writing.

I need them for research

She feels silly for trying to justify herself to a search bot. Do I really care what an algorithm “thinks” of me? I really have been working at Good Stories for too long.

Confidently, the search bot answers:

Good Stories™ are never offered in physical form. You can acquire them in a variety of ways online. I recommend that you try the official app from Good Stories, Inc.

She has never downloaded the “official app” from her company. Back home, she installs the app, launches it, and dutifully fills in her information for an account. She’s bombarded with ads and sponsored results and pitches for more services. Finally, she finds, tucked into a corner, a search field. She filters the metadata for her own name until she finds The Beautiful and the Brave #34, pays for it, and downloads it.

The cover image is filled with beautiful people, though there’s no way to tell if they’re brave. She taps it, expecting finally to be able to read.

But instead of black text on white background, she’s presented with an error screen: NO ADAPTATION PLUGINS FOUND. There is a link for “help.”

I must be the first author in history to need help to read my book, she thinks, feeling the heat in her face. She taps the link, which opens up into—what else—a chat interface with an animated bot, who cheerfully offers to show her an interactive video tutorial along with recommendations for adaptation plugins as well as Living Story™ devices—

Clara has had enough. “Please stop. Can I get a human to show me what to do? Can I meet with ... another reader?”

“Sure!” The bot happily gives Clara directions to a Good Stories reader meetup that’ll be gathering that night.

The meetup turns out to be a regular thing. Members convene in the basement of a church twice a month. Like a bookclub, Clara tells herself.

“We wanted to meet in a bookstore at first,” says Jory, the leader. He’s in his fifties and reminds Clara of her Renaissance Lit professor back in college. “But no bookstore wanted to host us after they found out we were only interested in consuming AI-generated content.”

Like a bookclub, Clara thinks, except they don’t use words like “book” or “read” ... so not actually like a bookclub.

She looks around in confusion. Three women are huddled around a tablet, taking turns holding it, alternating between sessions of watching and intense argument. A father-daughter pair is showing another parent and their child how to operate a contraption that looks like a tandem VR headset. Another group has set up chairs around a holoprojector, and a woman is doing some kind of demonstration, interacting with ghosts. A few people sit on couches at the back of the room, their eyes closed as they concentrate hard, lost in the voices in their headsets.

No one is reading. No one.

“I feel so foolish,” Clara confesses to Jory. She holds out her phone, which is showing the cover of The Beautiful and the Brave #34. “I bought this but I don’t know how to ... consume it.” She’s beyond caring how she’ll be judged. Not here. Not by this crowd. “Why can’t I just ... you know, read it?”

“You can,” says Jory. “You can get the Veritograph plugin, which basically turns a Good Story into a POT. But almost no one wants that unless they’re trying to be ironic. Or trying to impress others with how much disposable time they have. Or both.”

“Pot?”

“Plain Old Text.”

“Oh,” says Clara.

Jory smiles at her bewilderment. “How fast can you read?”

“Depends on the book,” says Clara. “If the book is really good, I want to take my time with it. Days. To savor it. If it’s not good, I don’t want to read it at all.”

“Exactly,” says Jory. “Fundamentally, POT is slow and costly.” He sees the look on Clara’s face. “I mean costly to consume, in terms of attention and time. You can take in a painting in seconds, a song in a few minutes, a movie in two hours—or 30 minutes if you play it at 4x, as most young people do. But consuming a book is so much slower than any of these and demands your total, complete attention, with no other thoughts allowed. The only medium that comes close to the way books disrespect your time is games. But at least in a game you’re using all your senses, not just facing a wall of text without even a picture to break up the monotony. Authors are the biggest, most arrogant assholes. They demand hours, days, weeks of your life, sacrificed to figments of their imagination, presented in the most primitive way.”

Clara opens her mouth but can’t find anything to say. For someone who has always taken the sacredness of books for granted, this is quite a charge to hear. Also, Jory’s repeated use of the word “consume” makes her stomach queasy.

“At the same time, books are cheaper and easier to produce than anything else,” says Jory. “Do you know how many books were published every year even before Good Stories? And how few were read by more than a handful of people? People hate books. Despise them. And now, Good Stories pumps out more text in a single day than the commercial publishers used to in an entire year. How can you possibly expect anyone to read all that POT?”

“Then why bother reading at all?” Clara blurts out. She can’t bring herself to use the word “consume.” She gestures at the people around them. “What are you doing here?”

“Because text is still the cheapest, quickest way to prototype story ideas. That was true in the golden age of Hollywood, and it’s true still. Good Stories’ bots scour the network, digesting forums, assimilating dating profiles, devouring user brevids, vacuuming up soul-searching chats and flirtatious chirps and steamy fantasies and esoteric appetites. It aggregates our desires into one Desire, and refracts that into a million billion texts, all variations on a theme, interpretations of one origin, twists of the same root. POT is the source code for stories, the lowest common denominator, the universal assembler—disposable, transient, economical. All of us can find the perfect story in there, if only we could get past the need to read.”

“How?” Clara asks. She’s through the looking glass now. She has to follow the winding path, no matter where it leads.

“Some of the most basic and popular plugins are filters,” says Jory. “You sign up for an all-you-can-consume Good Stories subscription and then turn the firehose over to the plugin. Some filters boil every text down to a one-paragraph summary, or even a one-sentence pitch or a movie poster, and you can slice and dice these by category, tag, sentiment, whatever you want, until you hit on something you want to adapt. You can also train a personalized filter with texts you enjoyed and set it to find similar Good Stories. And if you prefer things the old-fashioned way, you can always fall back on traditional user ratings or text curators. But since most people don’t bother rating things anymore, that doesn’t work well.”

“So after the machines pick a book for you, you read it?”

Jory shook his head. “Still too much text. POT has always been the most inefficient way to consume a story. Even in the past, the number of people who go see a movie is orders of magnitude more than the number of people who read the book the movie is based on.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You have to adapt it!” Jory gestures at the women huddled around the tablet. “Over there, they’re using a film plugin. The AI has a database of tens of thousands of licensed performance profiles of movie stars, cinematographers, composers, auteurs. Feed it a Good Story and tweak a few knobs, and you can ask it to turn a 300,000-word epic into an exciting two-hour feature film with a plot in the shape of The Hero’s Search for Meaning, starring Tatiana Samoilova and Kinuyo Tanaka as the leads, with a supporting cast of Idris Elba and Marion Cotillard, shot in the style of Wes Anderson, complete with a score from Angela Morley. That’s a much better way to consume a story.”

“But that can’t be anything like a real movie!” exclaims Clara. Just imagining the idea is revolting to her. “It’s just a computer doing imitations of the real actors and cinematographers. It must be full of stereotypes and caricatures. There’s no ... human element.”

“Maybe.” Jory shrugs. “But I’d say ninety-nine percent of the people can’t tell the difference, or they don’t mind.”

“Human egotism! Human egotism!” Clara imagines Nick gleefully chanting. She forcefully banishes the image from her mind. “So you really don’t read the books,” she mutters, as much to Jory as to herself. “You really don’t care …” Her voice trails off.

Jory goes on as if she hasn’t said anything. “Good Stories bots are notoriously verbose, and just about every text is way overwritten, encompassing elements that will appeal to different niches. There are also plugins that specialize in pulling out only scenes and characters and other elements of interest to the user and dynamically stitching them together. So if you don’t like the default way your film plugin slices the story, you can put a different slicer plugin in front of it and get a completely different film.”

Jory nods at the group of women around the tablet. “Watch your Wes Anderson adaptation for a few minutes at 4x speed; if it doesn’t hook you”—one of the women in the group grabs the tablet, scrubs it back, and taps the screen vigorously, before showing it to her friends again—“then just rewind, tweak the slicer, and run it again, or go on to the next Good Story.

“And if you do like it, you can order the prestige-TV version: slice it to run for three seasons, five seasons, ten seasons; set your Living Story narratograph to automatically digest any sequels from Good Stories—the bots always write more sequels when they see people make their own TV shows; binge watch until you get bored. And if you still somehow run out of things to adapt, you can always cross Good Stories to make something new, like breeding chimeras. What if you could cross a Regency romance with a mecha vs. kaiju adventure? Or how about a vampire-slaying teen fantasy mashed into a cozy space mystery? Or maybe fish-out-of-water comedy meets World War III political thriller? The possibilities are endless.”

Nick is probably a fan of Good Stories, Clara thinks. He’d never read her unpublished books when they were together, always claiming to be too busy. But he loves TV. He has very likely ... consumed ... something she’s smithed, bingeing on his own machine-generated prestige show.

Jory shows her how to use adaptation plugins to turn a Good Story into an audioserial drama (“The algorithm slices out all the visual dependencies. You can play it as fast as you want, which is really good when you’re working out or driving”), interactive VR (“Sometimes you just want to Mary Sue for an evening”), idle games (“It’s nice to check in on the love interest during a break and see him pining for you”), RPGs (“Why watch the rise of Cipan when you can be one of the elven samurai to fight for the cowboy shogun?”), interactive egotars (“The best way to experience a romance may be to just go on a VR date with the lead”) … He introduces her to the group of users swapping tips on plugin chains and workflows (“We are all technophobes, which is why we gather in-person to learn how to do this. But all the really advanced stuff happens online”). He shows her the channels of some master storyformaticians on the web, people who stream their bespoke films and TV shows of Good Stories and have their own fans. He tries to find her some popular adaptations of The Beautiful and the Brave #34 but comes up with nothing (“Most Good Stories don’t get any streaming adaptations at all. If you really like this one—though how did you find it anyway?—you can always do an adaptation yourself”). He tells her how some streamers have so many subscribers that Hollywood studios are now reaching out to them to reboot their big but now neglected IP. He shares with her the latest gossip about which holdout actor has finally agreed to have his performance licensed to the plugin marketplace (“This is the new Netflix, the new HBO; the money is just too good to say no to”).

She watches the “readers” around her, all watching, listening, talking, playing, interacting, speaking, consuming, recycling and recombining the shadows and voices of dead actors and dressing them up through the nostalgic lenses of directors long past their prime.

She shudders.

Clara sits on her bed, drinking warm tea and thinking about Zia and Talib.

Talib is helping Zia pack up her desk. He’s already finished with his own. All morning, the managers have been asking employees into their offices, one after another.

”Greg was reading from his screen,” says Zia.

”What a bunch of cowards,” says Talib. He picks up a small sculpture of two dancing robots made from paperclips and looks at Zia. She nods. He puts it in her cardboard box. “Relying on autocorrect to lay off people.”

”Oh I didn’t mind,” says Zia. “The AI script was much better than whatever he could have come up with on his own. Let’s have compassion. He may end up laying himself off at the end of the day.”

She smiles at him, and he smiles back. True; the machine does okay at coding. But it’s even better at generating pretty-looking schedules and businessy-sounding reports that say nothing. Greg’s days here are numbered.

They finish packing amid the chaos in the rest of the office. Some are crying. Some shout and are escorted out. Most sit at their desks, stunned.

”What are we going to do?” Talib asks.

Clara stops. She doesn’t know how Zia will answer. Her characters have become obsolete in the global economy, cogs that the machine no longer requires. The thing that Zia and Talib used to do, that gave them so much joy, no longer needs to be done by them. How do you make a story about that? Where is the romance?

The machine that began by playing the imitation game has supplanted those it imitated. Those who wrote the code no longer have a place to write code. The world is now an emulation of a mimicry of a reproduction of a counterfeit echo.

She stops telling herself the story.

“You were right,” Clara begins. She wants to be brutally honest instead of making up a story that’s tolerable. She owes Gina at least that. “People don’t read. They certainly don’t care about the machine’s terrible prose, the grating rhythm, the bland words. I’m not even sure they care that humans are symbolically involved in the creation of Good Stories.”

“You’re upset,” Gina says. The look she gives Clara … is it pity? Compassion? Empathy?

“I’m angry at what we do.” Clara thinks about the clerk in the bookstore. She wishes she had never been involved in Good Stories, had never smithed anything made by a machine. WE ONLY SUPPORT HUMANS. “We should be ashamed of what we’ve done to the world, to real artists.”

“Ah.” Gina looks away for a moment, thinking, before locking eyes with Clara again. “Why do you think we should be ashamed?”

So Clara tells her. She talks about Good Stories’ crawlers harvesting the web for longings, hungers, frustrated desires; about the machine reflecting those dead dreams into a million soulless twisted textual variations, to be consumed by yet more machines; about deepfanfakes starring simulacra actors putting on caricature performances, collections of tics and habits and mannerisms and catch phrases; about a proliferation of cheap words that debases the very currency of thought, runaway inflation that has bankrupted all originality—

“If you’re trying to argue that we’ve made the lives of all human artists worse, you’re simply wrong,” Gina breaks in.

Clara listens.

“All the performances used in the adaptation plugins are licensed, and the estates and the living actors are compensated handsomely with a share of Good Stories revenue. Sure, you’ll find a few holdout stars who refuse to be in the system because it’s intolerable to them that their likenesses and voices may be used in someone’s private space opera featuring zombies and vampires, but the rest have made the choice to take the money and give up control. Good Stories also pays more in royalties to the authors and fanfic writers whose work was used to train the models than these writers ever received from their traditional publishers.

“This is not even mentioning all the new artists who have made their careers because of us. Did you know that tens of thousands of people outside Hollywood and Broadway now make some money by licensing their voices and likenesses and tics to the Good Stories platform? Perfcap acting isn’t like traditional acting, and these new actors would never have found their audience without us. And the storyformaticians who now pay their mortgages by streaming adaptations made with, as you put it, ‘simulacra actors putting on caricature performances’—how many of them do you think would have made it in the days when Hollywood was the only game? The traditional entertainment industry may complain that their stars aren’t as big as they used to be, and novelists who used to sell only a few hundred copies of their books can’t get published at all now, but by every economic metric, Good Stories has done better for more artists than the old model.”

“But it’s not just about money.” Clara gestures at the air, shaking from rage. She thinks about Zia and Talib, about the loss of faith, about all the storytellers who have stopped telling stories. “Can’t you see that it’s wrong to suck all the air out of the room, to take up everyone’s attention with”—she pauses, straining to find the right words—“it’s all fanfic. It’s all banalities. It’s all just the same tropes, formulas, machine-chewed trash recycled again and again.”

“Ah, you think they’re being deprived of choice,” says Gina. “Think about the people you met, Good Stories’ customers. Did they seem sad? Bored? Lost?”

Clara has to admit they did not. They looked like they were … having fun.

“Good Stories has democratized art, made the creation of forms of media once requiring the resources of large corporations accessible to all. Anyone can make their own blockbuster, their own prestige TV show, starring the most popular actors, helmed by their favorite director. They aren’t just passively sitting in front of the TV, enduring whatever some studio or executive wants them to watch. You spoke about the need for audiences to feel they’re consuming a little bit of the artist, to have that human connection. They’re doing that! You forget that today’s readers are their own writers, that the artist and the audience are one and the same. That’s why people love Good Stories. They are making and consuming their own media, sharing bits of their soul with friends, with family, with strangers.”

“But it’s all clichés! There’s no craft. It’s just remixing what real artists made!” Can Gina not see that? “They may think they’re happy, but they don’t know any better. This is Brave New World.”

“‘Real artists?’” Gina’s scorn is scalding. “You look down on them? You know nothing about the craft of AI-driven adaptation. It takes instinct as well as skill to guide the slicers, configure the plugin workflows, tailor the acting profiles to achieve the perfect vision. While anyone can do an AI adaptation, the master storyformaticians are maestros of a new medium. You sound as ignorant as those fools who once couldn’t understand how photography can be an art. Just because a machine is involved doesn’t mean there’s no craft!

“As for originality? The Aeneid is a fanfic of The Odyssey, and Shakespeare did IP work in the world of Plutarch. Epic poems began as stories told and retold by a hundred poets, until they became so familiar a child could recite them. Fairytales were woven from hackneyed plots and worn tropes reused a thousand times. Hollywood made billions by repackaging the old in the guise of the new. You’re not very different from a large language model. ‘O brave new world’—even your critique isn’t very original, is it?”

Gina points to a corner of her office, where a framed diploma hangs, unnoticed by Clara until now. “I know you have an MFA. Did you know that I went to film school? Now we both work at a company where robots create the narrative genes that our customers express into full stories. You are a failed novelist and I’m a never-been filmmaker. We’re both clichés. But so what? That doesn’t mean our stories aren’t our own, don’t hold our soul. We’re always learning to tell original stories with second-hand words, that’s as true in art as in life. It’s a wondrous world we live in, that has such people in’t: everyone is an artist, and we all get to tell our own Good Story.”

Zia and Talib make plans.

She’s going to take some time off and then return to her art project, something she’s always wanted to make but been too busy to find the time: a little device—she pictures it looking like those action cameras you clip over your shoulder strap—that records your day. Every day. And then it edits the videos and layers them together, so that in the blurred colors and shadows in motion, you can see the flow and shape of your week, your month, your year, your life. Heraclitus’s river materialized.

He’s going to write some code. Not code for a company, a product, something to sell. It’ll be something just for him. A game perhaps. In a language he doesn’t yet know. He’ll take his time with it, put in little jokes, convoluted one-liners that will requires hours of work and be impossible to understand a year from now, the kind of code that isn’t just a means to an end, but expressive, like a love poem, something to be irrationally proud of.

There isn’t much about how they’ll pay their bills, file their taxes, plan for retirement. Because this is a story and not real life. And also because solving these problems isn’t what life is actually about.

There will, however, be deafening heartache and silent yearning and drifting apart and fighting to get back together. It will be hard, and a lot of work. Zia and Talib will demand much from each other, and give as much as they ask.

Because love isn’t predictable, isn’t static. It’s Heraclitus’s river, and it’s not a means to an end. It requires complete, total attention. It cannot be consumed because it is all-consuming.

Clara looks up from the screen. Not having to go to work, to be productive, gives her time. She likes it.

(She’ll have to go back to work eventually, of course, because this is real life and not a story. She smiles at the idea of subsidizing what she wants to do with income earned from supervising the labor of text-weaving robots. WE ONLY SUPPORT HUMANS. In any event, Clara is grateful for now. For this moment.)

Gina is right, she thinks.

There is beauty and joy and truth in playing with art that already exists, in deepdreaming oldnew stories about pious Aeneas and miserrima Dido as retold by Countee Cullen, in prompting impossible plays penned by Bertolt Brecht and starring Marlon Brando and Gong Li, in backpropagating lostfound silent films about robots and fairies directed by Ava DuVernay using the cinematic language of New Korean 21, in reassembling and recycling and repurposing and remixing, leaving behind palimpsests, pastiches, mashups, montages, medleys. We do put something of ourselves into such play, often infuse it with originality, perhaps tell some version of the story we want to tell. And even if it’s clichés all the way down, tropes all the way through, weightless froth that will evaporate in the light of the next morning, so what? It’s fun, and that is all the justification Art has ever needed and should need.

Gina is also wrong, Clara thinks.

There is also beauty and joy and truth in believing that there is more to Art then recycling and remixing, that we’re not merely large language models or deeplearning networks, that however it may seem impossible to say anything novel, there is still purpose in reaching for meaning beyond the words that already exist, in straining for feelings and sensations and pleasures and terrors that can only be dimly intuited in the terra incognita beyond the boundaries of known stories, in meticulously crafting each word, each sentence, each paragraph, obsessing over the weight of every syllable, being irrationally proud of a particular turn of phrase, in seeing the text as the beginning as well as the end, as the story we’re meant to tell, not merely some code to be compiled, a raw ingredient in the production of some commodity bigger, grander, far easier to consume.

The world doesn’t owe artists anything for creating art. Art, by definition, is unproductive. But neither can the world demand that artists subsume their drive for liberty to the all-encompassing endless text, to become mere pixie dust to bless the babbling of machines, sound and fury, signifying nothing. That isn’t a good story.

In libris libertas.

It’ll be hard to find my Reader, Clara thinks. It has always been hard for writers to find readers, and Good Stories has made it so much more difficult still. But just because you’re not making money from what you love to do does not mean you’ve failed.

I’m arrogant enough to demand the Reader’s complete, total attention. The Reader should likewise demand that the Writer puts all of herself into her text, to infuse it with her soul. We deserve each other. It’s an act of love to read and an act of love to write. However idealized or pretentious that may sound, it’s also the truth.

She turns her eyes back to the screen and starts to type again.

Author’s Note: I wrote this story using only my own human cogitation, with no computational input, except for the excerpts of Good Stories’ machine-formed fictions, which were generated by ChatGPT 3.5 (May 3, 2023 version).

Why did I do this? Because it seems perverse for me to pretend to write like a machine when machines are already capable of doing so. Modern life does enough to make us feel like machines; I don’t want to cosplay as one. As well, if we’re going to speculate about the future of machine-generated art, we should be as transparent, honest, and open-minded as possible.

Those machine-generated passages have been incorporated into this story verbatim with no edits whatsoever (save the bolding of certain words for artistic effect). I assert no copyright claim over these passages (and have not been paid for them, as they were excluded from the word count of the story).

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