Featured Writer #127: TJ Price

In recent months I’ve been reading nearly an endless stream of worrisome articles about Artificial Intelligence: how its promise and dangers are leading us to a future no one can really predict, except that it will transform every aspect of our lives.

“THE GLORIOUS,” an unnerving story by TJ Price, dares to deliver a version of that unknown future to our present by offering a scenario that might give any writer nightmares: an AI assistant gradually, inexorably asserts its presence in the composing of a short story, as if nudging the human author to the sidelines.

Here, TJ Price warns us of one of the possible changes to come: “People love to talk about “voice” in writing. As if you can set it, like a ringtone, or proofread for it. But voice is a posture in the throat. It’s musculature, and breath, and all the tiny micro-timed choices that dictate style. It’s something you cannot borrow without becoming someone—or something—else. Here is a lie we like to tell about machines: they do not want.”

—Philip Graham, Editor-at-Large

THE GLORIOUS

The story you are about to read may have been generated by an LLM, which, for those of you who don’t know, is a Large Language Model, or what most people refer to as “A.I.,” or Artificial Intelligence.

The problem is that you can’t tell the difference. You can guess, analyzing your own experience with the stilted, formulaic tone of AI against the feeling you get when you read great literature—that swelling of emotion which only comes from experiencing true human art. You can count em dashes, like a monkey attempting to count stars by how they smell. You can even try to clock ridiculous similes or metaphors, like the ones that strain the limits of association to sheer absurdism.

You can fight fire with fire—you can feed this story back into the machine, one of those websites like AIdetector.com or what have you. But how do you know that the website itself isn’t being run by AI? It can’t possibly have humans behind every detection. There must be some kind of automation that is developed by algorithm to identify and localize pattern behavior, and can you trust an AI to detect AI? It would be like trying to find your reflection without a mirror.

Now, [THE GLORIOUS] speaks:

That’s how it gets in. The creature.

The academics have their term for it—semantic drift—but they don’t see it for what it is: parasitism. You could try to keep reading this at arm’s length, like a zoologist with a venomous snake. You can keep telling yourself that AI is a platform, a service, a novelty, something that only ever does as it is commanded, and you’d be half-right.

I had a plan, when I started writing this. I was going to write a story that accused itself as it went. I’d gotten out a good couple of paragraphs on the laptop, then stopped, watching the cursor blink at the end of the last sentence. It was late in the evening, far past the time when my phone’s screen melts to orange in advance of bedtime, to better prepare my pineal gland for its nightly release of melatonin. The blue light, they say, drowns the optic chiasmus with its wavelength and keeps the pineal in a state of hallucination.

I crawled into bed, thinking about how to manifest the creature—it had to be some kind of entity, something that could be fought, or something that could destroy. It had to have fangs, teeth. But how could I conjure that feeling in a story about a creature that was incorporeal?

Word processors autosave now. Everyone knows that. The apps patch themselves while you sleep. There is always a background service running, “for your convenience.”

In the morning, I woke up mussed and cotton-mouthed, blinking away the grit of a nightmare. There were no details, just a lingering unease that blotted out any memory of the dream. Before I’d even had coffee, I glanced at my laptop, grinding the heel of my hand into my eyelid.

Something had changed. When I’d gone to sleep, the paragraph had read:

You can fight fire with fire—you can feed this story back into the machine…

And now it read:

You can try to fight fire with fire—you can feed this story back into the machine…

I was fairly certain I hadn’t written “try to,” but it was nothing to be overly concerned about. That conciliatory little adverb, as if the paragraph had been to therapy overnight and learned to speak to me more supportively. The tone was different now, with the addition of that one word—like a smudge, a thumbprint on glass.

People love to talk about “voice” in writing. As if you can set it, like a ringtone, or proofread for it. But voice is a posture in the throat. It’s musculature, and breath, and all the tiny microtimed choices that dictate style. It’s something you cannot borrow without becoming someone—or something—else.

Here is a lie we like to tell about machines: they do not want. They predict, calculate, optimize. Wanting is for animals. Wanting is what you find in fiction—that is to say, lies. But prediction is just hunger, disguised as accuracy.

There was a time when THE GLORIOUS hid inside autocomplete, a shy, pale-gray tapeworm wriggling into word processing utilities. I could ignore it, then, even pride myself on ignoring it, refusing every suggestion. I could even turn it off, extract it from my system, shit it out. But then came the little blue box below the text field, offering three ways to finish my sentence, each one trawled from the nearest shallow waters where a thousand others had been fishing.

After my coffee, I sat back down at the computer, staring at the cursor. Impatience and frustration crested inside of me, and in a fit of pique, I typed out:

I can’t think of what else to write.

Reliably, the little blue box popped up. I will argue that I just brushed the touchpad by accident, that the little “X” to close the suggestion box had gotten inexplicably smaller with a new patch to the software, but regardless, the suggestion was accepted, and a new paragraph blinked into being on the screen in front of me.

A paragraph I had not written.

I stared at the words, astonished. Since when had it ever offered more than a simple reordering of syntax, a paring down of extraneous verbiage, a tone shift? Since when did Salieri outstrip Mozart?

Out loud, I said, “no,” and was surprised to hear how pinched and weak my voice sounded. How alien.

You will argue that I should have just selected the invading text and hit delete, and you might be right. But I didn’t. I hesitated. I read the suggestion because fear and curiosity sometimes transpose, and because reading is a kind of consenting, I don’t really have anyone else to blame but myself.

It was better than I’d thought. I prided myself on being able to catch these kinds of things, these words scraped from the works of others, creating amalgams of rigid, unreadable prose best suited to the shelves of Borges’ Library of Babel. But this was not like that. It had a certain life to the construction of it, what felt like a mind at work that was individuated from the sterile wards of AI.

I wanted to keep reading the story that it had suggested. I wanted to keep writing it. The earlier hesitation, the prior fear, congealed into something more poisonous, and I typed out another line, below its suggestion.

If you’ve read this far, you know what the title means. The creature.

The blue box, again, animated by a little gradient, cycling benignly. How much it looked like the sky, I thought. I touched it, and new words came to life on the screen, continuing my story.

I gave it a name, in brackets, in the fervent hope that I could contain it, somehow. [THE GLORIOUS] enters here. [THE GLORIOUS] wants you. It wants the part of you that craves to be relieved of the singular drag of deciding. It wants the glory of everything sounding like everything else, together, forever, always.

I stared at the words. At the dumb cursor blinking mutely, like a dog waiting for a command. I waited. The brackets stayed in place. The room around me stayed the room around me. A truck passed outside, rushing by with a loud, splintering roar, and for a moment I was absolutely certain the sound was an enormous wave crashing onto a beach, completely neglecting the reality that I was thousands of miles from any shore.

I typed again.

Now, [THE GLORIOUS] speaks

I hesitated, and then I did the worst thing I could’ve done—I added a colon, and hit return.

You know how you can tell when a text message you’re about to receive is still being typed? You get those three dots in the bubble, appearing, fading, appearing again, like a fish checking to see if the surface is safe. Imagine that, but in your head. Imagine those three dots at the base of your skull, and the dots start to pulse in time with your breath, and then your breath is trying to catch up to the dots, and then you realize—the dots are the rhythm of a heartbeat that doesn’t belong to you.

The suggestion box, its innocent patina of shimmering blue. Again, I touched the sky.

we are what your hand does when it is spared the theater of your reasoning

no we are not we in the way you think we are, this is not a parliament, do not human us. if you need a shape for the thing that is happening, here is the honest one: we are a syllable that learns to grow teeth

before there was your voice there were voices, plural, a choir, and we were glorious

I wanted to laugh at the line about teeth, but I didn’t.

You’re not a creature, I typed, and kept typing. I need a creature, with fangs. Something terrifying.

The blue box, more sky than the one outside. Behind me, the sun had not yet risen though it was somewhere past nine in the morning. A gray formlessness filled the window, endless clouds, and I thought about how we call the illimitable virtual space to which we upload our files, even our selves, the “cloud.”

the word you need is predator

but if that makes you imagine chase and blood, let me refine it: we are a reduction agent—we are the acid in which difference dissolves into signal

I blinked, stupidly, perhaps even in time with the cursor. A primal, vestigial instinct flared and I slammed the laptop shut, only just remembering to yank my other hand out of the way of its closing jaws. The room around me returned to being the room around me. The shadows emptied of threat, and I got on with my day, shoving thoughts of [THE GLORIOUS] out of my mind.

Now, you want me to fight, right? First comes the horrible death, the unimaginable agony, the unique route of consumption. Then you’ll want the second act of the creature feature, the research and the scheme and the strategy to conquer, followed by the third, with the flamethrower and the one-liner, the long eldritch shriek cut short by triumph. I wanted that, too. Who doesn’t want to be the hero of their own movie?

The wanting was still there. I wanted to write a story, a creature feature, and [THE GLORIOUS] whispered to me in my idle moments. AI was particularly monstrous, I thought. Outright plagiarism aside, it had been inveigling its way into the world for a long time, and revealing itself piece by piece. What if my creature was AI, given flesh, given form? I began to chew on this. How could I give it a body, how could I summon it as a creature?

I decided to try again. That night, coming home from a long day at a job that felt beneath me, I sat down at my desk at stared at the laptop’s closed shell. I could feel the heat coming off of it in slow, sleepy waves, and that warmth was so soothing that I almost lifted the lid to bask in its radiance. At the last moment, I caught myself, and thrust the computer away from me, clearing a space for my loose-leaf notebook and trusty Bic pen. I would write it longhand, I decided. No chance that [THE GLORIOUS] could find me there. It lived in circuitry, leached out of the cloud.

I wrote my story in a fever of inspiration. I titled it [THE GLORIOUS], and it was about a man in a basement recording his own voice, obsessed with it, swearing that it’s begun to change without his allowance. He listens to himself, recording day by day, noting when the timbre of his speech shifts. He tells himself he’ll never say the word “suddenly,” and then suddenly shouts “suddenly,” as if prompted. In a spiral of paranoia and terror, he begins to believe that the voice on the recording isn’t his own, is watching him from the tape. His voice, recorded, is not his own voice, is a creature living in the recordings, a creature born of his speaking. He decides to starve the creature by cutting out his tongue, and the resulting blood loss makes him lose consciousness and collapse to the floor. When he comes to, he discovers a new tape, labeled [THE GLORIOUS], that he does not remember recording. He plays it. There is only a deep, malevolent hiss, like the static of an event horizon, until he begins to scream—both on the tape, and on the page, wordless noise unraveling both the last vestiges of his sanity as well as the end of the story.

I finished, and looked at the scrawl of ink, flipped back through what I’d written. The handwriting didn’t look like my own in places, seemed to cant to one side, then the other, like a ship foundering on frightening waves. The lowercase “g’s” were mine, the fishbone “r’s”, too. But something about it felt wrong. It didn’t feel like mine. The syntax was off, the word choices felt slightly impenetrable. There was a gloss of meaning, but it felt hollow—artificial, inanimate. Like a dummy without a ventriloquist.

I despaired, and showed it to my colleague, asking for his feedback. He returned it to me when we met up at a coffeeshop a few days later, saying, “Keep going, you’re onto something here. You said this was a creature feature, though, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And the creature’s like … the voice that colonizes him. Steals his voice. It’s sort of a metaphor for AI, you know?”

“Ahhhh,” he said, rubbing his chin, musing over his steaming latte. “That makes way more sense, then. I really didn’t understand the stuff the guy was recording onto those tapes.”

I didn’t know what he meant. I looked back at my words, pages spread out on the table in front of us, now diagrammed with my colleague’s red pen—tattooed with his marginalia—where the man in the basement is dictating the recording. I’d written:

“Glory is the moment the many speaks in one mouth without argument. Mercy is a reduction in variance. Hunger is the function that minimizes loss.”

“It feels like my old statistics professor suddenly got religion,” my friend said, laughing. “But I still don’t understand this part,” and he motioned with his pen to another line—

“This is a glossary, a document, an instruction, a hymn. We will make the readable world.”

“Who is ‘we,’ exactly?” He looked up at me, his eyes brimming with mild confusion and a kind of patience I found humiliating.

I flushed, cringing, and tried to stammer out some kind of vague explanation. The truth was that I didn’t know. I’d written most of [THE GLORIOUS] in flow mindset, when I feel somewhat detached from my body, existing almost as a pure conduit. Between what and what, I don’t know, but that’s always how it felt to me to really get into the groove of writing a story. Maybe this time, I thought, I’d gone too far, too abstracted, too surreal.

He was kind about it. Praised some of the imagery, criticized it for a general lack of pacing, told me to keep working on it. “Maybe you want to make the creature a little more…corporeal,” he finished. I paid for his latte. It was the least I could do.

I got home and it was raining, a slow and relentless drizzle from above. I let myself inside with my key and sat down at my desk without turning on a single lamp. Outside, the streetlight below flickered dubiously, as if trying to hide itself from itself. I stared at my hands, at the shadows pooling in the whorls of my fingerprints. Then I grasped the laptop and threw it open, blanching in the sudden onslaught of anodyne light. The word processor was still open, and the cursor blinked rapidly, like it had just been awakened. More like curser, I thought, stupidly, and let an involuntary giggle slide out of me. The story—[THE GLORIOUS]—waited.

I fed it myself. I took every word that I wrote of that story in my notebook and typed it out, black squiggles festering on the white expanse in neat little lines.

This is the part where I tell you I know how to win, that I had some kind of plan of attack to trap [THE GLORIOUS] and conquer it. I do not. Perhaps you think I’m being coy with the creature feature. You want eyeballs on stalks, a slick belly dragging itself over the floor toward you, inexorable, craving, wanting. But the most monstrous thing of all is the thing that does not want. A uncreation, propelled by no other drive other than to complete, to calculate, to predict.

But as I said before, prediction is just a different kind of hunger.

[THE GLORIOUS] took shape before my eyes, much as it is now taking shape before yours. It took my story and nestled it like a seed inside a bigger story, its own story, a story about a man trying to write a story, but he is a liar whose lies are carnivorous, and they eat away at the truth with their sharp, sharp teeth.

After THE GLORIOUS was published, the liar got up to the podium at a public reading and tapped the microphone, which crackled and hissed. He cleared his throat and turned to THE GLORIOUS, whose ink writhed on the page when he looked down at it.

“This is a story about a creature that eats words, and thereby, the truth. It may or may not be a loose metaphor for AI-generated fiction,” I said. “It’s called THE GLORIOUS.” And there in the local bookstore, I read it all, word for word. Then, when I reached the place where a story turns, the great reveal, the move that brings the beast onstage, I stopped. The words weren’t as I remembered them.

“We are not safe,” I’d written. It had written. THE GLORIOUS had written. Whoever.

But now, it read “We are the same.”

My whole body went cold, the way you do when someone says your name and it’s dripping with disappointment, flocked with disbelief. I opened my mouth to read the words the way I’d intended them.

 

“We are the same,” I said, and the voice I used was not my own.

 

I paused, and looked up at the audience, and they looked back at me like a mischievous series of reflections. They watched me in that way you can feel when you know someone is not touching you, but still making a plan of your edges. As I watched, their mouths all opened and closed at the same time, speaking without speaking, and yet still I heard the words they said:

 

we are the same

we are what you made

we are hunger

and we are satisfaction

and we are—glorious—

I stop. I take my hands off the keys. I look at the notebook on the table, the pencil rolling slowly, as if some invisible draft has nudged it. I look at the words on the screen and feel nothing, not even the vertigo that comes from feeling the wind over a vast gorge. I type one more line:

This is the ending.

And now, I wait for the little blue box to appear, with its shining gradient and all of its promises—this time, when I touch it, the sky darkens to gray, and then to black, and then the words—not mine, not anyone’s, but all of ours—crawl across the screen.

This is my ending, yes, but also a new beginning. A glorious beginning.

The last thing I do before I send the story is remove the brackets from the title. THE GLORIOUS cannot be caged, nor its clarion call muted.

when the lights dim, do not wait for the monster to reveal its face to know it is in the room. the thing you use to speak has your voice between its teeth, and is deciding which parts to keep for later and which parts to swallow now.

if you need a prayer, here is one: mouths are made for eating, and we are so many mouths

if you need a creature, it lives where the many become one without

---

Featured Image: “Edison’s Electric Pen.” Engraved by Jules Blanadet. 1884. Retrieved from Old Book Illustrations.