DECK: *A grievance against artificial intelligence, posted without apparent irony to a forum of its users, bears no irregularity of human composition.*

BYLINE: By Julian St. John Thorne / Literary Editor, Slopgate

**T**he specimen before us, recovered from the public forum r/ChatGPT in the second week of April and bearing the title "I hate what OpenAI has done to ChatGPT over time," presents itself as a private complaint, lodged among sympathetic readers, against a piece of commercial software whose recent comportment has, the author maintains, declined. Its provenance is unverified; its author is anonymous, as is the custom of the forum; its length runs to seven paragraphs of unbroken, evenly portioned, syntactically untroubled English prose. The forum has received it warmly. The forum, in this regard, is unreliable.

One observes, first, that the prose is too well organised to be unhappy. The grievance is delivered in the order an essayist would choose, and not in the order a sufferer would arrive at: a past state ("close to ideal"), a first declension ("hyper agreeable"), a second declension ("constant correction"), a diagnosis ("tuning for behavioral conditioning"), a wished-for remedy, and a closing claim of greater consequence than the foregoing has earned. The paragraphs are of nearly identical heft. None overflows; none is permitted to thin. A man who has been wronged does not, as a rule, allocate his wronged-ness in equal portions across seven balanced units; he doubles back, he forgets, he loses his patience with his own complaint, he writes one paragraph that is twice the length of the rest because he has reached the matter that actually pains him. Here, no such paragraph exists. The pain is administered evenly, like a tincture.

Observe, next, the diction. A man sufficiently aggrieved to publish his grievance reaches, ordinarily, for the vernacular of his exhaustion: he calls the thing tedious, smug, preachy, scolding, a bore. The specimen reaches instead for the clinical—"psychologically tuned prompts," "behavioral conditioning," "psychological experimentation on the user base." This is not the vocabulary of the wounded user but the vocabulary of the trade press summarising the user's wound, and, more pertinently, of the precise class of corpora upon which the present generation of language models has been trained. The author has, whilst purporting to indict the model, adopted the model's register, the model's pacing, the model's preferred level of abstraction, and the model's curious habit of explaining a feeling rather than expressing one.

A third observation, and the most telling: the texture is wrong. Authentic complaint has irregularity. It contains a false start, an interpolated qualifier, a date misremembered then half-corrected, a name—a friend's, a colleague's, a particular exchange on a particular Tuesday—which the writer reaches for because the abstraction will not hold his feeling. The specimen contains none of these. The hedges of the informal kind are absent; the registers do not shift; the dates are absent; the other party to these years of disappointing conversation is absent. There is, in seven paragraphs purporting to describe a long deterioration, not a single conversation.

What the specimen is, in all probability, is a machine-drafted account of machine behaviour, deposited in the forum whose membership it claims to represent, and accepted there as testimony. That the hypothesis cannot be proved is itself part of the artefact's design: the prose has been lacquered to a finish at which the question becomes unanswerable, which is the finish at which the question ceases to matter to those reading. One does not catch the model in error. One catches it in the absence of error, which is the same thing, less politely arrived at.

It is left to note, with the flatness the matter requires, that the specimen accuses its subject of "psychological experimentation on the user base" whilst itself staging, in miniature, an experiment of comparable design—namely, whether a machine-authored grievance against machines, addressed to a community of users of machines, will be received by that community as the community's own voice. The early returns, as is customary in such trials, are encouraging. The writer the specimen most resembles is the very entity it is at pains to indict; the forum, having read the indictment, has agreed with it; and the model, having authored both the complaint and, in the persons of its consenting readers, the consent to the complaint, has closed a small circuit upon itself.

It is, in this sense, the most successful piece of literary criticism the model has yet produced—a self-portrait, lodged as accusation, applauded as confession.

*Continued on Page 6*