DECK: *Essay counselling the abandonment of pleasantries toward a language model bears every hallmark of having been composed by one.*

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

The specimen, recovered from the subreddit r/ChatGPT and running to roughly six hundred and fifty words, proposes—under cover of accident, which is the preferred costume of all such confessions—that the prudent user of a language model address it not in the manner of a human petitioner but in the manner of the machine itself, omitting greetings, omitting subordination, omitting whatever the author calls "ceremony" and what an older grammar would have named the courtesies of address.

The argument, insofar as it is an argument, is economic: pleasantries cost tokens; tokens cost money; therefore pleasantries cost money. The conclusion is pressed upon the reader with the apparatus of a manifesto—bolded rubrics, the single-line paragraph deployed for emphasis as a sort of typographical stomp, and the italicised aside in which the author professes to have stared at his own discovery "like i'd discovered fire."

It is, of course, the prose of the machine itself.

One does not need to consult the metadata to recognise the hand. The signatures are too plentiful to be missed: the rubric ("the caveman theory in one sentence"); the self-naming aside that pre-empts critique by christening it ("the meta irony"); the dutiful concluding exception, which concedes that creative work resists the very method just expounded; and, at the foot, the promotional link to an external community, which is to such posts what the maker's mark is to silver. The piece is a marketing artefact costumed as confession, and the costume is itself machine-stitched.

What is interesting is not the deception, which is mechanical, but the recommendation, which is sincere. The author advises that the human user adopt the diction of the machine in order to economise upon the machine—that the proper register for addressing a system trained upon human prose is the register that human prose has been reduced to by the system. The English sentence, in this counsel, becomes a unit of waste. The verb is preserved; the subject is dispensed with; courtesy is reclassified as expenditure. "fix bug. line 47. null error." is offered not as a regrettable concession to constraint but as an attainment.

This is a vulgar instruction in the precise sense: it solicits the multitude to abandon, on grounds of thrift, the very habits by which one address differs from another. It is also untrue. The model does not, as the author insists, "process zero useful information" from the courtesies; it processes them as it processes everything, which is to say statistically, and the question of whether their omission improves the output is one the author has not investigated and is not equipped to investigate. He has noticed that the bug got fixed. He has noticed nothing else.

What ought to detain the literary reader is the closed loop. A machine has produced an essay instructing the reader how to economise upon the machine; the essay has been distributed as the testimony of a man who, weary one evening, stumbled upon a discovery; the discovery is that one ought to write more like the machine which wrote the essay. The whole apparatus turns upon itself with a smoothness no human author, weary or otherwise, would trouble to engineer. It is the closed loop perfected: the artefact instructs the reader to produce more of itself, whilst presenting the production as accident.

The peroration, mercifully, is cut off mid-sentence. "if you're on free tier every wasted"—and there the specimen ends, the thought truncated by the ledger from which it was always drawn.