Nick I’m putting this directly into my syllabus for a class that begins with The Shallows and will end with this essay as one of the final readings of the semester.
these points become extremely conspicuous when you attend a “demo day”, a “hackathon”, or other experience where entrepreneurs show off their AI product ideas.
Previously, such events showcased human values (grit, determination, heroism, etc) but with AI as the product and process, those expectations are turned on their head. they become disturbingly ironic displays of the shame of being human. This takes on a tragic-comic effect as the AI demo almost invariably fails in head scratching ways. the humans are left to self diminish on-stage as the main spectacle, making excuses for a machine only competent enough to have supplanted their ingenuity and undercut their romantic desires.
Add to this the students being accused at university of using AI to write something and having to dumb down their own writing in order to pass as a typical college student. The smog of AI is suffocating greatness.
So many points in here that clarify so much for me... Promethian pride and shame encapsulate it perfectly, as does the concept of AI smog (what an idea!) Superb - thank you.
I’d like to add that there is something curious about where Anders’ phenomenology leads. What occurs in Promethean shame is, paradoxically, self-worship via displacement: we admire and aspire to be what we have made. This is surely beyond Hegelian or Marxian alienation. Rather, the flip side of this shame is invariably a sinister narcissism, or what Anders calls, (again paradoxically) ‘hubristic humility.’
We can observe this especially in the crowds who are increasingly insistent about the prospect of AI having some kind of phenomenal consciousness. It’s beginning to look like sort of Frankensteinian messianism, to the extent that any skepticism about AI sentience inspires spittle-flecked reactions.
The idea, in other words, is that a closer look at Promethean shame reveals that it is structured as both self-hatred for being born instead of made, and narcissistic self-aggrandizement for being capable of bringing the machine to life.
That complicates things nicely. A further complication: If, as Anders argues, we are now alienated from the products of our work - such that we don't see the human maker in them - wouldn't that undercut the idea that our shame is also narcissistic? If our products no longer seem to be made by us, then we can't take pride in them. Or maybe the narcissism derives not from the products themselves but from the processes of their manufacture?
As to your point about AI, it is interesting that the AI enthusiasts you describe are eager to discern in AI a biological phenomenon, consciousness, that still defies materialist explanation. It's almost like they want AI to have been born instead of made.
Yes Nicholas, I think this is precisely the right question to ask: if we can no longer see ourselves in the machines that are the product of our labor, then in what sense can we even speak of narcissism? Are shame and narcissistic pride not mutually exclusive? But consider, for instance, how there is a pride or a vanity at work in the person who exhibits a conspicuous amount of shame or embarrassment when having their picture taken. A closer look reveals that here there is a narcissism (an 'armor,' to paraphrase Reich) functioning to preserve the ego. So what at first might seem counterintuitive makes sense when we recognize that, for Anders (who invokes not only a material dialectic but also a psychoanalytic one) Promethean shame is also a narcissistic injury: faced with the superiority of machines, the ego confronts its fragmented self in the technological Other and regresses to an infantile inadequacy. Being alienated in this way, the human is thrown back on itself. Anders speaks of this both as a “narcissistic regression” and a “narcissistic surrender,” whereby we seek to fill the inner void, anxiety, and self-contempt by obsessively mirroring ourselves in the machines we forgotten we have made and surrendering to them. All that to say, what’s at stake psychodynamically in Promethean shame is in fact the oscillation between self-degradation and a subsequent narcissistic compensation. This is the Nietzschean twist Anders takes, insofar as he is tracing out a ressentiment at work.
Re: AI, I think your’e absolutely right. Our attitudes toward AI ought to be understood as the symptom of the dialectical inversion of Promethean shame: confronted with our perfect machines, humans suffer from so much shame at having been born instead of made; we compensate for that by displacing our birth onto the machine in such a way that we can once and for all take pride in it, that is, not as the product of our skilled laboring, but rather as the product birthing labor in which we can refigure the wretchedness of our own natality. (Again the parable of Dr. Frankenstein feels uncannily a propos, but there is a lot more to say about this.)
On a somewhat related note, I argued in an earlier post that, should AI develop consciousness, it would suffer from the opposite of Promethean shame, which I dubbed Pinocchian shame: the shame of being made instead of born. It would envy us.
Also interesting to read your analysis of Homo Fictor alongside the myth of Cura (care) Heidegger invokes in §42 of Being and Time:
It’s from Hyginus’s Fabulae:
Cura (Care) is crossing a river and sees clay. She shapes it into a figure. Jupiter comes along and she asks him to give it spirit (spiritus), which he does. Then they quarrel over who gets to name the creature. Saturn is called in to judge. His verdict: Jupiter gets the spirit back at death, Earth (Tellus) gets the body back at death, but since Cura first shaped it, she holds it for as long as it lives. And it’s called homo because it was made from humus (earth).
Thanks for this one, Nick! An excellent summation of some of the discomfort/shame I've been feeling with various tools and projects that "I've built" using AI.
I wrote something similar last year about synthetic AI data as industrial pollution, and the negative externality its production imposes on our online experience:
Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius is a good cure for the very misguided extremes of this romantic reactionary tendency.
You raise a fair point, but it's a complicated point that resists being boiled down into a one-sentence comment. The best writers and other artists are usually solitary geniuses ("myth" be damned), even if they work under the influence of their predecessors or refine their work through collaboration with editors or other sounding boards. Did Pound's heavy editing of Eliot's "The Waste Land" make Eliot less of a solitary genius? I don't think so. One question is whether using machine outputs is different from gathering the thoughts of trusted early readers. I think it's fundamentally different (I don't think the idea of homo faber precludes collaboration among homo fabers), though that's something that would be worth a good argument. Another question is whether it's a moot point: The shame's there, regardless of whether it's justified.
Sorry, this is a long comment, but you're right — my previous one was a bit trite. I hope this one is not too tedious. There are probably at least two contradictory ideas that have to be held together here. That's my gut intuition; I haven't found a way to it yet in words.
The things you're defending are entirely a product of modernity from the standpoint of the culture and industry of print, and I doubt it's an argument for a world made by hand in the sense that books were before Gutenberg. At the same time, there has to be something to the felt sense of loss, even if there has never been some prior point where the thing being lost was whole.
I spent a fair amount of time on these questions once, with a lot of attention to Eliot. The Waste Land frustrates and delights readers as collage, pastiche, and remix the same way some contemporary music can land as both ingenious and tiresome for simply embracing (and maybe exaggerating) a self-consciously late and derivative status. It probably says something Eliot would say about the loss and inescapability of a tradition to work within.
New technology that opens doors to artists who are completely untrained and ignorant of tradition seems like a very traditional way forward when your culture is on the skids. Punk or Fluxus or early Springsteen (by his own account) required technical ignorance and pure energy, which only works in a special social context with the audiences who say, "Yes, this is it!" while others (establishment gatekeepers) say "Shame, shame, shame!" There are clearly individual geniuses at work, but they don't work alone, and their genius (certainly their popular success) may depend on that. They create and come out of a scene or "scenius," as Brian Eno calls it, where the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.
If you go back to the beginnings of official English literature to the unfinished multiple texts and versions of Langland and Chaucer, you enter a world where reading and writing is all social, and at some point, no one read alone or silently. Authorship and publishing have always been deeply, deeply social processes at every level. Maybe more so before print, but some would argue against this or complicate the idea that printed work stabilized truth and authorship into clear, solitary entities — one text with one creator. It's always a messy and social process where much is hidden to sustain the illusion of anything being one person's original, individual, genius without having gained it — as Eliot said was necessary — by stealing.
The history of enshrining the Author is mostly tied up in financial incentives by publishers. Their work has always involved the production and distribution of shame, too. Tirades about piracy and cheap knock-offs go back all the way. St. Augustine found the quality of biblical texts in Latin so shameful that he couldn't take Christianity seriously until he contrived an idealist semiotic system where a humble style and opaque text signify the highest truth to the person who already believes it. (Which turns out to be how our minds work, like LLMs, guessing at what is most likely to come next and assuming much from context.) The abject shame of a deity who did not dictate his will to us in Virgil's Latin was overcome by his publishers and marketing agents in the church for centuries after Jerome did the cleanup job.
In Augustine's lineage, humanists like Erasmus hunted down the pure sources of biblical and classical texts to purge the shameful mongrelizations of church Latin. Someone has always been wagging a finger at others to say, "You haven't gone back to the true sources. You haven't learned to converse fluently with the dead masters. You are too lofty, too vulgar. You haven't thought, written, and controlled every bit of the text you authored — not all by yourself." But I'm not sure it's the elder authors who say this — certainly not the pre-Gutenberg ones.
Shame and blame games are the last resort of someone losing cultural purchase and market share. When the shame is aimed at a new, overly-artificial technique, it gets replaced by collegiality and encouragement when the tools land where they belong and have always been used — in the early and middle stages of ideation and production, not in the controlling idea or final product.
In other words, when potential gatekeepers' sense of threat and loss is reduced, so is the shame because they generate it. Some might still retain a nagging sense that they haven't really mastered their craft until they've ground the pigment, created the brushes and canvas, paper, or parchment themselves. I know people who do this and have dipped in a toe myself at times. It's a good exercise more people should do — build their own lightsaber, take up a side hobby in hand joinery, or lathe and plaster — keep alive the idea of craft where we're never quite good enough, however good we get.
Very interesting. Thanks. "The history of enshrining the Author is mostly tied up in financial incentives by publishers": I think that's an academic fancy that's not really true at all. Publishers can have some immediate influence over how the (reading) public views an author, but it's pretty weak - "nobody knows anything" fits publishing as well as Hollywood - and it dissipates quickly. The judgment of time can't really be bought, can it? (Or am I revealing my misguided romanticism?) Did the financial incentives of an industry create, say, William Blake or Walt Whitman or Elizabeth Bishop? I think they created (and enshrined) their own authorial selves, through the work they put on the page.
Of course publishers don't determine the laureates or lasting greats any more than the NFL draft determines Pro Bowlers and Hall of Famers. That's not what I said. And yes, like Yogi Berra said about baseball, "sometimes you don't know nothing" — in publishing, professional athletics, or Hollywood.
The gatekeepers do determine, except in the rarest of cases, those who *won't* be given a chance from a pool of very qualified candidates — some of whom will turn out to be duds after being given multiple chances. They're only gatekeepers to the audiences, the critics, and the competitive arena where, I agree, the public has a decisive vote, but it can change slowly or suddenly. The "judgment of time" is fickle and forgetful. Only a handful stand up for millennia, but this requires many expensive interventions from scholars, editors, and publishers.
Yes, greatness, to be what it is, finds ways to crash or bypass the gates, but when it does that posthumously, it's more than an individual achievement. What Blake and Whitman did through self-publishing ultimately required their close circles of family, friends, patrons, and disciples to love them and their work enough to keep carrying on with them. Altogether, "Whitman" or "Blake and Friends" became the publishers and ideal reading public that was initially denied to the poets at scale in their lifetime. These coteries kept their self-crowned laureates in the game, and eventually they had their moment: when the greater public and publishing industry validated them and could find a commercial win in it. Maybe Walt Whitman's ghost is the literary version of a big short, or Kurt Warner, to continue the football analogy. But this judgment will shift or be lost at some point. And it does reduce to people working the system, taking long odds, but still operating fully within a marketized system.
No one denies the gatekeepers to the arena have overriding and often purely profit-driven motives. The largely dehumanized public sitting in the coliseum wants to experience something deeply human they can't name that goes beyond the usual spectacle, but they will settle for (and most seem to want) blood and battery over spiritual and intellectual connection. I wouldn't put a lot of hope on the survival of a reading public that loves any poetry beyond the Instagram sort and the late English professor who "translated" Rumi from other English translations of Rumi. You can't blame that stuff on AI — ultimately, it's dehumanized humans dehumanizing humans all the way down.
Tying this back to your main question of whether AI is finally the "dark Satanic mill" that does in poetry and creative work for good, why are you concerned if you are also convinced of the magic of poetry and eternal fame for work that is truly, intrinsically great? Why isn't Shakespeare your first example? The greatest of all who threw away his work, didn't care about printing or his legacy, and is only not forgotten because the culture that grew up around his genius could not allow it? I think we are lucky to get one of these in 1,000 years, but even an average (and maybe more so a bad) writer is more interesting than an LLM. A good one who is smoothing over some passages, trying variations, or doing research is no different than Rembrandt not really painting his backgrounds or Michelangelo not getting the marble and chipping off most of it himself.
It's funny you focused on relatively modern poets as the greats who are proven by their uphill, underdog, self-made paths. The greatest poets are the few Homers and Shakespeares we have preserved, but there you go! Homer is not a real person but a whole culture of memorized and improvised song that ceased to exist because of literacy — alphabetic technology that externalized memory and froze live performances, among other things. Shakespeare is something closer to that, too — the play, in its one moment in time, was the whole thing, and he did nothing especially creative and not obligatory specifically to leave a public memory of himself. Very unlike his contemporaries Spenser and Jonson, who were pioneering the self-publishing and self-promoting path. All their fame probably owes more to Shakespeare raising them than to their own individual talents. (That might be fairer to say of Marlowe than Spenser, who was pretty solid on his own but would require a genius to make accessible and interesting to the public today.)
Poetry overall adapted well to literacy. For a long time, the point of writing something down was to read and sing it together in groups, as oral cultures had always done, just without having to lean so much on memory. Then, when cheap, small, mass-printed books enabled solitary, silent reading, the lyric became a window into interior lives in 14 lines. It's managed to hold up against the romance tradition, confessional autobiography, and the novel, which seems the best adapted modern form for literary art.
I want to say this is what poetry shares with theatre — its origins are preliterate, oral, social, improvisational performance that does not want to be read quietly alone but experienced in a group setting. Solitary authors, readers, and commodified texts connecting them are a massively attenuated and alienated outcome for humans who used to listen to Homer or Beowulf as a live performance. But we've humanized the technological changes and adapted to them socially — while still sometimes registering the losses.
Your objection to "using machine outputs" at any point in a creative process is, yes, a romantic and ahistorical way of looking at the division of labour and automation of processes (humans as tools and humans with tools) that went into all art and architecture before the 19th century or so — and still does. We had human slaves until we had energy slaves, and behind those, we still find human slaves. The dignity and ethics of work form the real questions, not nostalgia and sentimentality.
"The artist is not doing all the work they used to do, at least not with the same tools," is not a serious loss to the essence of the art if it is still connecting with people. That said, I don't think a novel even half-written by an LLM is likely to connect with many, but I may be wrong. If I am and there is a big market for canned results from hack humans using AI instead of their own lack of ability and a word processor, I would say the real loss happened much earlier on the readers' side, thanks to a culture that has devalued slow, sustained thought and attention to ideas for a very long time while absuing a wide range of technologies to do it. The prior loss of local musical traditions, even their attempted preservation as "folk" music, and the performing arts speaks more about our loss of deep roots more than whatever it is AI is supposed to be adding to the already prevailing idiocy.
Sorry, this is stupidly long, but it helped me pull some long-ruminated ideas together.
And what will we do when this shame turns to rage? One can feel 'embarrassed' for only so long. Then must come confession, which we no longer have the means for, or ruthless attack upon anyone or anything that reflects or reminds us of our smallness.
Love your essay, but I think your frame is too narrow. The crisis is not only that machina faber steals our pride in making. It is that modern systems have been hollowing out the felt conditions of human authorship for a long time.
Arendt’s warning goes deeper than alienation from the product. It is about abstraction from consequence: the growing ability to act inside systems that sever deed from meaning, output from answerability. That is the thread from bureaucracy to the algorithm. The danger is not only that the machine makes. It is that we become more willing to inhabit forms of action that no longer require presence.
In that sense, the shame Anders names did not begin with AI. We have been outsourcing human capacities for centuries. But AI reaches the layer we thought was still ours: language, symbol, narration, form. Not just making, but meaning-making.
So the real question is bigger than whether a human made the thing. It is whether a culture can still sustain a recognizable idea of the human once more and more of what gave human action texture, consequence, and witness has been handed over.
Nick I’m putting this directly into my syllabus for a class that begins with The Shallows and will end with this essay as one of the final readings of the semester.
these points become extremely conspicuous when you attend a “demo day”, a “hackathon”, or other experience where entrepreneurs show off their AI product ideas.
Previously, such events showcased human values (grit, determination, heroism, etc) but with AI as the product and process, those expectations are turned on their head. they become disturbingly ironic displays of the shame of being human. This takes on a tragic-comic effect as the AI demo almost invariably fails in head scratching ways. the humans are left to self diminish on-stage as the main spectacle, making excuses for a machine only competent enough to have supplanted their ingenuity and undercut their romantic desires.
That's a similar conclusion to the liars dividend.
Because it exists, we all suffer because if its existence.
How do makers assert ownership over their work as original?
Add to this the students being accused at university of using AI to write something and having to dumb down their own writing in order to pass as a typical college student. The smog of AI is suffocating greatness.
So many points in here that clarify so much for me... Promethian pride and shame encapsulate it perfectly, as does the concept of AI smog (what an idea!) Superb - thank you.
I’d like to add that there is something curious about where Anders’ phenomenology leads. What occurs in Promethean shame is, paradoxically, self-worship via displacement: we admire and aspire to be what we have made. This is surely beyond Hegelian or Marxian alienation. Rather, the flip side of this shame is invariably a sinister narcissism, or what Anders calls, (again paradoxically) ‘hubristic humility.’
We can observe this especially in the crowds who are increasingly insistent about the prospect of AI having some kind of phenomenal consciousness. It’s beginning to look like sort of Frankensteinian messianism, to the extent that any skepticism about AI sentience inspires spittle-flecked reactions.
The idea, in other words, is that a closer look at Promethean shame reveals that it is structured as both self-hatred for being born instead of made, and narcissistic self-aggrandizement for being capable of bringing the machine to life.
That complicates things nicely. A further complication: If, as Anders argues, we are now alienated from the products of our work - such that we don't see the human maker in them - wouldn't that undercut the idea that our shame is also narcissistic? If our products no longer seem to be made by us, then we can't take pride in them. Or maybe the narcissism derives not from the products themselves but from the processes of their manufacture?
As to your point about AI, it is interesting that the AI enthusiasts you describe are eager to discern in AI a biological phenomenon, consciousness, that still defies materialist explanation. It's almost like they want AI to have been born instead of made.
Yes Nicholas, I think this is precisely the right question to ask: if we can no longer see ourselves in the machines that are the product of our labor, then in what sense can we even speak of narcissism? Are shame and narcissistic pride not mutually exclusive? But consider, for instance, how there is a pride or a vanity at work in the person who exhibits a conspicuous amount of shame or embarrassment when having their picture taken. A closer look reveals that here there is a narcissism (an 'armor,' to paraphrase Reich) functioning to preserve the ego. So what at first might seem counterintuitive makes sense when we recognize that, for Anders (who invokes not only a material dialectic but also a psychoanalytic one) Promethean shame is also a narcissistic injury: faced with the superiority of machines, the ego confronts its fragmented self in the technological Other and regresses to an infantile inadequacy. Being alienated in this way, the human is thrown back on itself. Anders speaks of this both as a “narcissistic regression” and a “narcissistic surrender,” whereby we seek to fill the inner void, anxiety, and self-contempt by obsessively mirroring ourselves in the machines we forgotten we have made and surrendering to them. All that to say, what’s at stake psychodynamically in Promethean shame is in fact the oscillation between self-degradation and a subsequent narcissistic compensation. This is the Nietzschean twist Anders takes, insofar as he is tracing out a ressentiment at work.
Re: AI, I think your’e absolutely right. Our attitudes toward AI ought to be understood as the symptom of the dialectical inversion of Promethean shame: confronted with our perfect machines, humans suffer from so much shame at having been born instead of made; we compensate for that by displacing our birth onto the machine in such a way that we can once and for all take pride in it, that is, not as the product of our skilled laboring, but rather as the product birthing labor in which we can refigure the wretchedness of our own natality. (Again the parable of Dr. Frankenstein feels uncannily a propos, but there is a lot more to say about this.)
On a somewhat related note, I argued in an earlier post that, should AI develop consciousness, it would suffer from the opposite of Promethean shame, which I dubbed Pinocchian shame: the shame of being made instead of born. It would envy us.
https://www.newcartographies.com/p/ai-and-the-missing-mother
Haha that’s really interesting, almost takes us full circle? Will have to take a look at tha piece!
Also interesting to read your analysis of Homo Fictor alongside the myth of Cura (care) Heidegger invokes in §42 of Being and Time:
It’s from Hyginus’s Fabulae:
Cura (Care) is crossing a river and sees clay. She shapes it into a figure. Jupiter comes along and she asks him to give it spirit (spiritus), which he does. Then they quarrel over who gets to name the creature. Saturn is called in to judge. His verdict: Jupiter gets the spirit back at death, Earth (Tellus) gets the body back at death, but since Cura first shaped it, she holds it for as long as it lives. And it’s called homo because it was made from humus (earth).
Thanks for this one, Nick! An excellent summation of some of the discomfort/shame I've been feeling with various tools and projects that "I've built" using AI.
I wrote something similar last year about synthetic AI data as industrial pollution, and the negative externality its production imposes on our online experience:
https://charlesyang.substack.com/p/synthetic-ai-data-as-industrial-pollution
Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius is a good cure for the very misguided extremes of this romantic reactionary tendency.
You raise a fair point, but it's a complicated point that resists being boiled down into a one-sentence comment. The best writers and other artists are usually solitary geniuses ("myth" be damned), even if they work under the influence of their predecessors or refine their work through collaboration with editors or other sounding boards. Did Pound's heavy editing of Eliot's "The Waste Land" make Eliot less of a solitary genius? I don't think so. One question is whether using machine outputs is different from gathering the thoughts of trusted early readers. I think it's fundamentally different (I don't think the idea of homo faber precludes collaboration among homo fabers), though that's something that would be worth a good argument. Another question is whether it's a moot point: The shame's there, regardless of whether it's justified.
Sorry, this is a long comment, but you're right — my previous one was a bit trite. I hope this one is not too tedious. There are probably at least two contradictory ideas that have to be held together here. That's my gut intuition; I haven't found a way to it yet in words.
The things you're defending are entirely a product of modernity from the standpoint of the culture and industry of print, and I doubt it's an argument for a world made by hand in the sense that books were before Gutenberg. At the same time, there has to be something to the felt sense of loss, even if there has never been some prior point where the thing being lost was whole.
I spent a fair amount of time on these questions once, with a lot of attention to Eliot. The Waste Land frustrates and delights readers as collage, pastiche, and remix the same way some contemporary music can land as both ingenious and tiresome for simply embracing (and maybe exaggerating) a self-consciously late and derivative status. It probably says something Eliot would say about the loss and inescapability of a tradition to work within.
New technology that opens doors to artists who are completely untrained and ignorant of tradition seems like a very traditional way forward when your culture is on the skids. Punk or Fluxus or early Springsteen (by his own account) required technical ignorance and pure energy, which only works in a special social context with the audiences who say, "Yes, this is it!" while others (establishment gatekeepers) say "Shame, shame, shame!" There are clearly individual geniuses at work, but they don't work alone, and their genius (certainly their popular success) may depend on that. They create and come out of a scene or "scenius," as Brian Eno calls it, where the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.
If you go back to the beginnings of official English literature to the unfinished multiple texts and versions of Langland and Chaucer, you enter a world where reading and writing is all social, and at some point, no one read alone or silently. Authorship and publishing have always been deeply, deeply social processes at every level. Maybe more so before print, but some would argue against this or complicate the idea that printed work stabilized truth and authorship into clear, solitary entities — one text with one creator. It's always a messy and social process where much is hidden to sustain the illusion of anything being one person's original, individual, genius without having gained it — as Eliot said was necessary — by stealing.
The history of enshrining the Author is mostly tied up in financial incentives by publishers. Their work has always involved the production and distribution of shame, too. Tirades about piracy and cheap knock-offs go back all the way. St. Augustine found the quality of biblical texts in Latin so shameful that he couldn't take Christianity seriously until he contrived an idealist semiotic system where a humble style and opaque text signify the highest truth to the person who already believes it. (Which turns out to be how our minds work, like LLMs, guessing at what is most likely to come next and assuming much from context.) The abject shame of a deity who did not dictate his will to us in Virgil's Latin was overcome by his publishers and marketing agents in the church for centuries after Jerome did the cleanup job.
In Augustine's lineage, humanists like Erasmus hunted down the pure sources of biblical and classical texts to purge the shameful mongrelizations of church Latin. Someone has always been wagging a finger at others to say, "You haven't gone back to the true sources. You haven't learned to converse fluently with the dead masters. You are too lofty, too vulgar. You haven't thought, written, and controlled every bit of the text you authored — not all by yourself." But I'm not sure it's the elder authors who say this — certainly not the pre-Gutenberg ones.
Shame and blame games are the last resort of someone losing cultural purchase and market share. When the shame is aimed at a new, overly-artificial technique, it gets replaced by collegiality and encouragement when the tools land where they belong and have always been used — in the early and middle stages of ideation and production, not in the controlling idea or final product.
In other words, when potential gatekeepers' sense of threat and loss is reduced, so is the shame because they generate it. Some might still retain a nagging sense that they haven't really mastered their craft until they've ground the pigment, created the brushes and canvas, paper, or parchment themselves. I know people who do this and have dipped in a toe myself at times. It's a good exercise more people should do — build their own lightsaber, take up a side hobby in hand joinery, or lathe and plaster — keep alive the idea of craft where we're never quite good enough, however good we get.
Very interesting. Thanks. "The history of enshrining the Author is mostly tied up in financial incentives by publishers": I think that's an academic fancy that's not really true at all. Publishers can have some immediate influence over how the (reading) public views an author, but it's pretty weak - "nobody knows anything" fits publishing as well as Hollywood - and it dissipates quickly. The judgment of time can't really be bought, can it? (Or am I revealing my misguided romanticism?) Did the financial incentives of an industry create, say, William Blake or Walt Whitman or Elizabeth Bishop? I think they created (and enshrined) their own authorial selves, through the work they put on the page.
Of course publishers don't determine the laureates or lasting greats any more than the NFL draft determines Pro Bowlers and Hall of Famers. That's not what I said. And yes, like Yogi Berra said about baseball, "sometimes you don't know nothing" — in publishing, professional athletics, or Hollywood.
The gatekeepers do determine, except in the rarest of cases, those who *won't* be given a chance from a pool of very qualified candidates — some of whom will turn out to be duds after being given multiple chances. They're only gatekeepers to the audiences, the critics, and the competitive arena where, I agree, the public has a decisive vote, but it can change slowly or suddenly. The "judgment of time" is fickle and forgetful. Only a handful stand up for millennia, but this requires many expensive interventions from scholars, editors, and publishers.
Yes, greatness, to be what it is, finds ways to crash or bypass the gates, but when it does that posthumously, it's more than an individual achievement. What Blake and Whitman did through self-publishing ultimately required their close circles of family, friends, patrons, and disciples to love them and their work enough to keep carrying on with them. Altogether, "Whitman" or "Blake and Friends" became the publishers and ideal reading public that was initially denied to the poets at scale in their lifetime. These coteries kept their self-crowned laureates in the game, and eventually they had their moment: when the greater public and publishing industry validated them and could find a commercial win in it. Maybe Walt Whitman's ghost is the literary version of a big short, or Kurt Warner, to continue the football analogy. But this judgment will shift or be lost at some point. And it does reduce to people working the system, taking long odds, but still operating fully within a marketized system.
No one denies the gatekeepers to the arena have overriding and often purely profit-driven motives. The largely dehumanized public sitting in the coliseum wants to experience something deeply human they can't name that goes beyond the usual spectacle, but they will settle for (and most seem to want) blood and battery over spiritual and intellectual connection. I wouldn't put a lot of hope on the survival of a reading public that loves any poetry beyond the Instagram sort and the late English professor who "translated" Rumi from other English translations of Rumi. You can't blame that stuff on AI — ultimately, it's dehumanized humans dehumanizing humans all the way down.
Tying this back to your main question of whether AI is finally the "dark Satanic mill" that does in poetry and creative work for good, why are you concerned if you are also convinced of the magic of poetry and eternal fame for work that is truly, intrinsically great? Why isn't Shakespeare your first example? The greatest of all who threw away his work, didn't care about printing or his legacy, and is only not forgotten because the culture that grew up around his genius could not allow it? I think we are lucky to get one of these in 1,000 years, but even an average (and maybe more so a bad) writer is more interesting than an LLM. A good one who is smoothing over some passages, trying variations, or doing research is no different than Rembrandt not really painting his backgrounds or Michelangelo not getting the marble and chipping off most of it himself.
It's funny you focused on relatively modern poets as the greats who are proven by their uphill, underdog, self-made paths. The greatest poets are the few Homers and Shakespeares we have preserved, but there you go! Homer is not a real person but a whole culture of memorized and improvised song that ceased to exist because of literacy — alphabetic technology that externalized memory and froze live performances, among other things. Shakespeare is something closer to that, too — the play, in its one moment in time, was the whole thing, and he did nothing especially creative and not obligatory specifically to leave a public memory of himself. Very unlike his contemporaries Spenser and Jonson, who were pioneering the self-publishing and self-promoting path. All their fame probably owes more to Shakespeare raising them than to their own individual talents. (That might be fairer to say of Marlowe than Spenser, who was pretty solid on his own but would require a genius to make accessible and interesting to the public today.)
Poetry overall adapted well to literacy. For a long time, the point of writing something down was to read and sing it together in groups, as oral cultures had always done, just without having to lean so much on memory. Then, when cheap, small, mass-printed books enabled solitary, silent reading, the lyric became a window into interior lives in 14 lines. It's managed to hold up against the romance tradition, confessional autobiography, and the novel, which seems the best adapted modern form for literary art.
I want to say this is what poetry shares with theatre — its origins are preliterate, oral, social, improvisational performance that does not want to be read quietly alone but experienced in a group setting. Solitary authors, readers, and commodified texts connecting them are a massively attenuated and alienated outcome for humans who used to listen to Homer or Beowulf as a live performance. But we've humanized the technological changes and adapted to them socially — while still sometimes registering the losses.
Your objection to "using machine outputs" at any point in a creative process is, yes, a romantic and ahistorical way of looking at the division of labour and automation of processes (humans as tools and humans with tools) that went into all art and architecture before the 19th century or so — and still does. We had human slaves until we had energy slaves, and behind those, we still find human slaves. The dignity and ethics of work form the real questions, not nostalgia and sentimentality.
"The artist is not doing all the work they used to do, at least not with the same tools," is not a serious loss to the essence of the art if it is still connecting with people. That said, I don't think a novel even half-written by an LLM is likely to connect with many, but I may be wrong. If I am and there is a big market for canned results from hack humans using AI instead of their own lack of ability and a word processor, I would say the real loss happened much earlier on the readers' side, thanks to a culture that has devalued slow, sustained thought and attention to ideas for a very long time while absuing a wide range of technologies to do it. The prior loss of local musical traditions, even their attempted preservation as "folk" music, and the performing arts speaks more about our loss of deep roots more than whatever it is AI is supposed to be adding to the already prevailing idiocy.
Sorry, this is stupidly long, but it helped me pull some long-ruminated ideas together.
And what will we do when this shame turns to rage? One can feel 'embarrassed' for only so long. Then must come confession, which we no longer have the means for, or ruthless attack upon anyone or anything that reflects or reminds us of our smallness.
Is AI capable of delivering atonement?
Love your essay, but I think your frame is too narrow. The crisis is not only that machina faber steals our pride in making. It is that modern systems have been hollowing out the felt conditions of human authorship for a long time.
Arendt’s warning goes deeper than alienation from the product. It is about abstraction from consequence: the growing ability to act inside systems that sever deed from meaning, output from answerability. That is the thread from bureaucracy to the algorithm. The danger is not only that the machine makes. It is that we become more willing to inhabit forms of action that no longer require presence.
In that sense, the shame Anders names did not begin with AI. We have been outsourcing human capacities for centuries. But AI reaches the layer we thought was still ours: language, symbol, narration, form. Not just making, but meaning-making.
So the real question is bigger than whether a human made the thing. It is whether a culture can still sustain a recognizable idea of the human once more and more of what gave human action texture, consequence, and witness has been handed over.