FR
AI: everyone knows what this acronym stands for by now. Since the introduction of ‘chatbots’, artificial intelligence has permeated our daily lives and become an integral part of them in just a few years. So much so that many are questioning the implications—and even expressing alarm about the future of humanity—in the face of the rapid, uncontrolled deployment of cutting-edge technology that remains largely misunderstood.
Artificial intelligence is going to change everything in the world, except how men think and behave.
Warren Buffett
Meanwhile, our attention is deliberately diverted by other forms of invasion—more immediate and more vociferous, yet just as anxiety-inducing. The good old trick of distracting us from one thing by drawing our attention to another. The Matrix saturates our mental and physical space for one purpose alone: to prevent any breakthrough of the Spirit (flash of insight).
You’ve all seen at least one sci-fi movie in your life, or read dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, This Perfect Day and a couple of Asimov’s stories—the list is by no means exhaustive. So there’s no need to explain how technological advances serve human slaves just as much as their masters, albeit to vastly different degrees.
Ghost in the Machine
Too much information running through my brain
"Too Much Information", The Police (1981)
Too much information driving me insane
In “Intelligence in Front of Its Own Mirror: From the Lawnmower Man to the Illusions of AI”, I discussed the dangers AI poses to human consciousness and the harmful consequences of its misuse.
Today, this dangerous trend is no longer merely theoretical: it is creeping into classrooms where laziness has replaced effort, into our ears through a deluge of artificial music, and into our numbed minds, which no longer read but demand summaries of everything—just like that Gen Z influencer who publicly complained about books containing ‘too many words’.
The findings of the latest OECD PISA survey1 are unequivocal: we are facing a historic decline in young people’s reading comprehension and reasoning skills. Teachers see this on a daily basis: critical thinking is being delegated to algorithms, attention spans are dwindling, and cognitive laziness is taking hold.
This intellectual atrophy is by no means accidental; it goes hand in hand with the systematic destruction of what elevates us as human beings: art and nature. Both are essential to our mental balance.
But it's the same ‘logic’ everywhere: forests are cleared to make way for rows of solar panels or data centres; trees are replaced by surveillance camera poles; and centuries of human creativity are plundered to feed algorithms. The living world is destroyed and replaced with concrete, silicon and control.
And it is but a short step from the disfigurement of our natural environment to that of our cultural landscape: the machine is now striking at the heart of our entire creative ecosystem. In just a few years, platforms and social networks have been overwhelmed by a synthetic tidal wave: music churned out in vast quantities by plundering the voices and works of artists, whether signed to record labels or working independently; videos mass-produced ad nauseam with haphazard dubbing; images generated in two clicks… cultural theft is now global and unabashed.
Ghostwriters in the Shadows
On this moonlit night, my friend GPT
Lend me your quill to churn out an essay2
The publishing world is where the decline is most noticeable.
Every aspect is affected: algorithm-generated covers, shoddy machine translations, audiobooks read by bots... Publishers who still value the human touch now feel compelled to label their products as ‘human interpretation’. How long before we see ‘written (or translated) by a real person’ labels on books in our bookshops?
But there's worse to come: this ease of production gives rise to a host of ‘fake authors’ who, after typing in a few prompts, mistake the ability to generate text for a genuine calling to write books or poetry.
This system not only further reduces their tolerance for frustration by offering the illusion of immediate results (without the months or years of hard work that go into creating a genuine work), but also inflates their egos. Buoyed by the applause of a gullible audience, they delude themselves into thinking they are creators, when in fact all they do is operate a machine that they could not do without. Some are so trapped by their own pretence that they are unable to hold a live conversation or answer questions about their own books without outsourcing their thoughts to an algorithm first.
Intellectual Onanism and Hacked Prose
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
"Paperback Writer", The Beatles (1966)
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It's based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer
The price of this collective delusion is the systematic flooding of the self-publishing market. On Amazon, in particular, this ceaseless stream of soulless texts, published for prestige, profit, or both, stifles authentic creativity and drowns out emerging authors amid a cacophony of empty words.
In response to this invasion, the industry's safeguards are proving to be nothing but a farce: their so-called ‘AI detectors’ are just blind algorithms, incapable of distinguishing between synthetic prose and human-written text—to the point of classifying the US Constitution of 1787 as a machine-generated text3!
For aspiring writers, the consequences are twofold. Not only is their work lost in the mix, but overwhelmed publishing houses may also reject it after turning to these ‘detectors’ as a stopgap measure, lacking the time and resources to review every submission.
Playing Along or Being Played by ‘I’?
Can't you see anything on the horizon?
"Aux sombres héros de l'amer", Noir Désir (1989)
Stranded souls who dropped anchor with their pens here
And stopped writing...
Algorithms never doubt. They know neither the anxiety of a blank page nor the exhaustion of having bled to extract every word from the depths of our wounds. They merely calculate the most probable sequence, polishing the sentences with a veneer of unsettling perfection.
But is it really perfect? What is perfection? Don’t they say that ‘better is the enemy of good’?
What AI regurgitates after siphoning off our writers (and our artists) is nothing but a slick, soulless pastiche. After all, it's our imperfections, our rough edges, our wounds put into words and our words made flesh that contribute to our inimitable signature (what some, like Stephen King, call the ‘author’s voice’, and others the ‘vibrational signature’). The famous crack in everything through which the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen put it.
Writing is not simply a matter of recycling one’s cluttered thoughts by dumping them into a machine in the hope of giving them form, but rather a—often therapeutic—wrestling match with language. By outsourcing this effort, we abandon our most precious asset: critical thinking.
Whispering Isn't Playing
Anyway, I’d like to tell you
"L'encre de tes yeux", Francis Cabrel (1980)
That everything I’ve ever written
I’ve drawn from the ink of your eyes
It is precisely this intimate connection that Stephen King describes in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. For him, writing is a form of telepathy that enables the same scene to be conjured up in the reader’s mind without direct communication. Whilst algorithms can certainly reproduce (rather than create) the form of a text, their lack of lived experience prevents them from capturing its essence.
Because AI feels nothing. And it is precisely in order to feel that people read. And write, too.
What about humour, puns, those double or triple meanings and other semantic twists—which, for me, have almost become a hallmark? I don’t think AI is capable of that. At any rate, not of genuine humour—the sort that enchants the mind, releases endorphins and neutralises negative energy, thereby lifting our spirits and freeing us from what weighs us down.
For genuine humour is a form of creative intelligence. It elevates us and brings us closer to our Spirit. After all, don't we say of those endowed with such humour that they are ‘witty’ or that they ‘have a sharp wit’?
For that to happen, AI would need to become capable of self-awareness, as Christelle Dabos, author of The Mirror Visitor, recently pointed out: “Perhaps it will have this capacity for spiritual awakening that we have failed to achieve, and perhaps it will transform itself into a great Buddha?”
I wouldn’t be that optimistic, but I wouldn’t dismiss the tool altogether. When I entrust it with the task of untangling the knots in my inconsistencies, it leaves me free to comb through the details and pick out the nits.
I love a challenge, and there’s no better fuel for dispelling the prevailing gloom than showing the machine what we’re made of.
Whispering isn't playing. We only get the upper hand by crowning our pieces. The machine will not replace humans… at least, not those who remain sovereign. The others? They will replace the machine. Look around you: it’s already happening.
Endnotes
- ^ Source: PISA 2025 Results: France.
- ^ This is actually my own pastiche of the French nursery rhyme "Au clair de la lune".
- ^ Source: That Time When the American Constitution Resulted as AI-generated.
© La Pensine Mutine. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.
