Postscript: On Machine Writing

In a postscript to my book, I look at what I call ‘machine writing’ and especially recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) writing programmes that work from prompts. I also briefly attend to some precursors to this scene—earlier experiments with algorithmic writing and other theoretical accounts of post-conceptual and post-internet writing. I am interested in what these new forms tell us about writing more generally and, perhaps, what has always already been in play with it (for example, that there has always been an inhuman aspect). Connected to this is also the way in which these AI systems open up debates about what intelligence is or could be. As such, these systems operate as devices, which, as well as anything else, offer up a perspective on our own form of intelligence (and on what it means to be human), but also on those other forms—or genres—of non-human intelligence that already surround us (and, in this sense, machine writing, like the other kinds of writing I have explored in my book, has a performative aspect, albeit more obliquely in this case).