A Craft Essay by John Sergio 

BETTERED BY A BOT: A Hopeful Submission, an Immediate Response, and an Existential Crisis

Almost immediately after my short story was rejected by one publisher, it was selected and shortlisted by a different one. That, however, offered little consolation. The rejection itself didn’t bother me. Writers are well acquainted with that. Yet how I was rejected bothered me. And by whom. Or what. The rejection letter was dishonest.

They cheated. Without my permission, and using something sneaky, even sinister, they read my mind. They reached in, uninvited, to that one space we should all be able to inhabit alone, and they took what was mine. With a pretense and a superior force, and by harnessing the very laws of physics to achieve their objective, they got what they wanted. They found my fears. They cribbed my secrets. And now they know me better than I know even myself.

So, of course I’m angry, and maybe a little jealous of their powers. Regardless, I now have an incontrovertible awareness of the awful future that awaits us. We writers are going to be replaced by something different, something not even human.

I write essays and fiction, not always well, of course, though I try admirably. (Effort must count for something. At some point, it may be all we have left.) I have written about the arts, literature, culture, and science. The 4100-word short story I submitted a month ago to a publisher of speculative fiction in a far-away time zone took a chance.

By way of metaphor, I had referenced early in my story a real and fascinating Village Voice article from decades ago which had stayed with me, resonating, simmering. I had, at the time of this submission, already accumulated a few rejections of the piece, and some of those had taken months to come back to me.

This time, though, almost immediately after I hit send and began to catalog my submission, I received a reply back. At first, of course, I thought it was the customary receipt response. And it did start like that (“Dear John, Thank you for submitting…”) But the letter, after a tease (“This story tackles big ideas…”), just kept going –long and well crafted. I skimmed in disbelief, over a detailed analysis of a very complex plot and a long list of structural and technical triumphs and yes, flaws, too. I was staring at a three-page letter with an extremely cogent analysis of my short story and its flaws, and it had been produced less than a minute after I had made the submission.

My first thought was that this can’t be happening. Like I had fallen into my own fictional story. Like if you remove the batteries from the Chucky doll and yet it still turns to you, laughs maniacally, and begins to taunt. My second thought was that maybe I was suffering a time lapse. Like what happened to Barney and Betty Hill, and every alien abductee since, if you believe in such happenings. But of course, then I knew. It could only have been them doing this. It was the bots, the robots, AI.

This publisher had obviously used a sophisticated bot which had read my short story, instantaneously, as only AI can, immediately found the referenced Voice article in the cyber stacks where all content now resides digitally, digested and integrated that, and spit back out to me this omniscient response.

Back and forth, like a volley in tennis, the rejection cited snippets of my article interspersed with references to the article I had cited. (“…This connection, anchoring the dystopia in a real 1990 Village Voice article is bizarre, specific, and strangely brilliant…”) As I read on, it was clear that this was an initial rejection of my submission, but with an offer for me to make changes to the story and consider a resubmission. For a fee, of course, they offered to assist in making those editorial changes.

The embedded bait-and-switch sales pitch wasn’t what offended me (though had I known they were one of those outfits, I’d not have submitted). It wasn’t even how quickly they generated their response. It was how exacting its analysis was. The bot had somehow read into, around, and through my story. It understood better than I what my story was trying to say. The few lingering doubts I carried about the story and which I had hoped no publisher would cite, were noted, in painstaking detail. No human could have done that so quickly. So precisely. So exactly. And the worst part of it was that I knew that their analysis was spot-on.

I had been bettered by a bot.

Writers know not to use AI. No writer truly committed to creativity would want to. (If I could summon the phlegm, I’d spit on any who would; the indignation I’d need is there, in abundance; it’s just that the saliva is not. Fear will do that.) And yet, for commercial applications, AI is the inevitable and unmistakable future, and the impact on the world’s economy will be unprecedented.

I’m no luddite. Progress can’t be stopped. The world will be changed dramatically because of AI. Much has been written about the effect this will have on human labor and the risk that millions of people from so many industries will be displaced. Crowded out. Yes, those dystopian undertones abound. And while the sky may indeed fall, there is an alternative, and more optimistic possibility. Some economists do call for an initial dislocation of human labor replaced by AI, but they then optimistically prognosticate what they believe will be such a profound increase in economic productivity that it will usher in an age where universal basic income can become guaranteed similar to how Social Security is for most retirees. These are, of course, vital issues and important questions.

But what of art? I fear that too soon computers will come to evaluate art as well as humans. And computers, of course, already create art. AI art in all of its forms already exists, and though the quality may still be wanting for some tastes, I fear it may eventually crowd out human creativity. To be sure, the programmed emotion harnessed by AI would by definition have to be derivative of real human emotion, but a readership wouldn’t necessarily know about human or artificial authorship, and even if they did, they may not care. Will it then anymore even be the human condition that art seeks to explore? Or will that too be artificial?

I had my first short story published at 19 (earning me a check for a hundred dollars in 1982 which was easy money for a recycled high school English assignment). How things have changed. Since then, I’ve suffered some of the usual vicissitudes which writers suffer, and I’ve survived different challenges in this crazy game. There was the decades-long pause to my creative writing as I built a lucrative career on Wall Street. (Had I not retired young, and with sufficient financial resources, I’d not today be able to write despite the daunting economics offered to those who do so.)

There was, along the way, the representation of an in-demand agent and the shopping of a novel (a fictionalized account and exposé of sorts of the abuses on Wall Street) to the largest publishers in the country. (A very exciting two weeks.) There was the request, denied by me, that I consider changing that manuscript to non-fiction, and naming names. (Though this would have been theoretically possible, I feared not just for my investment banking career, but even for my personal safety.) After an early retirement that allowed me the freedom to write, I encountered the paltry new economics offered to creative writers, which forced me to acknowledge that this wasn’t to be a second career, but merely a hobby. But none of those was an existential crisis. This AI rejection was different. Far more profound. What I was left with was the struggle of whether or not I should continue to write. Or quit.

Quitting would even be okay if I could. But ask a writer why he writes. Most will say: because I must. Sure, we have a choice in the same way that a mountaineer can choose to stare at, instead of scale, fantastic heights. And in the end, we face this paradox that we artists, compelled as we are to do what we do, actually to have a choice to write, to compose, to paint, to draw; to create; or not to.

The bots do not have that choice. They don’t toil. They’re just coerced by code. But know this: soon they absolutely will be able to produce great art. Sure, we will always be able to cling to the knowledge that their emotion is not real. Bots can’t suffer heartache. They can’t know the romantic agony. They don’t pine for the splendor in the grass, the glory in the flower. Only as human creatives do we; and that will have to be enough—even as they come to create art indistinguishable from ours; even if that art comes to be superior to ours; even if the only audience for our own art becomes artificial or simulated.

There is something deeply personal and human about that need to express oneself, to create. I have come to believe—and this will have to suffice—that humans (myself included) will go on doing just that, until the lights go out, and the human condition we have mined since the beginning of time is lost to us, finally, and forever.

John Sergio is the COO Emeritus and was a founding partner of a mid-sized investment bank; he was the COO for over 20 years until his retirement. He has enjoyed a long and rewarding career in the securities industry and has written a number of articles for national, literary, and financial industry publications.