Sam Kriss hates. The list of things he hates is seemingly endless, which is fitting. Our postmodern days are filled with modernity’s coprophilous institutions and practices. There’s a lot to hate.
Kriss especially hates AI writing.
The biggest problem with AI writing, he observes, is its botched metaphors.
AI has no body. Metaphors are bodily. That doesn’t mean AI can’t write a story with apt metaphors. I mean, frick, it has, like, 8 trillion data points that it can mix and match to conclude that “piece of shit” is a dead-nuts accurate metaphor for “politician,” but it has no way of going into its own body and pulling a metaphor out of its metaphorical ass.
“All the weird metaphors and overheated rhetoric are bluffing, a great cloud of likely-seeming language, and if this homogeneously portentous cack feels empty or contradictory it’s because the machine has no earthly idea what’s going on . . .”. Sam Kriss, May 2026
The left hemisphere can’t draw curves. It can’t draw a circle. It can only draw straight lines.
But, clever bastard that he is, he can draw a bajillion micro lines then piece them together to resemble a circle.
“Computers create the illusion of curves using two clever tricks: stair-stepping (at a massive scale) and optical illusions (using color gradients). Because your eyes and brain blend things together from a distance, the computer doesn’t actually need to draw a perfect curve—it just has to trick you into seeing one.” Gemini’s response when I asked it how computers draw curves when all its images consist solely of dots and squares
You and me? We can’t even see what the sneaky son-of-a-bitch did. It looks like a circle, and therefore we conclude it’s a circle. We post it on Reddit with a caption like, “Look at this sweet-ass circle,” and, voila!, that circle is now in the AI database of what circles are.
AI was like, “Hey, I was just f***in’ with ya. I didn’t really draw a circle. . . . But wait. The rGeometryNerds subreddit says I drew a sweet-ass circle, so apparently I did.”
What’s the difference between a circle and a bunch of tiny lines that look like a circle? It’s the difference between having sex with your wife and having sex with a replica of your wife. If you don’t intuit the difference, quit reading this and join one of those new AI churches that are attracting your postmodern gnostic fellow travelers.
AI is shredding books. It rips them apart, scans the pages into its database, then discards them like disheveled and ravaged co-eds tossed from a frat party the morning after.
It’s doing that with millions of books.
But AI doesn’t want books born in 2022 or later. It wants the old broads. That’s because the younger ones have been despoiled by AI and no one wants that skanky stuff. Post-2021 prose is pockmarked with fakery and the books AI builds with it are filled with fake prose.
It’s one example of what Iain McGilchrist referred to as the left hemisphere constructing houses of mirrors.
The left hemisphere doesn’t receive raw, unadulterated reality. That stuff flows into your right hemisphere, even if we have to join Aldous Huxley on Dr. Osmond’s couch in 1953 and take some mescalin to really experience what it feels like. The mescalin throttles back the left hemisphere so it doesn’t jump in immediately and start organizing and categorizing and converting the raw, unadulterated reality into data.
That’s what the left hemisphere is supposed to do: It takes the pure experience received by your right hemisphere, processes it, then feeds it back to the right hemisphere for further consideration, which then feeds it back to the left hemisphere for further processing. And on and on.
When the left hemisphere goes rogue, it concludes, “F*** the R.H. I can do all this myself.” When it does this--and Western civilization’s been doing it for a few hundred years now--it increasingly works with processed replicas of pure experience. It then erects its vision of reality from all the replicas, sits back and says, “Damn, that’s a mighty fine edifice I made.”
“Our postmodern days are filled with modernity’s coprophilous institutions and practices.” Eric Scheske, about five minutes ago.
Except it’s all fake. And fragile. And f’ed up. But we can’t see it because we’re enthralled to our left hemispheres.
Eventually, we’re just left with fake circles, fake sex, and fake prose. Shitty stuff.
Maybe some people don’t care. They’re happy worshipping at the AI altar, jittering about like adherents of those late medieval cults feverishly expecting an aligned eschatological event, and bringing metal flower bouquets to their robot wives.
Me? I’d rather join Aldous on that couch than worship with those morons.
I think I would buy an “I’M WITH ALDOUS” tee shirt.