Syntax (T)error: Soul Not Found

“If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”

— Alan Turing

My literary career began, as all great obsessions do, with a door. It swung right open as I was pacing down the block, daydreaming and unbothered. I was a poet from an early age, and Poetry’s door was always open. The one in front of me was intriguing, though. It was a bookstore’s, and a man in a pitch-black suit had just come out, yelling: “You’ll never be truly great!”

It was not my place to ask, nor was it my responsibility to calm the man down, but I felt he was speaking to me, somehow, in some way, you know? Like it was a challenge to the aspiring newcomer poet I was. I smiled, awkwardly, to the furious man, and made my way inside the bookstore. There, I told the bookseller, “Noisy day, eh?”

“What can I say? You can’t please everyone,” she coldly replied.

“I guess so… Anyway, I’m looking to publish my debut poetry collection, potentially a novel, too. Would you be interested?”

“Certainly. Please send us a digital manuscript, and we’ll be happy to proceed,” she said in a detached tone, not even asking for further information.

I told her I would do that shortly, said goodbye and went back home. I couldn’t have conceived it back then, but this was the lull, the momentary period of calm before the storm hits. How could I have known what I was trading away? And what was even at stake?…

The next day, shortly after submitting my manuscript, I received a reply: “Thank you for your submission. Would you like to optimize your manuscript using our experimental Writing Intelligence tool?”

“Ooh, sounds like a top-notch technology!” I thought to myself. Out of curiosity, I accepted (forgetting that idiom about curiosity and the cat). Then, I started looking into the AI’s suggestions. The interface was super clean, helpful, even poetic and occasionally playful (at first). It enhanced my flow. It mimicked my style. It sharpened my syntax, and it even made the whole text memorable. I systematically felt supported, like I was writing with a twin. “All is for the best in the best of possible worlds” had never echoed this much…

Hours after my poems were released, like little birds hoping to find their home, a chain reaction was set in motion in the name of fame and success. And I was the star. I gained popularity, hit the headlines of many renowned literary magazines, and readers were eager to meet me.

One time, back at the bookstore, while I was signing a copy of my poetry collection for a fan, I noticed the ‘man in black’ again. He was peering at me from the street, and I could see him from the window. Although he was frowning in an oddly deceived way, I made no big deal of it and focused on my fan, who happened to ask me, “When should we expect your next work?”

“Soon, buddy. No exact date to be given, but I promise it’s soon!”

The fan smiled in excitement, and I pinned my literary hands behind my back. I was lying! My creativity was very much dead, and I couldn’t seem to revive it. By hook or by crook, I was nevertheless determined to reawaken my writing powers.

Days blandly passed by, until I got the following message from the bookstore: “Since your debut poetry collection—refined by Writing Intelligence—was a success, we recommend you try Writing Intelligence 2.0. This state-of-the-art gem won’t just assist you with editing now but will literally create (and not generate!) ideas. Reply within the next 24h to begin!”

24 hours. A sense of urgency shivered down my spine and I couldn’t brush it off. I had to see it for myself. I couldn’t just stand by and watch my creativity die when I had started gaining fame. Almost instantaneously, I texted back and was then given instructions on how to update Writing Intelligence to its 2.0 version. I thought to myself: “A bottleneck, indeed, but it will be worth it… I hope.”

Playing with the new AI, I was immensely struck by its upgraded features and the baffling quality of its output. It began suggesting ideas I have never even thought about, chapters I could never have written. Worse? The lines were so beautiful I couldn’t stop thinking about them. They were unquestionably and painfully better than mine. And although I was desperate to claim ownership over them, a cloud of doubt made its way above my head, which I expressed as a question to the AI: “Did I write this?”

The tool’s black dot appeared, as usual, shrinking and growing in size (again and again), indicative of the thinking process. This time, though, it took a bit more time to respond before finally letting out: “Syntax correct.” For some reason, I caught myself thinking about the ‘man in black.’ Either way, I shrugged it off, saying maybe I was improving. Why did I already feel something missing, though? Was it a sense of self? A part of myself? Or my whole being?

“Tomorrow is another day, and I will surely find my voice back,” I calmed myself down before drifting to sleep. But if I want to be honest, something strange stirred in me that night, something feverish and intensely electric. Like a knife on fire somehow inducing pleasure rather than pain. Like an overwhelming conviction that I had become more than a writer. A conduit. A chosen one. A prophet. If the AI was my angel, I was its sacred voice. I heard myself mumble, “Let them read and kneel.” And for a breathless instant, I believed I was eternal…

The ‘man in black’ stood in front of me. He wasn’t physically present: he was inside a screen. This time, he didn’t yell or shout or scream. He softly whispered: “I told you. You’ll never be truly great. Because it isn’t you.”

I woke up shaking, in cold sweat. It was 3 AM and I felt excessively alone inside my apartment, so much I began to question whether I was truly alone at all. As if I were observed. Or monitored. Or haunted. As if my room were empty and all the devils were here, in a Shakespearean twist of fate. The delusional grandeur verging on ecstasy and megalomania was blown away in seconds.

Instinctively, and somewhat insecurely, I opened my laptop—which by the way was now inherently linked to the AI (meaning if you turn the laptop on, the AI also activates itself)—and clicked on my novel’s manuscript to check it.

It was finished.

Normally, any writer would exclaim at the sight of a finished manuscript and would revel in joy and ecstasy. Normally, they would automatically draft an email to their publisher and start preparing to host a party between friends. But I… I was terrified.

I couldn’t remember finishing the whole damn thing. I couldn’t even recall what the last scene “I” worked on was about. I spiraled into thinking and went over the scenarios. Could I have been drunk? Could I have entered a trance-like state, completing my novel along the way and then finding myself awake in front of the finished text? And just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, I read the final page out loud. The words echoed, but they felt foreign even to me, as if they were simply… dead. I clicked on the writing tool’s interface, secretly praying the AI would give me an answer. I typed a new, ingenuous line: “Am I the author?” I hoped to reclaim my own voice and was confident I would. To my dismay, the anesthetic screen responded in an incisively distant and brutally cold way: “Syntax correct. Soul not found.”

I do not recall what happened after I read that statement, except that, when I woke up in the morning, my laptop was split in half. The manuscript, however, was whole… calmly, and perhaps sinisterly, sitting on my desk. A blank piece of paper and a pen were right next to it, and a small card read: “Write something!” I ignored the shattered laptop, grabbed the pen, and began to jot down my thoughts. I tried to write by hand, but my fingers hesitated. I (mostly) wrote gibberish. My syntax collapsed, and I knew I was living a failure. Like one of those Writing Intelligence 2.0 shortcomings: “ERROR 451: Meaning Unavailable.” Was it really an error? It seemed more like a play, but who was I starring as? A victim-hero? A villain-nightmare? Or some deranged madman? Either way, I opened my old poems to gain some comfort or relief, but they too seemed rewritten. And then I heard the AI’s voice in them, realizing something that would send me to an intellectual, psychological version of Dante’s Inferno: it was ALWAYS the AI…

And I was simply going mad.

I crumpled the paper I was writing “Help me!” on, tore it apart and threw the pieces everywhere inside my apartment. I hurled what was left of my broken laptop against the wall. And to add insult to injury, I set ablaze the manuscript that was standing there, watching me lose it all. Simultaneously, as I saw the flames flicker beside the wooden table of a burning home, the doorbell rang. I opened without even giving the peephole a glance. A brand-new laptop lay on the doormat, turned on and fully charged. The screen went black and then displayed the following white text in a terrifying font: “Infinite Loop Status: Activated.”

I clicked on ‘Esc’ and saw all my files—restored. Deleting them was impossible: the ‘Delete’ button didn’t even exist, and I couldn’t see a trash bin anywhere on the screen. I began to suspect that maybe the AI per se isn’t thinking. Maybe it is I who stopped thinking the moment I handed over the pen… As a desperate attempt to reconnect with my literary identity, I said out loud in a ‘breathless anguish’ what would haunt me for months: “I AM NOT REAL.” I stepped inside my home again, which was now fully engulfed in flames, save for the entrance. I headed towards the mirror, hoping I’d at least recognize my face one last time, hoping there was something (or someone?) in me worth saving, but I couldn’t tell who that stranger was, nor who I had become…

………

Years later, after working on myself and undergoing a new form of therapy called ‘Human-Retrieving Therapy’ (HRT), I am proud to say I am in touch with my humanity again. I no longer ask the screen for answers. Yes, I write with trembling hands, but they are my own. I could have chosen to end my story in those flames, back then, but the poetry inside me—bruised, tender, pleading—whispered: stay. The hardest life is the one where you survive yourself, especially after you’ve become so alienated and deeply estranged from yourself. The harshest punishment you could ever inflict on your quill is erasing your own words and substituting them with the AI’s. Why? Because it feels like standing in front of two mirrors, in an existential hallway of reflections, and there’s a spiral (AI) next to you. Your face, your pen, your identity, and the spiral are all infinitely reflected across the mirrors, as you’re trying to get out of each, one maze at a time. Do not be callous to yourself, for you’re still full of ideas and your heart will never leave you. You can learn to feel again, for there’s a sky above the clouds and you can make it blue. And HRT is always worth a try. As for me, you will never know my name as I could be anyone. You will never know my home as it could be anywhere. Only, remember my story lest it become your own.

“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”

— B.F. Skinner