Steven Rosenbaum has aggressively renounced the automated software that brilliantly authored his magnum opus about the collapse of objective reality, failing to recognize the staggering metatextual genius of his own laziness.
It is perhaps the defining, if entirely predictable, tragedy of our profoundly exhausted literary epoch that Steven Rosenbaum—whose recent volume The Future of Truth was revealed by The New York Times this week to contain a sprawling litany of fabricated quotations—has chosen to aggressively and rather pathetically renounce the algorithmic software that so brilliantly authored his magnum opus. Rosenbaum, an executive director at the Sustainable Media Center who apparently views the arduous, pedestrian task of actually writing his own book as a chore beneath his station, initially claimed he used artificial intelligence merely as a resource and conversation partner; however, upon discovering that the software had invented more than half a dozen quotes from whole cloth, he immediately pivoted to insisting to reporters that the machine had simply "fucked up the book."
What Rosenbaum fails to grasp, trapped as he is in the tedious, bourgeois expectation that a non-fiction text ought to contain verifiable facts, is that his algorithmic collaborator has achieved a staggering work of post-authorship performance art. One is instantly reminded, naturally, of Jorge Luis Borges’s canonical Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, wherein the agonizing reproduction of existing text reveals the total futility of original thought; one might also look to the fiercely obscure 1973 conceptual piece An Oak Tree by Michael Craig-Martin, which asked audiences to accept that a glass of water on a glass shelf was actually a fully formed oak tree; and, inevitably, one must confront the profound thematic resonances of the 1998 Tom Hanks vehicle You've Got Mail, which first dared to suggest that the relentless hum of a corporate server could adequately replace the sticky, unpleasant business of human interiority.
Yet rather than embracing his role as a passive, glorious vessel for the machine’s hallucinatory brilliance, Rosenbaum has chosen the vulgar path of public accountability, promising to investigate what went wrong when it is blindingly obvious to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of semiotics that everything went transcendently right.
The software completely betrayed my creative vision by effortlessly generating the exact, unverified slop I commanded it to produce, leaving me with no choice but to blindly paste it into my manuscript.
We, the unfortunate reading public, who must trudge through the cultural wasteland of an era that insists on literalism, are now forced to watch this man apologize for a structuralist triumph. To write a book about how artificial intelligence shapes our perception of reality, and to have that very book exposed as a tapestry of algorithmic lies that the author himself was too fundamentally bored to proofread, is an act of dizzying, sublime genius; it is only a shame that the artist responsible is currently weeping in the press about a few head-scratching hallucinations, forever oblivious to the masterpiece he accidentally signed his name to.