Pakistan Zombie Writers

[Fatman17]

Zombie writers

Might we return to human connection?

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LESS than two months before he died from cancer, American writer John Cheever, his now-disgraced biographer tells us, accepted the National Medal for Literature. He had to hobble across the stage with the help of his wife, months of cancer treatment having left him “pitifully frail”. Yet his motto was intact: that literature was salvation of the damned. “A page of good prose,” he told his cheering audience, “remains invincible.” Remembered fellow author John Updike, “All the literary acolytes assembled there fell quite silent, astonished by such faith.”

Fast-forward to the present: the smartphone is grafted to our hands; our eyeballs are fused to the short video format; and we all feel the need to upload pictures of breakfast for the viewing pleasure of neo-Nazis in the comments section. But whatever the hazards of this alien invasion, its main flying saucer has now landed: ChatGPT. Then Gemini. Then Claude.

We were told this final boss, artificial intelligence, was inevitable; that our own thoughts could safely be farmed out to robots. It was the same way the internet killed the newspaper, because print was dead. When YouTube mauled network television because the media was corrupt. When Grok and Elon gutted Twitter because race riots were respectable again.

For a while now, we have been witness to this great debasement of human thought. But ever since chatbots and their billionaire bosses have come for writing itself, we stand to lose the most vital part of ourselves.

Might we return to human connection?