The Mirror and the Window

As you may have noticed—with relief, indignation, or maybe even a guilty mixture of the two—I don’t directly engage with current events or politics on this blog. This is on purpose, the product of long deliberation, and something I have no intention of changing any time soon. However, today I am going to scrape perilously close. Because today, I’m going to talk about AI.

I have deep misgivings regarding AI because, for all its potential, new technology never stays in a nice, neat, little, good-for-us box. Sometimes, more nefarious forces drive the world, and technology serves them as happily as it does the genuine altruist. I lack the expertise to comment on the perils and potentials of AI in a field like medicine, for example, but what I do know—and feel entitled to an opinion on—is the arts, being a human, and the relationship between the two. So today I want to talk about generative AI in the realms of fiction and poetry. Dance, for now at least, is much less vulnerable to the incursions of the new gods. May Terpsichore enjoy her reign. While it lasts.

I don’t know that I can say anything that other people have not already said—much ink has been spilt, uncountable pixels pixxed, untold tunnels carpaled—but nevertheless, I feel compelled to add my two cents to the maelstrom. I can’t help but feel that there is an existential and consequential difference between reading something written by a person and something written by an LLM—and judging from all the submission guidelines I’ve read, the larger speculative fiction world seems to agree—but it’s strangely hard to talk about, isn’t it?

If we try taking a purely materialist view—which is the only view one can take in this type of discourse and still be taken seriously by those who don’t already agree with you—what difference can we say exists between writing created by a human and writing created by an LLM? If humans are nothing more than a pile of chemical reactions driving a meat suit, then, just like the LLM, we are nothing more than sophisticated computing systems: We scrape an environment for input, cobble preexisting data into a new arrangement, and spit out a product. No act of creation takes place, only an act of amalgamation—maybe transmutation if we are feeling generous. There is no difference, so nothing can be lost. For something to be lost, humans would have to be more.

But maybe it is the AI who is more by this logic. A sophisticated AI could tailor creative writing to its reader in a way no human ever could. You could get exactly the book you want. The perfect poem. The perfect product. Ah, I can hear you thinking, but art is not a product! Don’t worry. I agree with you. Art, in its essence, is not a product. But books are. Lit magazines are. And unless we’re all going to stop sharing our work outside the ring of firelight that is oral storytelling, our art is also a product. By and large, people consume a nonessential product because it appeals to them, and if writing’s only job is to appeal, well, judging how successfully our algorithms have hacked our dopamine cycles, the AI will be infinitely better at that.

I think this is why in polite company, the aversion to LLMs is sometimes chalked up to a sense of fair play: using an LLM for creative work is cheating, and no one likes a cheater. But I think it goes deeper than that. So deep that it becomes uncomfortable to articulate the precise nature of the difference and why it matters. The question is ultimately a metaphysical one; it resides in a tender place where words fail. But words are what we have, so talk we must, however messily and imperfectly. That wordless tender part of us needs us to talk.

So let’s talk. Let me tell you about the mirror and the window.

While I was at Middle Tennessee State University, one of my favorite professors in the English department (honestly, all my professors were my favorites, I love you MTSU!) gave us an exercise. We were provided with a selection of poetry: some poems had been written by humans and others had been written by AI, could we tell the difference? Now, this was probably about 2017/2018, so we aren’t talking DeepSeek here, but with some of the poetry it was truly hard to tell. After sorting our poems into human and AI categories, we were given the answers, and I was genuinely surprised to find that I gotten them all right. I had definitely waffled about a few of the poems, so really, I was genuinely surprised, and I probably couldn’t replicate that success given the current generation of LLMs. But what it felt like at the time was that some poems felt like mirrors and others felt like windows. The mirror pile was written by AI. The window pile was written by people.

This idea of mirrors and windows has stuck with me, because, since the question of the LLM is ultimately a discussion about what it means to be human, I’ve come to accept that it’s impossible to lay out the breadcrumb trail of the all-laudable logical process. Logic stalls, and we find ourselves cast up on the shores of metaphor. I find this to be incredibly appropriate. Let us not resist the metaphor, but take refuge in it! Metaphor, after all, is the language of the body. Any dancer will tell you that the body does not understand words; the body understands images. The body, you see, is a poet. And whatever else this discussion is, it is at least in part a defense of the consequentiality of embodiment. How are we different from the LLM? We are enfleshed. And I don’t think that this difference is a trivial one.

But surely I am making too much of this, right? Many people don’t read fiction or poetry at all. Many people don’t read anything at all! So what’s the harm if somebody wants to read some AI generated romantasy tailored to their personal predilection for piratey-man-with-checkered-past-falls-overboard-and-realizes-he-is-completely-fulfilled-by-being-the-newbie-in-a-mermaidwholookssuspiciouslylikethereader’s-reverse-harem? (No judgement, you do you!) And from the reader’s perspective, is there a meaningful difference between an LLM writing that for you and commissioning a flesh and blood writer? Not really, and I concede the point. But the AI has no bills to pay. Hiring a professional novelist with the requisite mastery of genre conventions to write you a custom book would not be cheap. There’s a real barrier to entry there. Most of us peons have forever been stuck with the products of other people’s imaginations, until we take up writing ourselves anyway. But no longer! The LLMs have arrived! And as they get better and better, and less and less awkward, why read what another person writes ever again? Why bother with all the messy detritus of their mind? Why open a window (rain, wind, bugs, highly coordinated gangs of woodland creatures stealing pies from windowsills) when you can just…. look in the mirror?

Of course, all fiction and poetry functions as mirror to a certain extent, and that is good. But I would argue that another person’s writing gives you the reflection you get in a window—the kind where you can see branches in your hair, the sea in your skin, and other people cresting the sand dune of your collarbone. The reflection is there, but it’s transparent rather than opaque. There is a merging between your own face and the scene beyond the window; you see that your eyes are the homes of birds, and your world grows larger. I have a unique relationship with my favorite books precisely because of this process. A good book can be 100 different things to 100 different people while still remaining essentially itself. This is emphatically an integral part of what makes reading so special. But the writing of a person is not only—or even primarily—a mirror. I don’t think we can say the same of the AI.

One of my favorite poems I’ve read in the last few years is “Mirror, Mirror” by Theodora Goss, part of her wonderful book, Snow White Learns Witchcraft. The first time I read it, I cried. I was drawn outside myself into an impossible third place. It was magic. A poem written by an LLM is…. what exactly? Sure, I could find meaning in it. Symbols. Humans are nothing if not meaning-making, pattern-seeking creatures. But I would be most likely to find my own patterns repeated, make connections I have made 1,000 times before, and see myself-conception confirmed in the machine’s unblinking eyes. With an LLM, at best, you are getting a mixed up, sanded down, kaleidescopic, uncanny valley, fun house mirror of stolen words in which to preen. Where is the challenge? Where is the encounter with the other that makes your world larger?

Personally, I can imagine no stranger hell than being trapped in a mirrored chamber that reflects my own thoughts—and only my own thoughts—back at me ad infinitum. That sounds even worse than my other personal hell—the one with infinite inboxes. And what if I mistake the mirrors for windows? And I think here be the dragons, so to speak. What will become of us when our experience of the written word reaffirms incessantly that the whole world looks just like us, thinks just like us, feels just like us, and revolves around our whims? When there is nothing to break the illusion? When we are never challenged by the unwieldy protruding edges of another mind? If you think the current echo chambers are bad, just wait until each of us lives in an echo chamber of one.

When we read the work of another, we are like neighbors living alone in high apartments, leaning out of our windows and dodging the clothing lines to link hands across the chasm that yawns below us. (Which, according to my Latin professor, was a real thing you could do in ancient Rome because the apartment buildings were just that close together which is crazy to think about…) There is profound vulnerability and connection in reading the words of another. And I’m not just talking about “deep” fiction here. Even in the most formulaic, beat-for-beat, optimized for entertainment writing out there, you are still getting a glimpse of the author’s internal world. What do they find exciting? Who do they wish they were? What idiosyncratic aesthetic preoccupations definitely solidified in their minds at the age of three and are scattered across their writing like pearls from a snapped string across a crowded ballroom floor? Which words and images do they return to again and again? What are they stuck on? Where are their blind spots? What lines do they refuse to cross? What lines do they have no fear of? Even when the author’s primary goal is for you to have fun, you are having fun in a theme park built from their fingerprints. In fact, if you really don’t like a book? It’s those fingerprints you’re usually reacting to. The author’s inner world is not a place you want to spend time, and you close the window by closing the book.

The connection forged between the inner worlds of reader and writer, who would otherwise be complete strangers, is one of the big reasons I read in the first place. My favorite books—the ones that have taken up residence in my imagination so thoroughly that they’re woven through everything I do—are the result of specific persons grappling with the deep and magical weirdness that is being alive in a body. They are the manifestations of obsessions and idiosyncrasies, walks and ruminations, relationships and loneliness, radically unflattened by the steamroller of big data, and they are wonderful for it.

When we treat these things as equal—the human and the LLM—we are not elevating the AI, but depressing the human. And not just the human, I’d argue, but the entire natural, material world. Nature itself. Down here, in the embodied world of blood and leaves, we navigate incredible tension all the time. Even if we somehow managed to strip away all the soft limits of culture, we’d still find that we are limitless beings inhabiting limited bodies. I want, but I can’t. Learning to navigate those limits, learning to learn from them, is our life’s work. I know, I’m terribly unfashionable. And no, I don’t buy that uploading yourself to the cloud is a way out. The server you’d live on is as subject to the limits of nature as your flesh. And it is worse still, for where the body can mend and tend itself, the server requires slaves.

It’s my guess that if you really found yourself in the extreme hinterlands of the human condition, you would be forcibly reminded that you are, in fact, human, and those chemical reactions taking place in your meat suit would feel pretty damn real on your actual skin, your actual heart. Assuming this experience didn’t kill you, you’d likely find that you have an unspoken connection with others who’ve had a similar experience. And, well, if anyone suggested that a chatbot— a thing that cannot fathom limitation, or loss, or pain, no matter what it’s been trained on—would be a meaningful replacement for that unspoken connection, I’d completely understand if you had trouble stifling the urge to punch that person in the face.

That is the difference, and those are the stakes. And let’s not forget that it applies equally to the other extreme of human experience: Joy. It is my firm belief that these stakes extend to fiction and poetry. Because, why do I read? What am I after when I pick up a novel or a book of poems or a short story collection? Entertainment? Yes. Something that relates in some way to my interests and aesthetic preferences? Of course. A story I can see myself reflected in? Indeed. So why do we need a person on the other side of a page? Because there’s another thing I am after, and it’s a big one: Kinship. And a feeling of kinship just won’t cut it. I don’t want to just feel like I’m not alone, I want to actually, objectively, concretely not be alone in a real and fundamental way when I read. I want my world to grow larger, I want to meet you in the impossible third place, and that requires the presence of another person on the other side of the page.

Metaphysics aside, you and I have things to say to each other, about the messiness of embodiment, the joy of love, the sharpness of grief, the labyrinth of living, the way you can feel big waterfalls vibrate your bones. We experience consequences, live with regret, grapple with ambiguity, cry with relief, and fear loss. Things happen to our bodies, to the bodies of those we love, the bodies of people we will never meet even as we listen to their stories with horror and grow furious with the unfairness of it all. Even if this is all there is, and it’s just us, on a blood-soaked world, hurtling through a barren void at breakneck speed—especially if that’s all there is—give me the real thing, damn it. Give me a window.

The art featured with today’s post is John William Waterhouse’s “The Crystal Ball,” painted in 1902. Public domain, high resolution download purchased from Lovebeyondthemoon.