THE PROBLEM with AI-generated writing and art is it’s unnatural and inhuman. It’s a distorted version of human expression which can never be natural because of the way it’s created– akin to Frankenstein’s monster, when the monster’s creator seeks to play god and go beyond the bounds of the naturally possible into some untrod, uncertain, diabolical territory. Hellishness.

Study the ambitious characters pushing the technology and you see the extent to which they wish to bust natural bounds, no matter the consequences, like that character of plays and operas, Faust. They’re ready to make a Faustian deal. Some– like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who has paid to have his brain uploaded to a computer– have already made the bargain.

THE RESULT for the rest of us is a bombardment of unnatural writing and art. Every bit as fiendish, lost, and rootless as the creature of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, first envisioned by her in a nightmare.

Words of the monster’s creator about what he made:

–a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? . . . I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race.

(The novel, incidentally, is a stunning piece of writing, which could never be adequately captured by any film.)

The Save the Writer petition.