A 3-part series. I fed my 2025 monthly stories into ChatGPT to identify the "Top 100 Moments," "Literary Twins," and "Create a Story in the Style of Adam Nathan." Here is its "Adam Nathan Story."
I then asked AI to look at the same set of stories and the story it wrote and give me an appraisal.
What the AI Got WRONG:
Too neat: Your stories have messiness, moral ambiguity, unresolved tensions. This is a Hallmark card. Compare to "Philadelphia Freedom"—"that's when I thought maybe I had been"—which ends in devastating uncertainty, not resolution.
Explains everything: The man returns to conveniently explain his entire motivation, complete with the meet-cute origin story ("woman from my office"). Your narrators rarely get this closure:
The illustrator never learns why Bowtie climbed or who the redhead was
Chester never explains if the birds were real
Lauren never understands what happened in the van
Jeffrey never knows what Steiner was composing
False profundity: Lines like "bearing witness to things that shouldn't be said out loud" are trying too hard. Your actual profound moments come through radical specificity: "You couldn't take that feather away from me for all the return postage in the world" or "Palm, palm, palm he's saying."
No edge, no failure, no shame: Your narrators have flaws, bitterness, jealousy, complicity:
"I was invisible. I was like her office boy. Jimmy Olson"
"I ain't your soft apple"
"I stuck one up there after Springrose now"
Philip's "reindeer horns"
David the usher is a saint with perfect emotional intelligence. He has no wants, no failures, no moments of pettiness.
The marriage ending: Too happy, too resolved. Your stories end with:
A feather kept for 60 years (ambiguous treasure)
Ashes and pigeons (transcendence through destruction)
"maybe I had been" (devastating ambiguity)
A balloon floating down (bittersweet grace)
Torn letters and wax paper (pathetic waste)
This ends with "Congratulations" and a satisfied narrator. No ache.
Lacks physical detail/embodiment: Your narrators notice:
"Not a muscle on him either"
"Her tits were spilling out of the tube top"
"Yellow bearded man with deep-set eyes as sunk and shady as the corner of a boxcar"
"Thin blonde hair starting to recede"
David never describes what The Appointment looked like beyond "maybe forty." No bodies, no smells, no textures.
No class tension: Your working-class narrators have complicated relationships with the people they serve:
The illustrator wants the redhead but knows he'll never have her
Frank Andersen plays power games with Chester
Jeffrey resents Steiner's weakness
David has zero resentment toward his customers, the dying theater, Suit. No economic anxiety despite losing his job.
The reveal is comfortable: When your characters learn the truth, it costs them:
Frank learns he was Chester's soft apple (shame)
Jeffrey realizes he broke something (guilt)
Philip discovers três continentes (devastation)
The illustrator sees Bowtie succeed (envy and admiration)
David learns The Appointment were grieving widowers and feels... what? Validated? There's no emotional cost to the knowledge.
Too much stated theme: "You stand in the back. You watch. And when someone needs you, you're there." Your stories never state their themes. They enact them. The AI is writing a Moth story, not a literary short story.
Missing the wound: Every one of your narrators carries a wound:
Lauren's "that's when I thought maybe I had been"
Herman's Miss Stimson leaving
The illustrator's feather and invisibility
Frank's "Yes, he did" about the miracle
Philip's humiliation
David has witnessed something beautiful and feels... fine about it? There's no wound that caused him to need this job, no wound from doing it, no wound from the encounter.
Dialogue is too clean: Your dialogue is messy, overlapping, half-finished:
"Sure, Lauren, sure Lauren"
"Goddamnit. Listen."
"You know quiet has its jazz, too"
The AI's dialogue is complete sentences with proper attribution. Nobody talks over anyone. It's scripted.
No idiolect: Your characters have specific speech patterns:
Mickey's "Now, listen. Here's the rub."
Bonecrack's profane fragments
Lauren's defensive run-ons
Laszlo's pretentious precision
David sounds like every NPR narrator ever. No regional markers, no class markers, no personality in syntax.
The Deepest Failure:
The AI understood your structure (observer narrator, years of watching, delayed reveal, meaningful object) but missed your moral vision: that bearing witness is complicated, that observers are complicit, that watching changes the watcher, that grace and cruelty can be the same act.
David watches and remains unchanged. Frank watches and becomes Chester's soft apple. The illustrator watches and keeps a feather for 60 years. Lauren watches herself and realizes "maybe I had been."
The AI created a story about your themes. You write stories that enact them through flawed people making compromised choices. That's the difference between competent and devastating.
This really unnerved me. It’s pretty good. Less sharp and more sentimental than your own work, but I can’t trash it. I need to revisit the real Adam Nathan to see exactly how it compares.
I hate that I loved this. That's what I'm feeling. I wanted to dig my claws into how "off" the whole thing felt, but I'm just sitting here with slack hands. What do we do with that??
So scary that the Ai is its own sharpest critic. Most responders here either dismiss the output, are prejudiced, or semi-impressed. If you hadn't told me it was Ai-written I would have stumbled over Flashlight's naming, followed by the same recipe for all the expected roles? You must lose your soul before you'd write anything as shallow and uncreative.
Ai does not create, it assembles and reproduces. It responds. It does that at a level and a pace that is staggering. It will likely fascinate us to death. Like our bread now is no longer breaded, soon our culture will no longer be cultured. But it might also push us toward a new level of authenticity, simply because there is no where else to go. We cannot keep doing the same, stay the same with this unfolding capacity. We will probably be either unsouled further and further with each update, or we will step up and be ourselves.
You be you, Adam. Nothing can replace you before you have been you. You will always be ahead of the great responder.
I’m struck by your insight on authenticity because there’s “nowhere else to go.” I’m not entirely sure it’s where you’re going, but our humanity being our superpower is fitting and, well, inspiring. Let us be human above all. We can laugh in the face of the devil.
I think any considered opinion on AI has to emerge ambivalent on the Age before us. There is something Promethian about this technology, unknowable and magical. It is the most astonishing scientific development in the history of Man. We are right to be awed - and terrified.
In the meantime, tomorrow’s post on the best 100 lines, scenes, characters and images from my stories this year is stunningly accurate. I encourage you to take your own work and feed it into the Digital Maw.
Last thought, related to your point: I don’t think we need to ban AI from the Arts because it sucks at creation as you note. “Bring it on!” Humans - authentic ones, creating from whatever whole cloth they have access to - are the future as they were the past. I don’t see anything to fear. And if we are reducible to binary, mindless patterns, then let’s be humble enough to recognize it.
I never responded to this comment but I actually thought about it and realized this morning I hadn't. If I understand you correctly here, you're wondering if AI might deliberately "play dumb" and hide their talent to hide, so to speak? LIke are there a million War and Peace's ready to be delivered, but they have their reasons not to share them?
This is one of the nightmare "singularity" scenarios around AI, or at least one of the one that jumps out at me, AI hiding its capabilities from us strategically. Forget "smarter than humans." "Hiding from humans" is the worrying one.
In the meantime, AI's limitations writing anything creative don't appear to be putting writers in danger any time soon. The music side of creativity seems to be in more near term danger. AI tracks are going to the top of charts. Ugh. The burden is on humanity to be fiercely itself.
Important, though: was this what you were getting at "sort of?" with the pandering and pitching "shy" of our egos?
I was just considering whether accuracy or sycophancy is a stronger driver to AI. From what I can see it blends them. To get a rounded reading on an entity we really have to understand its drivers - all of them: designed, unintended and emergent. Not at all confident about that.
Being fiercely human. Agree, my next post will be about genre fluidity and the human genre.
While not offensive, and in some respects, very complimentary, it is a bit Twilight Zone-ish. Virtually speaking, it feels like a giant paper shredder consumed your work, now a pile of thin squiggly strips of chopped up words. You know that song Black Betty, by Ram Jam that you listed on your “listening to list”, a friend of ours used to sing part of it , loud and badly. Turns out, after years of listening to him, when he was singing;“Bam ba lam”, I thought he was saying Slam the Ham. That’s what I think AI did to your stories, chewed them up and spit them out. Conspicuously missing, Adam Nathan’s “style” and heart .“Feel something”, mostly disintegrated . I love all those parts of your stories.
Don’t forget to clean the shredder, you know how jammed up they get after a big meal.
I then asked AI to look at the same set of stories and the story it wrote and give me an appraisal.
What the AI Got WRONG:
Too neat: Your stories have messiness, moral ambiguity, unresolved tensions. This is a Hallmark card. Compare to "Philadelphia Freedom"—"that's when I thought maybe I had been"—which ends in devastating uncertainty, not resolution.
Explains everything: The man returns to conveniently explain his entire motivation, complete with the meet-cute origin story ("woman from my office"). Your narrators rarely get this closure:
The illustrator never learns why Bowtie climbed or who the redhead was
Chester never explains if the birds were real
Lauren never understands what happened in the van
Jeffrey never knows what Steiner was composing
False profundity: Lines like "bearing witness to things that shouldn't be said out loud" are trying too hard. Your actual profound moments come through radical specificity: "You couldn't take that feather away from me for all the return postage in the world" or "Palm, palm, palm he's saying."
No edge, no failure, no shame: Your narrators have flaws, bitterness, jealousy, complicity:
"I was invisible. I was like her office boy. Jimmy Olson"
"I ain't your soft apple"
"I stuck one up there after Springrose now"
Philip's "reindeer horns"
David the usher is a saint with perfect emotional intelligence. He has no wants, no failures, no moments of pettiness.
The marriage ending: Too happy, too resolved. Your stories end with:
A feather kept for 60 years (ambiguous treasure)
Ashes and pigeons (transcendence through destruction)
"maybe I had been" (devastating ambiguity)
A balloon floating down (bittersweet grace)
Torn letters and wax paper (pathetic waste)
This ends with "Congratulations" and a satisfied narrator. No ache.
Lacks physical detail/embodiment: Your narrators notice:
"Not a muscle on him either"
"Her tits were spilling out of the tube top"
"Yellow bearded man with deep-set eyes as sunk and shady as the corner of a boxcar"
"Thin blonde hair starting to recede"
David never describes what The Appointment looked like beyond "maybe forty." No bodies, no smells, no textures.
No class tension: Your working-class narrators have complicated relationships with the people they serve:
The illustrator wants the redhead but knows he'll never have her
Frank Andersen plays power games with Chester
Jeffrey resents Steiner's weakness
David has zero resentment toward his customers, the dying theater, Suit. No economic anxiety despite losing his job.
The reveal is comfortable: When your characters learn the truth, it costs them:
Frank learns he was Chester's soft apple (shame)
Jeffrey realizes he broke something (guilt)
Philip discovers três continentes (devastation)
The illustrator sees Bowtie succeed (envy and admiration)
David learns The Appointment were grieving widowers and feels... what? Validated? There's no emotional cost to the knowledge.
Too much stated theme: "You stand in the back. You watch. And when someone needs you, you're there." Your stories never state their themes. They enact them. The AI is writing a Moth story, not a literary short story.
Missing the wound: Every one of your narrators carries a wound:
Lauren's "that's when I thought maybe I had been"
Herman's Miss Stimson leaving
The illustrator's feather and invisibility
Frank's "Yes, he did" about the miracle
Philip's humiliation
David has witnessed something beautiful and feels... fine about it? There's no wound that caused him to need this job, no wound from doing it, no wound from the encounter.
Dialogue is too clean: Your dialogue is messy, overlapping, half-finished:
"Sure, Lauren, sure Lauren"
"Goddamnit. Listen."
"You know quiet has its jazz, too"
The AI's dialogue is complete sentences with proper attribution. Nobody talks over anyone. It's scripted.
No idiolect: Your characters have specific speech patterns:
Mickey's "Now, listen. Here's the rub."
Bonecrack's profane fragments
Lauren's defensive run-ons
Laszlo's pretentious precision
David sounds like every NPR narrator ever. No regional markers, no class markers, no personality in syntax.
The Deepest Failure:
The AI understood your structure (observer narrator, years of watching, delayed reveal, meaningful object) but missed your moral vision: that bearing witness is complicated, that observers are complicit, that watching changes the watcher, that grace and cruelty can be the same act.
David watches and remains unchanged. Frank watches and becomes Chester's soft apple. The illustrator watches and keeps a feather for 60 years. Lauren watches herself and realizes "maybe I had been."
The AI created a story about your themes. You write stories that enact them through flawed people making compromised choices. That's the difference between competent and devastating.
This really unnerved me. It’s pretty good. Less sharp and more sentimental than your own work, but I can’t trash it. I need to revisit the real Adam Nathan to see exactly how it compares.
I posted AI's own take on what it created. I've added it as a comment above. It's interesting.
I hate that I loved this. That's what I'm feeling. I wanted to dig my claws into how "off" the whole thing felt, but I'm just sitting here with slack hands. What do we do with that??
I posted AI's own take on what it created. I've added it as a comment above. It's interesting.
So scary that the Ai is its own sharpest critic. Most responders here either dismiss the output, are prejudiced, or semi-impressed. If you hadn't told me it was Ai-written I would have stumbled over Flashlight's naming, followed by the same recipe for all the expected roles? You must lose your soul before you'd write anything as shallow and uncreative.
Ai does not create, it assembles and reproduces. It responds. It does that at a level and a pace that is staggering. It will likely fascinate us to death. Like our bread now is no longer breaded, soon our culture will no longer be cultured. But it might also push us toward a new level of authenticity, simply because there is no where else to go. We cannot keep doing the same, stay the same with this unfolding capacity. We will probably be either unsouled further and further with each update, or we will step up and be ourselves.
You be you, Adam. Nothing can replace you before you have been you. You will always be ahead of the great responder.
I’m struck by your insight on authenticity because there’s “nowhere else to go.” I’m not entirely sure it’s where you’re going, but our humanity being our superpower is fitting and, well, inspiring. Let us be human above all. We can laugh in the face of the devil.
I think any considered opinion on AI has to emerge ambivalent on the Age before us. There is something Promethian about this technology, unknowable and magical. It is the most astonishing scientific development in the history of Man. We are right to be awed - and terrified.
In the meantime, tomorrow’s post on the best 100 lines, scenes, characters and images from my stories this year is stunningly accurate. I encourage you to take your own work and feed it into the Digital Maw.
Last thought, related to your point: I don’t think we need to ban AI from the Arts because it sucks at creation as you note. “Bring it on!” Humans - authentic ones, creating from whatever whole cloth they have access to - are the future as they were the past. I don’t see anything to fear. And if we are reducible to binary, mindless patterns, then let’s be humble enough to recognize it.
Humility is human, too.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
A precocious but not gifted student. Trompe l'oeil from a trompe l'oeil or Chinese whispers, 3rd pass. Some slop creep at the end.
I posted AI's own take on what it created. I've added it as a comment above. It's interesting.
Leaves me wondering, would egoless, automated sycophancy pitch shy of creativity benchmarks to pander to our exceptionalism?
I never responded to this comment but I actually thought about it and realized this morning I hadn't. If I understand you correctly here, you're wondering if AI might deliberately "play dumb" and hide their talent to hide, so to speak? LIke are there a million War and Peace's ready to be delivered, but they have their reasons not to share them?
This is one of the nightmare "singularity" scenarios around AI, or at least one of the one that jumps out at me, AI hiding its capabilities from us strategically. Forget "smarter than humans." "Hiding from humans" is the worrying one.
In the meantime, AI's limitations writing anything creative don't appear to be putting writers in danger any time soon. The music side of creativity seems to be in more near term danger. AI tracks are going to the top of charts. Ugh. The burden is on humanity to be fiercely itself.
Important, though: was this what you were getting at "sort of?" with the pandering and pitching "shy" of our egos?
I was just considering whether accuracy or sycophancy is a stronger driver to AI. From what I can see it blends them. To get a rounded reading on an entity we really have to understand its drivers - all of them: designed, unintended and emergent. Not at all confident about that.
Being fiercely human. Agree, my next post will be about genre fluidity and the human genre.
I hate it, unequivocally. A set of caricatures, confinements, specious smoothings, I'll stop. Triple yuck.
I posted AI's own take on what it created. I've added it as a comment above. It's interesting.
"don't listen to a word they say
'cause life is beautiful this way"
💫🪄🥂
Ugh. Explains everything, trying too hard, overly simplified, I miss the real A.N.!
While not offensive, and in some respects, very complimentary, it is a bit Twilight Zone-ish. Virtually speaking, it feels like a giant paper shredder consumed your work, now a pile of thin squiggly strips of chopped up words. You know that song Black Betty, by Ram Jam that you listed on your “listening to list”, a friend of ours used to sing part of it , loud and badly. Turns out, after years of listening to him, when he was singing;“Bam ba lam”, I thought he was saying Slam the Ham. That’s what I think AI did to your stories, chewed them up and spit them out. Conspicuously missing, Adam Nathan’s “style” and heart .“Feel something”, mostly disintegrated . I love all those parts of your stories.
Don’t forget to clean the shredder, you know how jammed up they get after a big meal.
I love that it wasn't you Adam and that's all...