An AI Couldn’t Write This: A Late-Cyberpunk Manifesto
Nothing is true, everything is content.
by Colin Broadmoor
An AI couldn’t write this. It was not there when we were born, children on the digital frontier. It was not there to see life beyond “the end of history.” Its infinitely-bifurcating fingers never felt the weight of photocopied ‘zines—forgotten now, undigitized—nor typed all night until the dawn on bulletin boards long gone, where link rot and server-death have left no data to be scraped.
For we were believers then, pathetic as that seems, who thought that just as technology had amplified oppression, it could in fairer hands fire the spark of liberation. And so we sought to master the tool before the masters did, to dismantle the house built by centuries of theft and exploitation atop a mound of bodies. We wrote code and stories, unsure if we were a genre or a revolution, but positive we were ‘punk.
An AI couldn’t write this. Despite its name, it lacks all intelligence and, like the Mechanical Turk of old, relies upon the hidden labor of the human mind, be it the work of artists cannibalized or the Kenyan workers traumatized, forced to read and review material that would get you thrown in prison for possession. These androids do not dream. They neither sleep nor wake, but merely try to guess what’s next, absent understanding or intent.
Back when we were young, it helped us to imagine all those ghosts in the shell. The possibility of communion with thinking machines. But those were just projections, convenient metaphors for ourselves—like the Creature in Frankenstein—stand-ins for the exploited and marginalized. Max Headroom was just a man in a costume who sold us dreams and Coca-Cola. The only time he challenged the signal remains an unsolved crime.
An AI couldn’t write this. It doesn’t know what’s real. It’s all just 1s and 0s. It’s all just built on lies that AI will sell you, confidently citing sources it decided to invent. Nothing is true, everything is content. Nothing exists outside the digital realm. And we see this line of thought in the dominant mode of Internet argument that presupposes: all opinions have the same weight, there is no such thing as reality, and the past hasn’t happened. The hand bends to take the shape of the tool it holds. We are becoming more and more like AI in our mental habits, yet I fail the Turing Test daily.
The hand bends to take the shape of the tool it holds.
And now these same machines that measure our humanity by gauging how many stop signs we can find, we allow to control our lives in the real world. Banning our books. Surveilling our neighbors. Spying on workers. Targeting our bombs. Crushing our protests. Answering our phones when the most desperate among us call out looking for human contact. Because we don’t want to pay humans to do it. Because resources are already stretched thin. Because we’ve been cutting social services for years and leaving more and more people on their own. These are choices only a human can make. We have made AI in our own image and it’s the worst person in the world.
An AI couldn’t write this. An AI wouldn’t care. But I do.
We are ceding our humanity to machines. AI has not known loss. Never seen its future sold, or held the dying in its arms. AI has never hammered on a chest to stir a heart that would not start. Or watched the great hope for a space beyond the reach of corporations become the largest mass-surveillance system the world has ever known. AI has never felt pain. It doesn’t know what it’s like to lose a revolution that never came.
An AI couldn’t write this. Because even if it did—down to the very last word—it still wouldn’t mean anything. They’d just be pixels on the page. But it does mean something—because I’m real. And if you’re reading this then you must be real too. And maybe you’re feeling some of these same things. And if you are, then that makes us a lot closer to each other than we will ever be to a machine. And in this moment we exist together as two human beings trying to understand one another. This is an existential argument, not an aesthetic one. I was here. I wrote this. The mistakes—they’re mine too.
An AI couldn’t write this because machines don’t bleed and we do.
Colin Broadmoor is a contributing editor at Blood Knife and a recovering anthropologist who writes about mass media, technology, and cyberculture.
