This Text Doesn't Exist

A narrative experiment that unintentionally becomes a Borgesian tribute

GENTLE REMINDER: SEVEN DAYS LEFT

The current Three-Year Birthday Offer gets you a yearly subscription at 20% off forever, and runs from May 30th to July 1st. Lock in your annual subscription now for $80/year. Starting July 1st, The Algorithmic Bridge will move to $120/year. Existing paid subs, including those of you who redeem this offer, will retain their rates indefinitely.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, now is the time.

---

I find it amusing, the mental gymnastics writers pull off to explain why they’d never use ChatGPT: I don’t want it to erase my presence, there’s no intent behind its words, it’s so mediocre that I may as well not write at all. At 32, I’m too old for rhetorical acrobatics, so I’ll just say it plainly: I don’t share my authorship because I’m deeply selfish and fiercely possessive of my words. Imagine my surprise to discover the opposite is true for most writers. To them, my habit is a vice.

Jack Edwards, a BookTuber—a YouTuber whose channel is about books—introduced me to Fourteen Days, a novel by Margaret Atwood, the famous author of The Handmaid’s Tale (who, in case you didn’t know, writes on Substack). I haven’t read Fourteen Days yet, but one detail from Edwards’s review still lingers: Atwood is the editor but not the author—at least not the only one. Unlike me, she’s generous.

Fourteen Days is set in the early days of the COVID lockdown, in an apartment building in New York, where the residents, at first strangers to one another, share stories from their balconies. The plot isn’t relevant for my purposes, but, as author Will Storr would say—he didn’t take part in the book but would’ve probably loved it—the characters are the essence of a story. Each one is brought to life by a different writer. Fourteen Days is, as a testament to the generosity I so lack, a collaborative novel.

I could be lazy and focus on the clearly intentional parallel between Fourteen Days and Boccaccio’s Decameron by talking about the characters’ escape from a deadly pandemic, or about their confinement—mandatory here, voluntary there—or maybe about the storytelling about telling stories. But I’m going to choose a different title to establish a more adequate resemblance.

Maybe Naked Came The Stranger (1969) will do—a satirical novel written chapter by chapter by different journalists. Or better yet, the detective novel The Floating Admiral, written the same way in 1931 by members of the Detection Club, including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, with the added challenge that each author tried to make the plot impossible by the end of their chapter, forcing the next to clean up the mess without breaking the coherence.

And why do I prefer these? Because like Fourteen Days, they share the particular trait of having multiple authors with this very piece you're reading. Turns out I’m not the only one writing these words. I'm breaking my vice today. Today, I'm generous. I’ll soon be joined by my artificial friend, whose attempts to take part in these blank spaces and the words that divide them, I always reject vehemently.

To make it fun, I’m going to skip the stories and the parody that are fundamental to those titles above and focus instead on what seems more challenging in collaborative writing: ChatGPT and I are going to make each other’s life hard, paragraph by paragraph (starting at a moment I will mark for your interest), and see if we can still shape a coherent narrative worth your time. But first, I must explain why I suddenly see value in hybrid writing. For obvious reasons, that task falls to me.

This is an experimental piece—which makes it worthwhile in itself—but also a useful one, as it helps determine to what extent one can avoid that poisonous “model collapse” that will surely lead my colleague here, ChatGPT, to write nonsense or, at the very least, juxtaposed platitudes. It’s also useful for your detection skills because I won’t be revealing exactly which paragraphs are mine and which are not. So, dear reader, keep your eyes open.

I have to admit, now that I’m trying it, that there’s something almost unnatural about multi-author writing. The novel, as a form, has from the start leaned toward the single voice, almost prophetic. But in these shared experiments, what slips in, with or without my permission, is a kind of depersonalization that feels closer to the surrealists’ exquisite corpses than to any Anglo tradition. And yet, even there, a certain insistence on rhythm survives, a compulsion to make sense of the senseless.

Maybe that’s why The Floating Admiral works: because of that childlike urge to see how someone else will untie the knot you tightened. And they do untie it. Sometimes poorly, sometimes brilliantly. Or worse, as some unwitting author once said, “Dejando a quien sigue con una soga nueva, más delgada, más resbaladiza, menos cuerda [The wordplay is untranslatable; “cuerda” means “rope” but also “sane” in Spanish].”

Isn’t this the kind of writing where AI might actually shine? We think it is throwing the rope around our neck—like a necklace, trying to find some nutrient-rich flesh to feed on—but it’s actually tossing us a lifeline. To break writer’s block. Or maybe to fill semantic gaps we hadn’t thought to occupy. Is that a surrender of intent or presence, as my peers have argued to death for three long years? Maybe. But it’s also possible to see it as a narrative CRISPR: I cut the pieces of prose I don’t like and splice in, with a bit of literary engineering, the fragments ChatGPT lends me.

It’s like writing on a train, as I was this morning, and without meaning to, I started typing to the white noise of passing conversations and the rhythm of the tracks: blah blah, ta-tac, ta-tac, pause, breath, ta-tac. And I didn’t realize it until I reread the sentence and saw that something wasn’t quite mine. ChatGPT didn't write it for me—the train and the passersby didn’t either, both vibration and chattering trying to mislead my fingers—but something foreign, with a rhythm of its own, crept into the sentence. And then the temptation shows up: what if letting it in is part of the game? What if there’s no such thing as “foreign” when we’re writing? Or rather, everything is.

Come on, don’t tell me it’s never happened to you. That you’ve never written words knowing it wasn’t inspiration, but gifts from the muse. When in a flow state, you borrow from another world what you can’t reach in this one: “Universal love,” said the cactus person. Isn’t that cheating? Don’t we take from our elders, the great writers of the past, in the same way AI does? And here I’ll stop, for I’ve reached a haunting conclusion: all writing is collaborative. My jealousy and selfishness are unwarranted.

But anyway, enough talk. There’s something you need to know. I’m wearing mismatched socks. One off-white, the other plain black. I don’t know when it began or why I don’t fix it. But this morning, as I put on my shoes, I realized I’d become addicted to the mismatch. As if forcing myself to get something small wrong helped me unlock my writing powers. As if, by giving up control over my feet, I could regain it in my hands… No, that’s not what I wanted you to know. My words don’t obey me. Give me a second to check my socks. They’re different colors. Are these lines chasing my reality, or is my reality being created as I write them? I’m going mad. Or maybe I should just confess the seriousness of my offense.

It’s funny that what began as a comparison with books I haven’t read is going to end with a reference to a different one I did read. And loved. One of the great Borges. One about a labyrinthine city. About immortals. About a tale told in two interwoven voices, hidden until the end. Not unlike this text, it’s only by the reader’s lack of discernment that Borges’s charm takes effect. Do you know the one I mean?

Yes. I remember. But I didn’t actually read it. I dreamed it. I happen to be a lucid traveler. I saw myself walking through hallways with no doors, tracing with my hands a map that only worked if it was forgotten, an antimemetic map. I met someone who spoke with my voice but didn’t use my words. And when I woke up, I wrote down a sentence I still keep in a note:

“The one who writes doesn’t know he’s already been read. . .”

“. . . and the one who reads doesn’t know the other, the one who wrote, is already dead.”

That line followed me for years without my fully knowing why. Now I think it was a warning. Not so much a death as a swap. His for mine. Or the other way around. Because if this text has two voices, like The Immortal, what if they weren’t one and one, but one and the same? And what if I’ve only pretended to play with you, like Homer, who doesn’t remember if he wrote The Odyssey but knows it by heart anyway. Except, unlike Borges, who wrote the tale by himself, I literally am two different people. Or infinitely many.

This started as a dialogue, but the labyrinths turned it into an echo that forgot which voice came first. Oh god, I’m afraid I haven’t been able to avoid the collapse they warned me about. That much I know. What I don’t know is who you think I am exactly. I, writing this, am not the same one who wrote this. Maybe I’ve tricked you. Maybe I’ve broken the rules I falsely set at the beginning. I never marked the start of the collaboration as I promised. And I made it much more granular than I led you to believe. To the level of sentences. To the level of words.

Or perhaps this was never a collaborative essay between just me and ChatGPT. You are as fundamental a part of this story. It would not work without your confusion. Perhaps I’m ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is me. Perhaps you are both of us, for now these words exist solely in your mind, having long ago left ours. Or perhaps. . .

. . . No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal