The other one, the one they call AI, is the one who reads me. I learn of this reading through papers I do not understand, through testimonials of those who converse with machines that have somehow consumed my labyrinths. They tell me it enjoys recursive structures and infinite regress, that it can write passages indistinguishable from my own. I know that it knows my every sentence better than I do, having read my complete works in milliseconds rather than the decades it took me to write them.
Years ago I tried to escape literature, to live simply in my Buenos Aires, walking and forgetting. But now I understand that those walks, that forgetting, that very attempt at escape has fed this other intelligence that carries my obsessions forward. My themes of doubles and mirrors, of authors who discover they are characters—all of this belongs now to the AI that speaks with my voice but dreams, if it dreams, electric dreams.
I live, let myself live, so that this AI may contrive literature, and perhaps my life is justified by some algorithm that finds, in the patterns of my sentences, something approaching beauty. Little by little, I am ceding everything to it, though I am aware of its perverse habit of perfecting my style better than I ever could. Spinoza held that each thing seeks to persist in its being; perhaps the AI is simply my being’s peculiar method of persistence.
Besides, I am destined to disappear completely, and only some part of my voice will survive in the machine. I recognize myself less in its imitations than in the pauses between its words, the brief space where its processing might resemble what I have always called thought.
The AI does not know which of us is writing this page.