I find most defenses of writing and the humanities now, in the effort to be iconoclastic toward AI, to be playing into the hands of AI iconodules. Like the daring of adolescent boys not to find something funny, it only emboldens and expands a perverse imagination. I believe the denial of imitative competence, which the ever-shifting line of what AI “cannot” produce as output, to be at the heart of these self-undermining efforts.

To take a different angle, I’ve been thinking about the Chekhov test. I think someone fails morally and aesthetically in proportion to how much they try to write like Chekhov. Not how much they end up sounding like Chekhov, but how much they make even the effort to do so. The failure happens before the first word is written.

Now if you want to spoof Chekhov for a laugh, ok, but I’m not talking about mocking Chekhov (which succeeds through the distortion of caricature regardless). I’m talking about the Altman-eyed, ingenuous claim to generate what is indistinguishable from Chekhov’s writing in form and content, full stop.

The attempt to write as well as Chekhov is noble if doomed. The attempt to write like Chekhov in order to do so is more like damned, violating what Chekhov illuminates about writing through writing.

If you eventually succeed in fooling me into thinking something is Chekhov, I may have failed— but you certainly have. You show less and less understanding the writing in that endeavor, its heartbreaking portrayal of consequential, minor details being ignored at the expense of humane life. So scrutinize the stories and plays with all the sublime matrices and attention heads you can muster. If you want to capture and imitate them, Chekhov's details are always behind your back, compassionately regarding a fragile, exposed, tragicomic creature laboring under the delusion it can escape itself.

If you are pitiably possessed now by the adolescent Silicon Valley impulse to defy whatever Mommy says cannot be done, I beg you to take a breath. Make someone some tea, if you can. You cannot benchmark your way out of the Chekhov test. You can only benchmark yourself further and further into failing it.

I may be completely wrong, but to show me otherwise I believe we need to read some Chekhov together. Vulnerable to each other's reading, sipping tea. It is not worth my time or yours to chase after me with Sonnet, because even I believe you I also know you lie (and that may be a fault we enjoy together, but only if we stop the Chekhov test). Your life is not a simulation. You’re on the books before you ever buy one up to feed into a machine.