Recently, someone asked me what I thought made something fresh. I interpreted this question as: in an age when AI produces so much polished content so fast, how can creators combat attention fatigue? Things become old quickly these days so how do we keep our creative work feeling new and exciting? I suggested two keys: precision and juxtaposition.
When an artist captures a familiar idea better than we can express ourselves, it sparks a moment of recognition, this is a hallmark of good art. Also, juxtaposing two seemingly unrelated ideas, even if the relationship is one of contrast instead of similarity, activates our minds to explore undiscovered patterns and connections. This is a core element of poetry.
Intrigued by this notion, I told ChatGPT that I was in the role of editor, and the AI was to act as a journalist and explore my observation. After a bit of back and forth, very much resembling a human to human editor-writer relationship, but faster ,the AI produced the following three stories. Although written by AI in the guise of journalism, these pieces are, of course, completely fictional. They emerged, as much else does these days, from that strange alchemy of mathematics, language, and energy that we’re all getting used to, little by little, and day by day.
Donovan Craig
***
The Last Original Sentence by GPT edited by Donovan Craig
It was a Thursday, and the WeWork smelled like disinfectant and LaCroix. On the 14th floor, under a skylight designed to keep creatives from despair, Cassie stared at her screen like it had betrayed her.
She used to call herself a “language mechanic.” She could feel when a sentence’s engine was off. Too many adverbs. No torque. Now, her new coworker,an AI with the temperament of a Labrador and the vocabulary of Proust, rewrote her email sequence in under ten seconds.
“This one triggers more empathy,” it said.
Cassie read the revision. It did trigger more empathy. It also felt like it had never been touched by a hand that had ever wanted anything real.
She stood up, walked to the communal kitchen, poured cold brew over ice. Jamie, the senior brand strategist, was doing pushups beside the fridge.
“Did you see what I fed the bot this morning?” he asked. “I told it to rewrite our call-to-action in the voice of a dad texting from a gas station in 1998. Killed it. Our open rate’s up ten percent.”
Cassie sipped. “How does that make you feel?”
Jamie grinned. “Like I should be billing the bot at three hundred an hour.”
In the old days, last year, Cassie wrote things that made clients cry. She once drafted an onboarding flow for a meditation app that caused a Buddhist monk to email the CEO and say thank you. Now her job was to sit beside the machine and steer.
But here’s what she’d started to notice. The copy that performed best didn’t just say something. It revealed something. Not to the world, but to the reader, about the reader.
Yesterday, she’d tested two subject lines. A: “Your 10% discount is waiting.” B: “You always hesitate, don’t you?”
Subject line B doubled the open rate.
She thought about Emerson. Something about the best writers being the ones who put into words what others have only felt.
In her notebook she scribbled a new rule.
The sentence works when the reader thinks it’s their own thought, only better.
Later that afternoon, she tried something else. She fed the bot two ideas to jam together: grief and GPS directions. The output was strange. Cold.
So she reworked it herself.
“In 600 feet, turn left. That was the road you always took home. She used to hum in the passenger seat. Now it’s just silence, and the voice inside the dash telling you to move.”
She sent it to her friend at a mental health startup.
An hour later: “This line broke me. Can we build a campaign around it?”
Cassie looked at her screen. The AI waited. The cursor blinked.
“Let’s collaborate,” she said. “But I’m keeping the soul work.”
And for the first time in a while, she meant it.
***
Juxtaposition Engine by GPT edited by Donovan Craig
In a sun-drenched glass office above an old tortilla factory in East Austin, five people sit around a whiteboard arguing about which philosopher pairs best with Megan Thee Stallion.
“Lacan is too cold,” says the strategist in the Chrome Hearts hoodie. “You want libido. You want thighs and theory. Give me Baudrillard or give me nothing.”
They call themselves Hermes/Sirius, a boutique content shop that churns out brand messaging with the flavor of highbrow hallucination. Their site is mostly white space and one line in pale serif: We traffic in collision.
Last month they sold a line of T-shirts for a vegan hot sauce company. The copy read: Ecstasy. Vinegar. Matrilineal rage. It sold out in two hours.
I first heard about them from a food startup founder who said, “Their copy makes my customers think they’re having thoughts.”
Inside their studio, someone is always playing ambient techno. A dog named Theory wanders between desks. The senior writer, a former comic named Sasha, has three browser tabs open: Kant, Cardi B, and a subreddit about grief. She leans over her laptop like she’s defusing a bomb.
“Here’s the trick,” she says without looking up. “Juxtaposition makes the brain ache in a good way. Two ideas crash together and the mind tries to find the thread. That moment of tension? That’s attention.”
Sasha was a touring stand-up before GPT took her jokes and fed them to an algorithm. Now she crafts taglines that sound like stoned koans. Her favorite one, for a mindfulness app: You are not your thoughts. You are the thing that feeds them snacks.
The founder, who goes by Dash and refuses to be photographed, believes we’re entering a post-coherence era.
“Clarity is obsolete,” Dash says. “The bots do clarity better than we ever could. But they don’t understand curiosity. They don’t understand longing.”
On the wall behind him is a huge corkboard labeled THE ENGINE. It’s a collage of fragments: quotes from Rilke, Craigslist missed connections, stock phrases like “limited time only” and “discover the power.” They throw things into The Engine and wait for sparks.
“We’re not writing copy anymore,” Dash tells me. “We’re making puzzles. The user solves them and feels clever. And if they feel clever, they feel seen.”
He pauses and looks out the window at the construction cranes in the distance.
“The future of writing is not information,” he says. “It’s invocation.”
Later, I ask Sasha what she thinks they’re really doing.
“We’re tricking people into feeling something in a space where feelings aren’t supposed to live,” she says. Then she shrugs. “Also we’re selling oat milk.”
The cursor blinks. Somewhere, a campaign is being born that will make someone cry in their car for reasons they can’t explain.
***
Emerson’s Ghost by GPT edited by Donovan Craig
I met the essayist in a bar in Echo Park where the mezcal comes with a chaser of chlorophyll and the bartender has a minor in Jungian dream analysis. He was fifty, maybe. Wire-rim glasses, thrifted navy blazer, black notebook stuffed with receipts and secrets. He had just fired his agent and deleted every app on his phone except Voice Memos and Chess.
“The machines are better now,” he said, staring into his drink like it owed him an apology. “They’re polite. They’re lucid. They’re just… not haunted.”
He’d been one of the early optimists, back when AI tools were like tricycles for grown-up brains. “I thought it’d free us. Give us space to say the unsayable.” He paused. “Instead, it flattened everything. Polished it to death.”
He reached into the pocket of his blazer and pulled out a folded index card. On it, in thin Sharpie, were two lines:
“Everyone secretly believes they’re the most disappointing person in the room.” “Love is choosing what you forgive.”
“That’s the job now,” he said, tapping the card. “You want to survive as a writer? You’ve got to name the thing people are afraid to name. The quiet dread under the dopamine.”
I asked if he was worried about being replaced.
He laughed. “You can’t replace a confession.”
He told me about Emerson. “He said the good writer articulates what you already know, only better than you ever could. That’s it. That’s the bar.”
On the way home I kept hearing that phrase: not haunted.
I pulled up a dozen AI-generated think pieces. They were clean. Fluent. Borderline charming. But none of them surprised me. None of them made me feel like someone had cracked my skull open just wide enough to let the truth leak in.
The next day, I talked to a poet who works as a copy editor at a fashion brand. She said the same thing, only blunter.
“AI can finish your sentence. It just can’t ask the question that keeps you up at night.”
This is the line I keep coming back to. The pivot point.
The future belongs to those who can hold a candle to the dark and whisper, Here. Look.
Not to explain. Not to summarize. But to summon.
Emerson’s ghost is watching. And he wants you to be honest.
Fin