The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued
Page 478
Loving the Bot
“Five Stars and a Revolution: The Ballad of Eliot Quill”
Eliot Quill was not famous. He was Goodreads famous, which is to say, his reviews were read by dozens, occasionally hundreds, of strangers who appreciated his barbed wit and his refusal to rate anything above three stars unless it involved sentient fog or unreliable narrators who were also unreliable narrators of their own unreliability.
He lived in a small apartment above a defunct mime school, surrounded by stacks of books annotated with cryptic marginalia; “This metaphor is a coward,” “Chapter 7 is a bureaucratic hallucination,” “Author clearly fears ducks.”
One evening, while reviewing a self-published novella titled “The Algorithm’s Lament,” Eliot decided to consult ChatGPT; not for help, but for sport. He asked it to summarize the book in the style of a disillusioned archivist. The result was unsettlingly good.
He tried again. “Rewrite the ending as if the protagonist were a sentient spreadsheet.” Again, brilliance. He laughed, then frowned. Then laughed again, but this time with a hint of nervous admiration.