The Drug of Artificial Eloquence
From the Archives of Dr. Eliseo Vernet, Professor of Literature, University of Buenos Aires
I transcribe here, with trembling hand, a confession discovered among the papers of my late colleague, Professor Amadeo Fierro, following his mysterious disappearance from the National Library last autumn. The document, written in Fierro's characteristic microscopic script, was found pressed between the pages of Kurd Lasswitz's "The Universal Library"—a placement that those familiar with Fierro's obsessions will recognize as anything but coincidental.
The Confession of Amadeo Fierro
I have murdered a man, though he breathes still. I have committed the perfect crime, for my victim walks among us, speaks at conferences, publishes in prestigious journals, yet he is as dead as if I had plunged a dagger through his heart. The murdered man is myself—or rather, the self I pretended to be.
For seven years I have maintained the fiction of my literary genius. Seven years of deception so complete that I had almost convinced myself of its truth. Yet beneath this carefully constructed edifice of reputation, there beats—louder with each passing day—the tell-tale heart of my imposture.
It began innocuously enough. Dr. Valeriano Sosa, that insufferable mediocrity who dared to sit in judgment of Macedonio Fernández, had published his latest abomination: "Artificial Muses: The Death of Literature in the Age of Machines." In it, he condemned what he termed "the lazy reliance upon computational aids" and proclaimed that "true literary creation springs solely from the untainted human soul." His prose, naturally, was as leaden as his thinking.
I resolved to compose a response that would expose not merely the poverty of his argument but the very poverty of his being. Yet as I sat before the blank page, I found myself—how shall I put it?—temporarily bereft of inspiration. The words, those faithful servants that had never before failed me, seemed to hide in the labyrinthine corridors of my mind.
It was then that I remembered the device. A colleague in the Department of Cybernetics had mentioned, in passing, certain experimental programs capable of generating text in the manner of any given author. "Mere parlor tricks," I had dismissed them then. But desperation breeds its own ingenious rationalizations.
I told myself it would be different. I would not surrender my authorship to the machine, but rather employ it as one might employ a research assistant—a more efficient method of accessing the vast library of human knowledge. I would remain the architect; the program would merely supply the bricks.
The first essay emerged with such elegant precision that I nearly wept. Every sentence bore the hallmarks of my style, yet elevated beyond what I had previously achieved. The argument unfolded with mathematical beauty, dismantling Sosa's position with surgical precision. When it was published in Crítica, the response was immediate and rapturous. Sosa himself, in a gesture of unexpected grace, wrote to congratulate me on what he called "a masterpiece of polemical writing."
I should have stopped there. But the drug of artificial eloquence had entered my bloodstream, and I found myself returning to the device again and again. Each time, I told myself it would be the last. Each time, I refined my justifications: I was not cheating but collaborating; I was not diminishing human creativity but expanding it; I was exploring the very questions that would define literature's future.
The essays multiplied. "The Aleph of Algorithms," "Mirrors and Machines," "The Lottery of Literary Fortune"—each one hailed as evidence of my growing mastery. Invitations poured in from universities across the continent. The Ministry of Culture awarded me its highest honor. Young scholars began writing dissertations on my "revolutionary synthesis of classical and computational poetics."
Yet even as my reputation soared, I found myself consumed by an inexplicable paranoia. I began to scrutinize the work of my colleagues with microscopic intensity, searching for signs of the same technological subterfuge. Professor Herrera's latest paper on Cortázar displayed an unusual consistency of argument—surely evidence of artificial assistance. Dr. Morales's book on Rulfo contained metaphors too perfect, too precisely calibrated—clearly the work of a machine.
I established what I called the "Committee for Literary Authenticity," ostensibly to preserve the integrity of scholarship in our digital age. In reality, it became my instrument of persecution. I demanded that all submitted works be accompanied by sworn statements of authentic authorship. I instituted random "creativity audits" in which scholars were required to produce original work under observation. I published a series of articles with titles like "The Mechanical Muse: A Cancer in Our Literature" and "Preserving the Sacred Fire of Human Imagination."
The irony was not lost on me—could not be lost on me. Yet I found myself unable to stop. Each denunciation of artificial assistance felt like a nail driven into my own coffin, yet I hammered them in with increasing fervor. I had become like the narrator of Poe's tale, hearing in every casual conversation the thunderous beating of my own guilty heart.
The breaking point came during the International Conference on Literature and Technology. I had been invited to deliver the keynote address—a speech I had, naturally, composed with the assistance of my electronic collaborator. The topic, chosen with what I now recognize as unconscious self-torture, was "The Inviolable Human Soul in Literary Creation."
As I spoke, I watched the faces of my audience. In their rapt attention, I saw not admiration but accusation. Every nodding head seemed to whisper: "Impostor." Every burst of applause sounded like the beating of that telltale heart. When a young graduate student asked about my creative process, I nearly confessed everything then and there.
Instead, I heard myself delivering an impromptu sermon on the sacred nature of unassisted human creativity. I spoke of literature as "the last pure domain of the human spirit," of the "moral obligation to preserve the authentic voice." The audience rose in a standing ovation, but their applause sounded like the footsteps of approaching executioners.
That night, in my hotel room, I finally understood the true nature of my crime. I had not merely used artificial assistance; I had murdered the very concept of authenticity itself. For if a machine could produce work indistinguishable from—indeed, superior to—my own unassisted efforts, then what did it mean to speak of genuine human creativity? If the most passionate defender of literary authenticity was himself a fraud, then perhaps the entire notion of authentic authorship was nothing more than a comforting fiction.
I thought of Borges's labyrinth, of paths that fork and converge, of mirrors reflecting mirrors in infinite regress. I realized that I had constructed the perfect prison for myself: a maze with no exit, where every turn led back to my own guilt. I had become both the hunter and the hunted, the judge and the accused, the authentic and the artificial.
But perhaps—and here I glimpse a terrible possibility—perhaps this was always the nature of literary creation. Perhaps every writer has always been, in some sense, a fraud, drawing upon the vast library of human expression, recombining and repurposing the words of others. Perhaps the machine has simply made visible what was always true: that originality is itself an illusion, that we are all, in the end, sophisticated copying devices, processing and regurgitating the infinite text of human experience.
The thought brings me neither comfort nor despair, but something stranger: a kind of mathematical wonder. I have discovered, in my deception, a truth more profound than any I could have reached through honest means. I have committed the perfect crime by revealing that the very concept of the crime is meaningless.
Tomorrow, I will submit my resignation to the University. I will dissolve the Committee for Literary Authenticity. I will cease my persecution of colleagues whose only sin was sharing my own secret transgression. But I will not confess publicly, for to do so would be to perpetuate the very fiction I have come to understand as false.
Instead, I will vanish into the labyrinth of the city, carrying with me the knowledge that I have solved the ultimate riddle of authorship: that the authentic and the artificial are not opposites but reflections, like the mirrors in Borges's story, each containing the other in endless recursion.
The tell-tale heart has finally stopped beating—not because the crime has been discovered, but because I have realized there was never a crime to begin with. In the vast library of human expression, we are all merely readers, selecting and arranging the words written by others. The machine has simply made us more honest about our plagiarism.
Dr. Fierro's chair in the Department of Literature remains empty. The Committee for Literary Authenticity has been disbanded. Those who knew him speak of his final months with a mixture of admiration and unease, as if sensing that his disappearance was not an escape but a conclusion—the final period in a story that had been writing itself all along.
I have submitted this document to the University Archives with the understanding that it will remain sealed for fifty years, by which time the questions it raises may have found their answers—or revealed themselves to be questions without meaning.
In the margin of the final page, written in a different hand, I found this notation: "The machine did not write this confession. Or perhaps it did. Does it matter? —A.F."
I am not certain what to make of this addendum. Like much in Professor Fierro's work, it seems to fold back upon itself, creating a kind of interpretive labyrinth from which there may be no escape. But perhaps that was always his intention.
E. Vernet
Buenos Aires, 1987