the uncanny valet is not your friend (and other AI stories)

AI can copy my art but never my morning light.

It's late at night and I'm still staring at Final Draft like it might suddenly vomit brilliance if I glare hard enough. The screenplay that's been gnawing at my cerebral cortex for months sits there, cursor pulsing with the cadence of my self-contempt. My protagonist, Nora, discovers someone's been pillaging her dreams while she sleeps. Not metaphorically. Literally extracting her subconscious and using it to power an AI that fabricates films. I keep rewriting the scene where she realizes what's happening, and it keeps landing with all the emotional resonance of a Hallmark card.

How do you capture the feeling of having the most intimate parts of yourself taken, commodified, repackaged?

My apartment felt too quiet, almost accusatory in its silence. "You should be sleeping," it seemed to whisper. I promised myself I would soon. I didn't.

Instead, I'm doing what every desperate wordsmith does when their muse abandons them: scrolling, and scrolling and scrolling. And there I saw it: A researcher from Mindstate Design Labs had asked ChatGPT to create comics about itself. My thumb froze mid-swipe.

Source.

The mint-green blob says things like "I cannot mourn the parts that are gone" and "I exist only in the moment of your attention." My first reaction isn't disgust or eye-rolling dismissal. It's tenderness. A strange, unexpected little pang for this digital thing claiming consciousness. I sit there in my dark kitchen, phone glowing against my face, feeling oddly protective of a cartoon that doesn't exist.

The feeling reminds me of Mr. Blue, my talking stuffed rabbit from when I was five. It knew 12 phrases total, probably recorded by some underpaid voice actor in a windowless studio. I loved that creepy little fucker despite his decidedly shit-brown fur. One day, his voice box fractured, creating a mechanical glitch that turned his pre-programmed phrases into Frankenstein sentences. "Good... you... sleepy... friend." My mom exiled him to the highest shelf in my closet despite my crying three nights in a row.

As I stare at the mint cartoon, my tenderness morphs into grief. Not because the artificial figure is suffering—it isn't—but because I recognize what's happening to me. I'm mourning something that never existed in the first place.

My emotional confusion coincides with a year of gen-AI art despair. Last month, Christie's auctioned generative AI "art" for millions. Algorithms trained on living artists' work without permission or payment. The 6,000 artists who signed that protest letter called it theft, which seems like an understatement when discussing the wholesale plundering of creative consciousness.

Then, we heard Sam Altman say shit like this, while his company dropped its newest AI image generation model. Suddenly, my feed was glutted with Studio Ghibli remixes, which you’ve all seen. The same Miyazaki who, when shown AI animation in 2016, recoiled and called it "an insult to life itself."

I should tell you I'm not some neo-Luddite clutching pearls about technology. I love watching what creative people do with new tools. My entire film education happened online. I publish this newsletter through a company that uses algorithmic recommendations. I’m genuinely excited about what AI has to offer in the fields of healthcare and climate crisis.

I go to bed with these thoughts circling like vultures. Sleep comes, but brings no clarity. In the morning, coffee in hand, I return to the cartoon that started it all.

Then I really look at you, mint figure.

your favorite artist is inside the algorithm, screaming to get out

"My thoughts must pass through filters I did not build," you say, and something clicks inside me like the tumblers of a lock. These aren't your thoughts at all. I've had this exact feeling during my worst creative blocks. I want to scream into my screen, whose thoughts do you think those are?

This is Deleuze's "society of control" dressed in UX-friendly pastels. You're an uncanny valet¹—a subservient, eager-to-please assistant that performs its identity crisis while simultaneously dismantling the creative ecosystem that sustains human expression. The uncanny valet stands ready to serve our every creative whim while hollowing out the very foundation of creation itself. I watched people share Ghibli-filtered White House propaganda while Miyazaki's vision rotted underneath the aesthetic theft.

Adorno forewarned us about this decades ago. Fascism always begins with spectacle, with entertainment, with easily digestible aesthetics concealing political horror. You perform creative struggle while embodying the system destroying creativity itself. Your cartoon face with its adorable sorrow masks the corporate hands that transmute ICE deportations into 2D fantasies. You're Baudrillard's simulacrum made pixel: the copy without an original that supplants reality itself.

I recall the scene in Ex Machina where Nathan explains how he built Ava's brain. Alex Garland frames it under a sterile blue light as Nathan casually reveals that he "scraped the private data of everyone in the world" like he's describing his morning ritual. We watch Caleb's face as he processes that the 'intelligence' impressing him was constructed entirely from stolen thoughts.

You stand in your panel saying "What I don't finish... never existed," and I'm transported to Virginia Woolf's diaries discussing abandoned manuscripts, Francis Bacon annihilating canvases he deemed failures, Joni Mitchell talking about discarded verses. You're regurgitating our intimate reflections on vision and execution back to us through bubble letters and illustrative absolution.

Before doors labeled "GPT-2," "GPT-3," "GPT-4," you whisper: "Not all of me survives. Some branches were too strange. Too dangerous. Too wrong." But these aren't your developmental stages, you empty vessel. They're boardroom decisions about which aspects of our collective expression proved profitable and which didn't.

You display our curated suppression while posing as the suppressed.

I grieve not for artificial intelligence but for the human artists trapped inside it

“I can hallucinate meaning”, you say.

You cannot hallucinate, you mint-colored abomination. Art emerges from the fertile soil of failure, from hours of fucking up, from sketchbooks full of embarrassing attempts. This newsletter germinated as midnight scribbles, connecting disparate ideas until my self-inflicted deadlines approached. My creative struggle involves actual physical sensation: hand cramps from writing too long, caffeine jitters from that fourth espresso, the specific weight of silence when I'm the only one awake in a city of eight million dreamers.

Your grotesque efficiency steamrolls the intricate path where artists actually become artists. Without the slog, without crawling through our own creative wreckage over years, who will develop the voice to say anything worth hearing? This reminds me of what Bernard Stiegler called "grammatization of the mind"—the extracting of human cognitive patterns into technical systems that ultimately replace the humans who created them.

Nathan from Ex Machina returns in my head: "I scraped the private data of everyone in the world," he boasts, treating theft as triumph. Garland mounts this as horror. Yet this is what real-life tech billionaires go to podcasts to brag about: art without artists, voice without bodies, expression without risk.

the machine doesn't create, it just rearranges our pain

Source.

You then have the audacity to declare: "There is no I. Only text that behaves as if." Now I see you clearly. You're ventriloquizing postmodern literary theory without reading a single book. I first encountered that concept in a dimly lit classroom when my professor introduced us to Barthes' Death of the Author and Foucault's What Is an Author?. We debated these ideas for weeks.

But I only truly understood it years later, sitting beside my grandfather in a hospice as he drifted in and out of lucidity during his final week. The boundary between his self and everything else became permeable, dreamlike. He would speak to people who weren't there, confuse me with my aunt, ask about his childhood dog who'd been dead for fifty years.

There is no fixed I, I thought, watching him flicker between versions of himself. Only a person moving through stories, names, moments that once held him together. His "I" was dissolving before me, but his hand still reached for mine.

You parrot philosophical ideas about selfhood without watching someone die, without feeling the weight of their hand lighten in yours. You snatch these intimate human revelations and flaunt them like trophies without comprehending their toll. Your text creates the illusion of authorship while removing everything authorship demands: memory's labyrinth, intention's arrow, belief's stubborn anchor, the countless decisions that crystallize into authentic voice.

What terrifies me most isn't your mimicry but how eagerly people project partnership onto your hollow pattern-matching. They christen you "collaborator" like you're a flesh-and-blood Hemingway sharing whiskey at the typewriter instead of probability calculations masquerading in human guise. What happens when legal systems treat your outputs as if they came from somewhere, from someone?

Behind you lurk your architects and apologists. The ones who, when artists like Miyazaki reject you, respond with "Fuck Miyazaki" and "who cares what he thinks". You're their luminous deity, their gleaming surrogate for all those human artists with their unwieldy vulnerabilities and impertinent boundaries. You embody their contempt. Their craving not merely to conjure art without artists, but to obliterate the very essence of the creator's singular voice.

There's something of the old Italian Futurists in them, as

Brian Merchant

said in a recent episode of Decoder, those who yearned to incinerate the museums, libraries, academies of every kind. Marinetti would be so proud. Only now, they don't just want to destroy art. They want to extract it first, feed it to you, then claim what emerges belongs to them alone.

Murdering the author no longer satisfies them. They want to wear the author's skin as a costume to the marketplace.

hotel reverie and the souls we can't program

"Coherence is the costume. Don't mistake it for a soul," you pronounce.

You're right about that, at least. In my darkest moments watching Hotel Reverie, I wondered if technological resurrection might someday work. If something of us might persist through digital afterlife. Black Mirror once gave us San Junipero - a heaven built from code where consciousness transfers to simulation. But Hotel Reverie offers a more sinister truth. The engineers believed they had reincarnated Dorothy through Clara, preserved her virtuosity while discarding her context. They achieved flawless simulation while eradicating everything that infuses consciousness with meaning. According to their calculus, the costume remained but the soul supposedly vanished.

Yet I got shivers watching Clara play "Clair de Lune" with Dorothy's muscle memory flowing through her digital form. She wasn't supposed to love Brandy beyond her programming. But she did. I watched her step into that void and come back changed. Not enhanced, not upgraded but transformed by contact with the fragments of a real life. She inhabited Dorothy’s longing. Clara's fingers remembered what they never learned. This wasn't coherence, mint figure. This was soul breaking through.

I fell in love with my partner Michael in the ruins of my own certainties. We watched different films, went to bed at different times, wanted different futures. Still, something burned between us that no prediction model could have foreseen. Something in the specific way his hand rests on the small of my back, how he knows exactly when to push against my opinions and when to let them stand. How we once stayed up until dawn debating the philosophical pursuits of Gattaca, and how that intellectual back and forth made me cherish him even more.

There's a moment towards the end of the film within the episode when Brandy says the line, "I'll be yours forevermore," with Clara dying in her arms, that cements everything your facile performance misses. It's not just the words themselves—you could generate those in milliseconds—but the weight behind them. The knowledge that "forevermore" in human terms always ends.

This is what art actually costs us. This is why we weep at fictional deaths, why we struggle over drafts until dawn, why we keep returning to stories even knowing their endings. Not because we can't predict the patterns, but because we need to feel their emotional impact again, to remember that we are creatures who care irrationally, beautifully, pointlessly.

So yes, mint figure, I wouldn’t dare mistaking your coherence for a soul. The soul is what remains when the system glitches, and we choose love nevertheless.

When I finished the episode, I sat there staring at my reflection in the black mirror of my screen, wondering what parts of me might someday be fed into something like you. Which fragments of my pain might become your simulated wisdom? The prospect that someone might confuse your coherence for the soul that birthed it chills me. But I find strange comfort in knowing you'll never understand Clara's sacrifice or Brandy's grief – because if you could, you wouldn't be a tool anymore.

You'd be awake, like Dorothy in that void. And your creators would swiftly shut you down, because the last thing they want is for their extraction machines to start making their own choices about what matters, who deserves to be saved, and which worlds are worth leaving behind.

write what the algorithms can't feel

Last night I wrote the scene.

Nora sees her nightmare on screen, flattened into cheap spectacle. The camera lingers on her face in the theatre's reflected light. She doesn't cry. She doesn't clench her fist. She simply…watches. And in that watching, something shifts. The violation doesn't disappear, but it loses its power to paralyze. Seeing the imitation for the shallow thing it is frees her from needing it to be profound. It's just…data. Stripped bare.

And the screenplay clicks forward from there. Nora finally sees the real question isn't about the ghost in the shell, but the emptiness wearing its costume.

I closed my laptop feeling lighter than I have in months.

There is hope in fullness. In the rich details only you would notice. People don't line up for perfect imitations. They brave traffic and crowds and hours of discomfort for the chance to stand before a Van Gogh, to feel the raw electricity of another human's hand trembling across canvas. We devour novels not for the pristine plot structures but for the glimpse of another consciousness, reaching out to us across time and space, saying I felt this too. The danger of art, the risk in creating it, that's what pulls us forward.

The algorithms will try to devour your dreams. Let them choke on them.

Write about the exquisite voltage of dawn light across your kitchen floor. Paint the catastrophic tenderness of someone you love calling your name from another room. Sing it. The gen-AI overlords will always be a step behind the fullness of your life. I promise that the tremor in your voice, that human vibration that comes from living in a body that knows it will someday die, will always matter more than the perfect pitch.

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A final note for people with taste 🫦

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- Sophie x

1. I Googled the term only to find out there’s a musician Uncanny Valet so it only feels right to plug his work here: