The God We Made.

I just finished reading Anna Goldsworthy’s Quarterly Essay on artificial intelligence. What an amazing piece of work. It was nothing like what I expected, and nothing like what I would’ve written if they’d commissioned me to do it. That’s not just self-regard, either. I’m in the middle of writing December’s quarterly essay on the rise of the New Right in Australia.

This evening I’ll be at Avid Reader in West End to launch Goldsworthy’s volume. That’s why I was reading it: to pick the eyes out of the thing and frame our discussion.

The first thing that struck me was the literary quality of the writing. It’s funny — like everybody in this business now, I read everything with my filters up, hunting for AI tells. And I’m not an anti-AI jihadist. But I can’t help noticing the bot’s mechanical fingerprints on posts, notes, and essays everywhere now. There was none of that in this essay. It read like a 100% organic product, despite Goldsworthy obviously having had to engage with a chatbot — usually Claude or ChatGPT — at various points, given the subject matter.

The writing was good enough to give me a crisis of confidence about my own upcoming essay. And I’ve already written two of the motherfuckers, so according to the people signing the cheques, I’ve got some idea what I’m doing. But twenty pages in, I felt like a complete pretender. Thankfully, that passed once I settled into the argument itself.

I still have to sit down this arvo and write up notes for tonight, so I don’t have anything specific to say about the content yet. But if the topic interests you even slightly and you get the chance to read this, do yourself a favour: buy a copy, or borrow one from the library. It’s well worth a couple of hours of your time.