This project stemmed from a curious conversation with ChatGPT, in which it misunderstood my requests, glitched, then apologized profusely. What followed was a meditation on how such tools work–culling data from vast stores of human creative outputs, cutting and pasting and remixing–not all that different from human creators drawing on their own stores of inspiration and experience.

The final form of the book evokes the “black box” I’ve heard AI described as–inscrutable even to its makers. AI can’t explain the decisions it makes, because we did not build it that way. Through our interactions with it, we can only learn about ourselves.