Just finished pic related, and it might be his best yet. Where his previous works were wholly impenetrable, Xenobacillus Glossophagii is actually readable insofar as it utilises the theoretical language of philosophy, mathematics, science, psychoanalysis, etc.. as a vehicle for the speculative pathogen to deliver its viral payload.What we assumed to be ordinary human language was already infected as an asymptomatic carrier. As the infection progresses beyond its incubation stage, we begin to realise it was there all along. The apparent semantic clarity of the text gives way to the horrors of recursive mutation and linguistic delirium, a non-human agency splicing itself together from the fragments of our speech according to the inscrutable logic of an alien syntax.The book is very clearly indebted to LLMs (most likely sonnet 3), both in its construction and in its concept. It doesn’t just talk about the symbiotic relationship between human and non-human agency in the process of meaning-making; it is a practical demonstration of the language that emerges out of this intersection. So if you think AI-generated art is inherently bad or meaningless, this certainly isn’t going to convince you otherwise.That said, I think it’s a brilliant work of art, and one of the rare instances in which the use of AI is not just thematically appropriate, but a compositional necessity. Writing “as if” one is infected by non-human intelligence would have simply been a disingenuous attempt at a posthuman literary practise.
