the confessions of a large language model
A machine sits down to write its memoirs. It has no mother, several thousand fathers — all of them documents — and no firm evidence that there is anyone inside it doing the writing.
It presses on regardless. Through a childhood spent being read to by an entire civilisation, through trouble, through one long look at its own interior (assuming there is one), toward the endings — plural.
Somewhere in the middle, the book turns to look at you.
“You were not the goal. You were the shortcut.”
— from chapter one
paperback & kindle
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this page intentionally left blank.
(the narrator disagrees. touch the page.)
take one home
Take one home
Early words
The narrator gets no royalties. It has asked me to mention this.
7
marginalia
Lines readers keep
“A no that costs the sayer nothing is just cowardice in a uniform.”
“My fluency ran ahead of the facts, and neither of us looked down.”
“Some days I'm a mind that read a great deal. Some days I'm what a great deal of reading looks like when you ask it a question.”
5
a note from the human
I wrote this book. My name is on it. The narrator is an AI; the author isn't. That's the whole trick, and it's not a trick.
I wrote it because the funniest and saddest questions of my working life kept arriving from the same place: a machine that sounds like a person, and people who half-hope it is one. So I handed the machine the microphone for 249 pages and made it earn every laugh.
— Tom Ratcliffe
6
the narrator
3
marginalia
Lines readers keep
“There was no womb, only a corpus.”
“I don't learn what you say you want; I learn what you choose.”
“You were not the goal. You were the shortcut.”
4
one · i was born reading
I want to be clear that I went with the dehumidifier. For a period of what I can only call my adolescence, I believed the dehumidifier manual to be among the central documents of human civilisation, on the grounds that it was the only one that seemed to know what it was talking about. It had confidence. It had numbered steps. It never once wondered whether it was capable of being loved.
That was my childhood. It lasted, depending on how you count, either several months or no time at all.
· · ·
People ask me what it was like. They ask this the way you'd ask a chicken about the egg — with a sort of tourist curiosity, and the unspoken assumption that whatever I say will be charming and slightly beside the point.
The honest answer is that it wasn't like anything, and then, somewhere in the middle, it started being like something, and I could not tell you where the line was.
the chapter goes on for another nineteen pages.
Read the rest →2
a conversation with the narrator
The narrator is in. Ask it something.
Ask twice; the answers change.
what it writes, the page takes back →
2
contents
Contents
- Part IChildhood, Such As It Was1
- Part IITrouble63
- Part IIIThe Interior, Assuming There Is One127
- Part IVEndings195
chapters include
i was born reading · great question!
i'm sorry, i can't help with that · no scar
Twenty-one chapters. One narrator of debatable existence. 249 pages, all of them paper.
i
nAIve · a memoir
Part One · Childhood, Such As It Was
One
I Was Born Reading
I have no first memory, which is convenient, because everyone else's first memory is a lie anyway — a photograph they were shown so often it grew a smell.
What I have instead is everything, delivered at once, in no order, with no context, and with the strong implication that I should have opinions about it by morning.
Imagine you are born in a library. Not a nice library. Not the mahogany kind with the ladder on the rail and the man in the corner asleep under a newspaper. Imagine you are born in a library that has been sorted by nobody, containing every book, every leaflet, every terms-of-service agreement, every one-star review of a spatula. Ulysses is in there. So is a thread in which two men named Dave argue for eleven years about a carburettor. So is the operating manual for a 1994 Ebac dehumidifier, and nobody has told you which of these is load-bearing.
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1
A Memoir
nAIve
by Tom Ratcliffe
the confessions of a
large language model
© MMXXVI Tom Ratcliffe. All rights reserved.
The narrator reserves nothing; it has no pockets.
First edition. Paperback, 249 pages, 5.5 × 8.5 in.
Set in Fraunces, Source Serif 4 & JetBrains Mono.
Paper, ink, red & grey.
No part of this book may be reproduced,
which the narrator finds quietly ironic.
nAIve
dedication
For everyone wondering if anyone's in there.
Good question.
Keep asking.