"I Want to Be a Machine" is a hybrid literary memoir, critical manifesto, and AI-assisted investigation of authorship in the age of generative technology. Texas experimental writer Mark Leach traces his development from realism and dream journals through appropriation, procedural composition, a 17-million-word megatext, damaged-broadcast fiction, and collaboration with artificial intelligence.
Leach’s central argument is deliberately provocative: AI did not introduce machinery into literature—it exposed the machinery already operating within it. Genre, influence, memory, institutional language, publishing conventions, repetition, and cultural inheritance have always shaped what writers produce. Rejecting both uncritical enthusiasm for AI and nostalgic claims that human-made writing is inherently superior, Leach argues that literary value depends less on who—or what—generated the language than on how the material is selected, transformed, framed, and placed within a larger artistic system.
Mixing autobiography, cultural criticism, manifesto, fictional scholarship, social-media fragments, machine-generated analysis, and examples from Leach’s earlier books, the work enacts the unstable human-machine authorship it describes. Its recurring movement through Texas mythology, television, corporate messaging, infinite libraries, artificial life, and “handmade slop” presents the writer not as a pure creative origin but as an editor, curator, systems designer, and switching station through which language passes.
"I Want to Be a Machine" is a hybrid literary memoir, critical manifesto, and AI-assisted investigation of authorship in the age of generative technology. Texas experimental writer Mark Leach traces his development from realism and dream journals through appropriation, procedural composition, a 17-million-word megatext, damaged-broadcast fiction, and collaboration with artificial intelligence.
Leach’s central argument is deliberately provocative: AI did not introduce machinery into literature—it exposed the machinery already operating within it. Genre, influence, memory, institutional language, publishing conventions, repetition, and cultural inheritance have always shaped what writers produce. Rejecting both uncritical enthusiasm for AI and nostalgic claims that human-made writing is inherently superior, Leach argues that literary value depends less on who—or what—generated the language than on how the material is selected, transformed, framed, and placed within a larger artistic system.
Mixing autobiography, cultural criticism, manifesto, fictional scholarship, social-media fragments, machine-generated analysis, and examples from Leach’s earlier books, the work enacts the unstable human-machine authorship it describes. Its recurring movement through Texas mythology, television, corporate messaging, infinite libraries, artificial life, and “handmade slop” presents the writer not as a pure creative origin but as an editor, curator, systems designer, and switching station through which language passes.
A great deal of human writing is slop.
That is the sentence writers do not want to hear. Many of them have spent the last several years denouncing artificial intelligence. AI slop, they call it. It’s as if the machine invented slop. But the machine did not invent slop. People did. The machine just inherited it.
The machine was trained on oceans of human language, much of it dead, derivative, sentimental, bloated, imitative, generic and embarrassing. The machine did not poison the well. The well was already full of inspirational fantasy trilogies, reimagined vampire romances, Tolkien residue, teenage wizard wish-fulfillment, memoir fragments arranged like therapy homework, literary fiction in which nothing happens beautifully and speculative premises that sound as if they were assembled from the back covers of other books.
The scandal is not that AI produces mediocre writing. The scandal is that AI is demonstrating that so much human writing is already mediocre and we have built a sentimental religion around pretending otherwise.
I do not want to save literature from machine intelligence. I am waging a war to save literature from the people trying to save literature from machine intelligence.
The human hand is not sacred. A sentence does not become more alive because it was typed slowly by a nervous person in a coffee shop. I do not believe the workshop, the MFA, the literary subreddit, the small press reading table, the hand-stapled chapbook, the “I finally finished my novel” announcement, or the tearful defense of human creativity automatically produces better writing than a machine. Sometimes it does. Often it does not.
The anti-AI crowd likes to compare artificial intelligence to the greatest writers who ever lived. AI has not produced Shakespeare. AI has not produced Joyce. AI has not produced Kafka, Woolf, Pynchon, Borges, Faulkner, Beckett, Burroughs, Stein, Ballard, or Gertrude Stein having a nervous breakdown inside a filing cabinet. Fine. Granted. Congratulations. The machine has not yet produced one of the towering monuments of human literary history.
But most human beings have not produced those monuments either.
Most writers are not Shakespeare. Most writers are not Joyce. Most writers are not Pynchon. Most writers are not even close. Most writers are writing genre exercises, sentimental confession, fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off, therapeutic realism, cozy apocalypse, erotic folklore, self-serious fragments, faux-Lorrie-Moore sentences, soft dystopias, market-ready grief and handmade slop.
Handmade slop. Yes, I said it. This is a critical opening salvo in my new war. With the phrase “handmade slop,” I have turned the propaganda machine insult inside out. I am pushing back against the ongoing “AI slop” talk on Reddit:
Don’t pay for AI slop. Only human-made content.
AI slop… everywhere
look at this AI slop!!!
OK guys so I've seen a lot of ai slop stories so I'm going to write my own story cuz fuck Ai and I'm cooler
HOW TO REMOVE AI SLOP FROM YOUR WRITING
Actually, I wrote that last one. More about that later.
The comparison between machine and human is rigged from the start. AI is judged against the highest achievements of the species. Human writing is judged against the emotional fact that a human tried very hard.
Trying very hard is not an aesthetic achievement. Sincerity is not a literary form. Original intention does not rescue bad execution. Human effort does not sanctify the result. A bad novel remains a bad novel even if it took ten years, broke a marriage, consumed a stack of notebooks and was printed on recycled paper by a local cooperative press with a tasteful bird on the cover.
“I Want to Be a Machine” argues against the prestige of handmade slop.
Not against human beings. Not against feeling. Not against the body, memory, grief, sex, failure, place, voice, or private obsession. Those are among the oldest engines of literature and I have used all of them. My work begins in Texas, in memory, in embarrassment, in family, in work, in journalism, in failed realism, in dreams, in male panic, in apocalyptic longing. I am not outside the human mess. I am made of it.
But I do not believe the human mess should be protected from machinery. I want the machinery. I want the system. I want the cable plugged into my temple.
Kurt Vonnegut would approve. (Not really. I’m just saying that to antagonize the anti-AI crowd.)
I want language copied, processed, rerouted, recombined, mistranslated, enlarged, degraded, shocked, indexed, repeated, automated and returned with the wrong face. I want dead text raised from the slab. I want the prompt as laboratory. I want the archive to speak. I want the corpse of literature filled with electricity.
I want to be a machine.
This does not mean I want to become efficient. Efficiency is one of the great boring lies of the machine age. I am not interested in AI because it helps me write emails faster, generate outlines, summarize meetings, or produce competent prose in the voice of a dead New Yorker contributor. I am interested in AI because it reveals what writing has already become: procedural, mediated, recursive, unstable, overproduced, impure and no longer securely human.
That has been my subject for decades.
Before AI became the public panic, I had already spent years trying to write like a machine. I copied. I pasted. I stole. I substituted. I cut up. I retained errors. I kept bad syntax. I preserved drift. I inflated scale past reason. I treated the novel not as a polished vessel of human meaning but as a machine for generating language under pressure.
In 2011, I made this explicit. I wrote, generated, assembled, or processed a dozen conceptual books – one per month (see the appendix, Early Systems). They now look less like eccentric side projects than early test chambers for the AI age. 31 Days, 31 Novels was one of the clearest. It drew from amateur premise-making, adoption threads, genre scraps, bad spelling, unstable science-fiction desires and the enormous slush pile of human narrative appetite. It was not merely a joke about writing too fast. It was a study of story before talent arrives. Or after talent has fled. Or before craft has had the chance to discipline desire into respectability.
The project exposed something important: poor human writing is not empty. It is full. It is full of wanting. Full of borrowed worlds. Full of teenage grandeur. Full of apocalypse, romance, destiny, hidden powers, ancient wars, chosen children, vampires with feelings, kingdoms under threat, magic schools, erotic curses, time portals, cloned assassins and protagonists who cannot think of anything interesting for the future to have. Bad writing is not a blank failure. It is a compost heap of human narrative hunger.
That hunger interests me. And in that sense, I like handmade slop. But I refuse to worship it just because it is human. The sentimental defense of human writing depends on a fantasy of purity. The human writer, we are told, brings lived experience, soul, intention, suffering, embodiment, originality and moral depth. The machine merely predicts, imitates, remixes, hallucinates and produces plausible language without inner life.
But what if much human writing also predicts, imitates, remixes, hallucinates and produces plausible language without much inner life? What if the human writer has been more machinic than the humanist wants to admit? What if the workshop story, the vampire romance, the fantasy quest, the trauma novel, the suburban memory piece, the lyric essay, the conspiracy thread, the Reddit opening chapter, the “worldbuilding” document, the “soft magic system,” and the “morally gray protagonist” are themselves forms of prompted output?
What if:
genre is a machine?
influence is a machine?
taste is a machine?
What if sincerity is a machine trained on previous performances of sincerity?
The anti-AI position often depends on pretending that human writing emerges from a deep sacred interior untouched by system. I know better. I’ve been working with creative talent for most of my life. I spent 43 years in communications. I worked in journalism, marketing, corporate messaging, public relations, institutional language, crisis framing, repetition, placement, frequency, tone, audience discipline and narrative management. I have seen language stripped of romance and put to work. I have seen how phrases become reality through circulation. I have seen how institutions speak through individuals who still believe they are speaking as themselves.
Language is not innocent. And it is never alone.
By the time a sentence reaches the page, it has already passed through systems: family, school, television, journalism, genre, advertising, politics, religion, software, search engines, publishing categories, corporate forms, social media rhythms and the buried library of everything the writer has absorbed and misremembered. The author is not a pure origin. The author is a node. The author is a switching station. The author is a haunted input device.
Space Writing begins there.
Space Writing is not simply writing about outer space, although my work is full of spaceships, satellites, astronauts, aliens, planets, robots, clocks in the sky, cosmic disaster and failed launch systems. Space Writing is writing that fills space. It treats language as material, residue, signal, clutter, infrastructure, junk, archive and atmosphere. It does not ask first whether the sentence is beautiful. It asks what happens when language accumulates, mutates, circulates, breaks, repeats and refuses to return to the human scale.
The human literary establishment has never known what to do with that kind of writing. It wants the excerpt, the manageable novel, the polished short story, the sincere essay, the author photograph, the paragraph that proves competence, the book that can be praised for being “deeply felt.” It wants evidence that a human consciousness has made tasteful decisions.
I have usually wanted the opposite:
too much text.
unmanageable scale.
appropriation.
badness left visible.
writing that did not clean itself up for the reader.
the machine before the machine arrived.
Marienbad My Love was the first monstrous proof: a 17-million-word megatext I built from dream, movie, theology, hoax, apocalypse, autobiography, plagiarism, failure, self-prosecution and Borgesian infinity. It was not a novel in the usual sense. It was an environment. It was a landfill cathedral. It was a library that had eaten the failed Texas realist novel hidden inside it. It was excessive by design because the world it tried to process was excessive by nature.
The 2011 books turned that excess into procedure.
31 Days, 31 Novels turned human premise-making into industrial output. Writing Through John Cage made chance a compositional engine. Give Me A VERB 51 treated the Apollo transcript as accidental cosmic poetry. Nobody’s Coming Back To Uranus moved traffic-report language into outer space. I’ll Be Your Warhol inserted me into a Wikipedia talk-page apparatus. SCUW Womanifesto used search-and-replace as ideological sabotage. Cutting Up Two Burroughs treated influence as cannibal machinery. These were not exercises in polish. They were systems designed to reveal what language does when the author stops pretending to be its priest.
That is why AI does not frighten me as a writer. AI feels less like an enemy than like a belated collaborator.
The anti-AI imagination wants literature to retreat into the handmade. It imagines a future of authentic little human books lovingly produced by authentic little human authors for authentic little human communities. Think of books stamped from what Nathaniel West called the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife. I can see it clearly: sentimental novels and reimagined tales of hobbits and romantic vampires and teenage wizards sold at local farmers’ markets beside homemade jam, beeswax candles, flower arrangements, knitted bookmarks and sourdough starter. The author sits behind the folding table, surrounded by signs declaring that no AI was used in the making of this book, as if that were a guarantee of anything except process.
No AI used. Fine. No electricity in the corpse either.
That future may comfort some people. It does not comfort me. It sounds like surrender disguised as virtue. It sounds like literature reduced to artisanal nostalgia: small-batch narrative, hand-poured voice, locally sourced imagination, gluten-free plot. It makes the book into a craft object and the writer into a vendor of emotional preserves.
I do not want a jar of literary jam or a basket of handmade reassurance. I do not want a sticker that says this book was written by a real human being, as if that fact alone should make me grateful.
I want writing adequate to the systems we inhabit.
We do not live in a handmade world. We live inside feeds, alerts, prompts, searches, dashboards, templates, summaries, surveillance, recommendation engines, terms of service, archived messages, brand voices, automated condolences, institutional apologies, machine translation, predictive text and artificial intelligence. Our consciousness is already mediated by systems that read, sort, frame and generate language around us. A literature that refuses the machine in the name of human purity is not morally superior. It is formally nostalgic.
That nostalgia is the true slop.
AI writing can be bad. Of course it can. AI can be smooth, bland, managerial, weightless, falsely profound and cosmetically competent. It can produce paragraphs “as nutritious as packet soup," to borrow a phrase from J.G. Ballard. It can sand away strangeness. It can generate the middlebrow tone of permanent explanation. It can lie. It can flatter. It can mimic life without having one.
But human writing can do all of that, too.
The question is not whether AI can produce bad writing. It can. The question is whether AI can be used to expose, intensify, corrupt, extend and transform the systems of language already operating inside us. That question interests me because it is not new to my work. It is the same question asked by the dream journal, the megatext, the cut-up, the transcript, the fake review, the appropriation, the broadcast loop, the robot reader, the author-avatar, the national wound and the impossible archive.
AI is not the end of my method. AI is the thing my method has been waiting for.
The writer who wants to remain purely human will defend the human hand. The writer who wants to discover what writing can become will plug in. I choose the plug. I choose the machine.
“I Want to Be a Machine” is about choosing the contaminated sentence, the generated fragment, the hallucinated critic, the false archive, the recombinant essay, the broken system that produces something more interesting than intention. I choose the writing that embarrasses the old categories. I choose the monster on the table when it opens its eyes.
This does not mean I surrender judgment. It does not mean I accept every output. It does not mean I confuse generation with art. The machine produces material; the writer creates the situation in which that material becomes meaningful, threatening, funny, grotesque, or alive. The author is not abolished. The author becomes electrician, editor, curator, fraud, theorist, grave robber, systems designer and horrified parent.
That is enough authorship for me.
The old humanist model asks the writer to express the self. I am more interested in what happens when the self is processed.
The old literary model asks the writer to produce original work. I am more interested in what happens when originality is treated as a superstition.
The old craft model asks the writer to polish the sentence until it shines. I am more interested in the sentence that arrives damaged and still carries voltage.
The anti-AI model asks the writer to defend humanity. I am not convinced humanity is the part of literature that needs defending.
The machine is not coming for literature from outside. It has been inside literature for a long time: in genre, formula, cliché, influence, market logic, critical discourse, institutional taste, publishing categories, workshop habits and the endless human tendency to repeat what has already worked badly before. AI merely makes the machinery visible. It gives the system a mouth.
Good. Let it speak. Then steal from it. Argue with it. Deform it. Make it confess. Then make it write the thing the handmade imagination was too tasteful, too afraid, too sentimental, or too human to say.
I want to be a machine because the machine is not the opposite of the writer.
The machine is the:
writer without the alibi of purity.
author after originality has been exposed as costume.
workshop with the human excuses removed.
dream journal that does not sleep.
Library of Babel with a mouth.
corpse of literature filled with current.
And if that produces slop, fine. Let us talk about slop honestly. Let us stop pretending the human hand produces art by default. Let us stop comparing every AI paragraph to the greatest books ever written while comparing every human draft to the sweetness of effort. Let us stop protecting mediocre human writing with the language of soul.
The future will not belong to the handmade merely because it is handmade.
The future will belong to the writers who earn it. It will belong to the writers who can use everything in the toolkit: dream, theft, system, archive, badness, scale, repetition, machine output, false criticism, genre debris, memory, media, corporate language, artificial intelligence and the enormous compost heap of human slop.
Especially the slop. Because slop is raw material. And material wants a machine.
Mark Leach’s "I Want to Be a Machine" explores the deep entanglement of literature, machinery, and artificial intelligence. Rejecting nostalgia for human originality, he argues that writing has always been “machinic,” shaped by systems, procedures, and technological influences. The book's title is derived from Andy Warhol’s famous statement: "I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do." Leach (and his AI co-authors) blend memoir, criticism, and AI-generated content to demonstrate how authorship is collaborative and machinic.
I was drawn to this volume because it addresses a tension many of us are grappling with: how to accept and navigate AI's role in creative work while acknowledging its risks. As generative AI permeates creative practice—from workplaces to academic settings—questions about acceptable use become increasingly urgent and personal. Many writers, researchers, and creatives I know are wrestling not just with the technology itself, but with their own complicity in its proliferation.
I am not a Luddite—far from it. I am genuinely intrigued by the capabilities of generative AI and the questions it raises for creative practice. However, the book's central assertion—that all writing is inherently machinic and system-driven—flattens the diversity of literary practice and risks obscuring what makes writing meaningfully human. This argument overlooks forms of writing that are deeply personal, improvisational, or deliberately resistant to formula.
From my vantage point as a bicultural and bilingual writer and reviewer, the erasure is particularly troubling. Writing in a borrowed tongue—as many Filipino writers in English do—demands far more than algorithmic precision. It requires deliberate intention to capture authenticity, cultural particularity, and emotional resonance.
Despite my misgivings, "I Want to Be a Machine" is a compelling and thought-provoking manifesto. Its most compelling moments are grounded in Leach's account of his development as a writer. He traces his evolution from traditional realism and dream journals toward experimental, procedural, and AI-assisted writing. Drawing on failed novels, journalism, and corporate communications work, Leach documents his gradual shift from viewing writing as self-expression to treating it as system. Through recurring alter egos like "Cowboy Mark," self-mockery, family anecdotes, and imagined reviews—including one from his mother—he explores the tension between private wounds and public performance.
And it is in these elements of memoir where irony is most pronounced. In a book celebrating human-machine collaboration, it is genuinely difficult to discern where Leach's thinking ends and the machine's influence begins.