Have you ever stared in a mirror for a few hours? Try it: Watch as your nose somehow shifts placement on your face, how your eyebrows lose symmetry, how quickly you fail to recognize yourself. Facial dysmorphia would come to anyone tasked with considering their own reflection for too long.

It’s a similar experience when you promote a book. For the past few weeks, I’ve been touring Canada and the U.S. promoting my latest book, Sucker Punch. The book is both a comedy and a catalog of the worst time of my life, and so the promotion of it has felt similarly bifurcated. It’s a dissociating experience to promote your own memoir, to codify your story into soundbites and snippets, to boil yourself down into something sellable and scalable. I sat for interviews and live events and tried to answer, again and again, the awful question that always comes with this kind of work: Who am I, and what do I have to offer you here?

But in the weeks after my book came out, I was more distracted by another title than the self-serving needs of my own. Sucker Punch wasn’t the only publication that came up when you looked up my name on Amazon. There was also SCAACHI KOUL: From Shattered Dreams to Unstoppable Voice—A Story Of Love, Loss, and Resilience, by Davis Bieber, available for $7.99 (a steal!). The e-book was a slapdash, poorly written biography about me, using a decade-old photo of me, blown up and pixelated and stolen from the Toronto Star.

Davis Bieber, it seems, isn’t a real writer; looking his name up yields little more than biographies for other F- and G-list celebrities. The best-known figure Bieber has written about is Mark Carney, the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, who is currently running for office, and who is otherwise the most boring man alive. Finally: Me and Mark Carney, together at last, subjects of what appears to be an A.I. bot churning out slop as a way to farm a few bucks from confused Amazon consumers.

My own biography seemed to be pulled mostly from Wikipedia, something I could glean only because both the book and my Wikipedia page featured lengthy—and otherwise obscure—details about my time in the Girl Guides of Canada, and an interview I did with Joe Francis three years ago. (Miraculously, neither my Wikipedia nor my A.I. memoir features any details about my marriage or divorce, which is the topic of the actual book I’ve been promoting.) Reading the A.I.-written book was a little like looking at a photo and thinking you see yourself in the background, when in fact it is simply a traffic light: a slash of recognition, before the embarrassment of realizing I had ascribed sentience to a mere thing. It was familiar but sour. Most disconcerting of all was what Shattered Dreams to Unstoppable Voice (genuinely brutal title) reminded me: Ultimately, any work I make can be flattened into food-data for a server a million miles away.

Concerns over artificial intelligence have been steadily ballooning in recent years: It’s creeping into our workplaces, it’s possibly putting teenagers at real risk, and it’s overloading our water and electricity demands. Decades ago, the industrial world wondered whether we could get robots to think for us. We have that answer now: Yes, but they will tell us to eat rocks if we don’t pay close enough attention.

But of the technology’s many downsides, one that is immediately threatening to me in particular is the impact it has on artists in almost every form. Last month, the Atlantic reported on the millions and millions of books that Meta pirated in order to train its A.I., essentially stealing the works of writers in order to teach a robot how to, I guess, write a novel that breaks your heart. A few weeks ago, a Studio Ghibli–style A.I. generator overtook social media, and everyone from brands you previously respected to the Israeli military to all the losers you went to high school with were using the generator. The sting felt especially fresh because Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki fucking hated this shit. “I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself,” he once said about machine-generated art. “We humans are losing faith in ourselves.” And what’s happening on Instagram this week? Well, it seems that everyone is using an A.I. generator to turn themselves into action figures. A generation of people raised on Lizzie McGuire: Outfit Design and BuzzFeed personality quizzes are now falling for predictive, charmless imagery created by an algorithm. Say what you will about “Pick Your Favorite Mac and Cheese and We’ll Tell You Which Chronic Illness You Are”—they may not have been considered high art, but those little quizzes were, at least, written by a very real person.

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The slime that A.I. produces is already offensive, but reading something trained off your life feels especially dégueulasse, like a Truman Show reboot; all the surfaces look the same but the depth is off. The A.I. book based on my life can’t compete with my actual work in both quality and detail—for now. But so long as there are bots scraping books in order to better mimic actual writers, there’s always the risk that my work will become redundant in comparison to a computer’s.

A.I. is flawed for a myriad of reasons, but chief among its most offensive transgressions is that it removes art from the artist, and the audience from the creator. The point of art isn’t just if it’s good or bad—in fact, those are the two least interesting things art can be. The point of art is to exist in a context. Kamala Harris was right all along: We do exist in the context of everything that came before us.

Earlier this year, I read One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad, about Palestine, the failure of neoliberalism, and the claustrophobic realization that the West has not fulfilled its endless promises. “There is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience,” he writes. “Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.”

It’s a near-perfect book, but what’s remarkable about it isn’t just that it exists—as if anyone could have written it, robot or man—but specifically that someone like El Akkad wrote it, now, in this time when it’s risky to write with such clarity about Palestinians and fascism. He’s Muslim, born in Egypt, raised in Qatar and Canada, now living on the West Coast. Unavoidably, his work is often filtered through white executives and white audiences, never mind Canadian arts grants once funded by, for example, a bank with a stake in an Israeli arms maker. His art, focused on the essential question of human freedom, is a risk to him. The point of One Day isn’t just that the work is stirring and that the prose is excellent. The point is that he stuck his neck out, which makes it easier for me to stick mine out, too. The context is what makes the art impressive beyond just a technical achievement—the medium is the message, and so the messenger is part of the story, too. A book without an author is just a pamphlet. There’s no real value in a drawing made by hands I can’t see or get to know. It’s not enough for something to merely exist.

This failure of A.I. in art extends to criticism, too. For whatever critics may say about my work, now or in the future, at least I made it. At least it was the product of risk and fear and light hopefulness at a time where that’s in short supply. That’s the thing about art, good or bad: It’s usually made under peril. Historically, it’s been political persecution or societal exile. On a smaller scale, maybe it’s personal threat or emotional jeopardy. Even when you were 9, and you drew a Valentine’s Day card for a girl you liked, you were engaging in the centuries-old tradition of risking your dignity in the pursuit of art.

But a robot can’t risk anything real. It can’t get embarrassed or feel uncomfortable or too vulnerable, all things I’ve felt in the past month as I’ve promoted my memoir. It can’t feel regret or ebullience or justification. It can’t fret about unlawful deportation, all because of a thought expressed. It can only mimic what we like about art: that it feels like a gamble, no matter what.

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My A.I. biography has since been pulled from sale, as have several other titles by our friend Davis Bieber. Here, maybe, is the part where you as a reader might grow irritated by this story. The book doesn’t even exist anymore! I thought she was going to solve the mystery of this book, and instead I got a lecture about A.I. use! Eggs are $39, who cares about what the robots are doing! Maybe you’ll open a new tab to send me an irritated email, as so many Slate readers already have. (Go for it. I am nourished by your hatred.)

But remember: You are afforded the privilege of telling me you hated something I wrote because I wrote it. There’s an outlet for your displeasure because I’m a real person using my real brain to write real thoughts, ones that are sometimes flawed and cloudy, ones you might disagree with enough to tell me about it. You and I, even in our roles as tempestuous columnist and displeased reader, are locked in a dance that’s existed for as long as people have made something with their hands, eyes, and minds. You can hold me accountable, if you want. What fun is it to tell a machine that you don’t like what it made? We deserve this especially human experience, of risking everything to make something valuable, and watching it fall flat on Goodreads.com.

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