On AI, Authorship, and Algorithmic Literature

So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd.
—Lord Byron, “Song of the Luddites” (1816)

If a real-life John Henry were to compete against an AI in a similar contest, it is unlikely that he would be able to win… It is worth noting that the story of John Henry is a legend, and there is no historical evidence that he existed.
—Chat GPT-3 (2023)

The particulars don’t matter much when it comes to archetypes. The location of the attic where Faustus conjured Mephistopheles, the logistics of the Tower of Babel, the latitude of Atlantis and the longitude of Eden—none of it matters. What’s of concern is the cost of a soul, the incommunicability of humanity, the direction of paradise. And so, when it comes to John Henry, the American Icarus who bet his sweat and labor against a machine, it matters not whether the folk hero’s famed competition against a steam-powered rock-drilling device happened by the mossy shores of West Virginia’s Greenbriar River, or in the green hills of the Shenandoah, or atop the rich soil of Alabama’s Coosa Mountain. It doesn’t even matter that the “real” Henry, to the best of scholarship’s archival shuffling, seems to have died not from exhaustion after besting the machine intended to take his and his fellow workers’ jobs, but from silicosis in a sanitarium.

There are facts, and then there is the truth, the truth sung in ballads by Mississippi John Hurt and Mississippi Fred McDowell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Dave von Ronk, Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash—that “A man is nothing but a man, /But before I let your steam drill beat me down, /I’d die with a hammer in my hand.” A man who, whatever the accuracy of the accounts, we can easily imagine: the noon sun over an Appalachian valley, sweat-stung eyes and burning muscles, the clank of metal on metal, the grunts of exertion, the high-pitched shrieks of the late summer cicadas. John Henry is an iconic, totemistic, mythic figure: the Black railroad worker famed for his strength and labor, who could drive stakes with a nine-pound hammer into the earth, and while in combat with the steam-powered drifter drill was able to just keep ahead—just—while punctuating the ground on the left hand of the track with the automaton lagging behind on the right, before Henry’s heart gave way, the pyrrhic victory of man against machine.

“There lies my steel driving man, Lord, Lord, /There lies my steel driving man.”

We feared robots before we ever built them, yet we built them anyway. Before semiconductors and. In , writes how the mix of exuberance and anxiety aroused by a blurring of the lines between nature and machines might seem a uniquely modern response to the juggernaut of scientific progress… But the hope—and trepidation—surrounding the idea of artificial life surfaced thousands of years ago,” repeated in variation from the stories of Prometheus’ automatons to the golem of . That there is something uncanny about mechanical beings, stemming in part from our own anxiety as lesser creations in God’s cosmic order. Automata, androids, artificial intelligence—all of it is threatening because it can mirror people, but without the interiority, the mind, the consciousness, the soul.