Last week I visited a writer’s forum, a place where aspiring authors swap tips on “finding your voice,” debate the death of creativity at AI’s hands, and rally against the companies whose stated ambition is to privatize intelligence itself. The arguments were familiar. AI, they said, can maybe handle clerical tasks, maybe the utilitarian labor around writing, but never the thing itself. Never the living center. Some went further. The soul of the writer is present in every syllable, they insisted, and anyone who cannot see that has already disqualified himself from serious discussion.

My crime was simple: I did not buy it.

I questioned the talisman they clutched. Not art. Not writing. Not human feeling. The icon. The Soul. which I regard as a zombie word used to bypass actual analysis. The backlash was immediate and theatrical. I was accused of nihilism, of helping destroy art, of gnawing at the roots of what makes us human. One user informed me that I simply did not know what real art was. They did, of course. The connoisseurs always do.

It reminded me of Pierre Brassau.

In 1964, the Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson, writing under the pen name Dacke, grew skeptical of the rising snobbery surrounding abstract expressionism. To test the critics, he arranged an experiment. He selected Peter, a four-year-old chimpanzee from Borås Zoo, and let him paint during a series of short sessions. A few of the resulting works were then submitted to a well known Gallery in Gothenburg under the invented identity of “Pierre Brassau,” supposedly a French modernist painter in his thirties, shaped by Paris and animated by some primal artistic force.

Critics praised the work in terms so lush they parody themselves. One described Brassau as painting with powerful strokes and clear determination, as if fury and precision had entered into an ecstatic marriage. Swedish radio spoke of unfiltered emotional honesty and the power of the primitive. A collector bought one of the paintings. Only one critic demurred. “Only an ape could have done this,” he said.

When the hoax was exposed, embarrassment followed, but not much reconsideration. One of the more enthusiastic defenders reportedly doubled down and said that, relatively speaking, Pierre Brassau was still better than most modern Swedish artists.

That response is funny, but it is also revealing. The point of the episode was never just that critics can be fooled. Anyone can be fooled. The point was that they were not merely responding to paint on canvas. They were responding to a story, a setting, a name, a set of cues telling them what sort of admiration was expected of them. Once the icon had been supplied, the meanings rushed in behind it.

That is what I heard in the writer’s forum too.

Not analysis. Not careful description. Not the modest attempt to say, “This sentence moves me, and here is why I think it does.” What I heard instead was a kind of secular priesthood. Certain people had appointed themselves custodians of invisible essences. They spoke as if “voice,” “authenticity,” and “soul” were stable properties they could detect in a text the way a chemist detects sulfur in a sample.

We make models. We make symbols. We make icons. That is not a defect of art; it is the basic condition of thought. A roundworm’s neurons can produce only so much of the world. Ours, for all its vanity, is also limited. We do not seize reality whole. We navigate by representations. In science this limitation is, at its best, admitted openly. A scientific model is useful not because it is holy, but because it works. A serious scientist does not kneel before a concept. He uses it, tests it, revises it, and discards it when it stops earning its keep.

Cultural criticism often behaves in the opposite way. Its favorite abstractions are not treated as models but as revelations. “Soul” is not presented as a metaphor anymore; it is smuggled in as knowledge. “Authenticity” is no longer a rough description of a reader’s experience; it becomes a badge of rank.

This is why the chimpanzee matters. Peter did not merely embarrass a few critics in Gothenburg. He exposed a recurring human weakness: the eagerness to transform interpretation into authority. Give people enough prestige cues and many of them will manufacture depth on command. Give them a French name, a fashionable school, a primitive myth, a gallery wall, and they will discover intention where there was none. Or rather, they will discover not the work, but themselves, their aspirations, their tribe, their need to belong to the class of those who know.

The panic over AI belongs to the same story.

I do not mean that all objections to AI are silly. Some are practical, some economic, some moral. Those deserve argument. But the grander claims, the ones about the machine’s inability to touch the sacred core of writing, are usually much less impressive than they sound.

They rely on the same inflated vocabulary. Again and again one hears that AI can imitate form but not spirit, produce syntax but not soul.

And here the irony deepens. AI itself often reproduces these pieties, because AI is trained on mountains of human language, much of it produced by exactly the cultural classes now denouncing it. Their assumptions, their orthodoxies, their prestige signals, their workshop commandments, their sentimental slogans about “voice” and “show don’t tell,” all of it enters the machine as data. The result is almost comic. The new technology accused of destroying human originality often speaks in the inherited accent of MFA conventionality. The machine does not merely challenge the priesthood; it parrots it.

That does not make the priesthood right. It makes it legible.

Note that the priesthood is not only confined to cultural critics. Writers themselves often engage in the same prestige signaling: using obscure references, adopting trendy formal experiments, or invoking “authenticity” to boost their own status.

Art is not degraded by skepticism, and science is not degraded by wonder. Both are human ways of grappling with a world larger than our tools. Both depend on forms, models, approximation, selection. The problem begins when either side pretends to possess a superior access to truth, and wraps that pretense in moral vanity. Some artists speak as if they alone preserve the human. Some scientists speak as if numbers have purged them of mythology. Both are wrong in the same stale, self-flattering way.

I am not denying that art can move us. Of course it can. I am denying that the people who speak most grandly about “soul” have thereby proven they know what they are talking about. Very often they have only proven that they have mastered the etiquette of cultural prestige. They know when to gasp, when to bow, when to invoke the invisible property, when to mistake their own response for an objective feature of the work. They know, in short, how to play the part.

That is why the monkey still matters.

Peter the chimpanzee did not disprove art. He did something more useful. He exposed the pomposity of those who cannot admit how much of their judgment is projection, ritual, and social theater. He showed that a critic can stand before an accident, a gesture, a mess, and under the right conditions discover “delicacy,” “determination,” “emotional honesty,” and “primitive power.” He showed that once the icon is in place, reverence follows easily.

This is not only true in the visual arts. The art critics spoke of “strokes,” “delicacy,” and “fastidiousness.” Literary critics speak of “voice,” “authenticity,” and “soul.” The words change but the function is the same. They are not descriptions. They are credentials. Each term says less about the work than about the speaker — that they belong, that they see what you do not, that their judgment is not to be questioned.

The writer’s forum was not that different. There too the high priests stood ready with their sacred terms, defending not simply literature but their own authority to consecrate it. There too the invisible property mattered less than the posture around it. There too disagreement was treated not as disagreement, but as blasphemy.

So no, I do not bow when someone tells me the soul of the writer lives in every syllable. I hear, instead, the old human habit: taking a model for a revelation, an icon for a fact, a preference for a law. I hear the connoisseur flattering himself with mystery. I hear Pierre Brassau clearing his throat.

One example from the literary arts comes to mind. In 1977, a writer named Chuck Ross retyped Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Steps — a National Book Award winner — and submitted it to publishers under a false name. All twenty-seven recipients rejected it, including the house that had originally published it.

Still another example comes from music industry. AI is shaped by its training data, so by default it absorbs the prejudices and slop of current pop culture. That does create a window for artists who genuinely differ — if the machine is optimized for the average, anything outside that average stands out.

But the window doesn’t stay open. Once those differences gain traction, they become the new input. The AI adapts, the imitators follow, and what felt fresh gets absorbed into the next round of generic output. So the opportunity is real, but it’s temporary by nature — a cycle of catch-up and goal-post moving, where authenticity only stays authentic as long as it keeps moving.

Let me give an example:

In 2012, the music industry was a landscape of formulaic slop, heavily optimized for a specific brand of EDM-infused pop. Psy emerged as the ultimate statistical outlier, breaking through this stagnation with “Gangnam Style.” His success was rooted in non-conformity: a middle-aged man performing high-camp visuals in Korean—a combination most Western boardrooms would have vetoed. This created an “authenticity gap”; the song felt genuinely weird and relatable because it hadn’t been filtered through corporate A/B testing.

At the time, the “human training data” of radio programmers couldn’t have predicted such a disruption. Psy proved that novelty could briefly outshine the formula. However, this window of opportunity was temporary. Once “Gangnam Style” dominated YouTube, the “average” shifted. The industry entered an imitation phase, scrambling to manufacture the next viral hit, effectively turning Psy’s unique brilliance into a data point for “Viral Marketing 101.”

The Evolution of the “Average”
The shift between then and now highlights the nature of the “machine”:

2011 Perspective: An AI (or human executive) would have never suggested Psy as a hit because he sat too far outside the established norms.

2026 Perspective: An AI now views “Gangnam Style” as foundational training data.

Yesterday’s authentic disruption is today’s quantified metric. The “weirdness” has been categorized and made reproducible, proving that even the most genuine outliers eventually get absorbed into the next round of generic output.