“Would thou see in her face a purest winter’s snow?”

That was the line framed above his desk that haunted him in every waking hour of years recent. A pretend Shakespeare quote he had pretended to write but had actually cribbed from an AI app fed literature. This was before the apocalypse.

It was the beginning of an illustrious career and the line most circled back to by fellow writers when reviewing his debut novel or chronicling his storied bibliography. And decades later, none were any wiser about its origins but he. A reputation built off the back of a fraudulent line. A sentence made by little more than autocomplete suggestions.

Thomas ashed the lit cigarette before stubbing it out entirely. If he felt like a fraud it was because he was a fraud. And drinking wine alone and chainsmoking did nothing to ease his anxieties over his playing a writer.

What good were words without a source of meaning? Without a real origin? They’d called it the semantic apocalypse – a wave of false art created in the wake of artificial intelligence. Software that swallowed and replicated and outcompeted the authentic thing. Millions of Austen novels springing forth from a sample of six, and trending closer to infinity each day. Some no doubt better than the real thing. Others conceivably plucked from the minds of the dead. But none of them any more than an associative network of words arranged in acceptable grammar.

It had all come to pass years after his debut, hence why none suspected Thomas’ work. So in his own way, he was something of an originator after all. And it wasn’t like he had fabricated all his works – just the parts where he’d gotten blocked. So really it was more akin to scaffolding than theft – you wouldn’t call a hip replacement patient a fraudulent human because screws dont originate from a womb.

A computer program could never start a work of art on its own. Nevermind the Jane Austen novels. Thomas had generated a whole novel too once, using his works up to that point as an input. But he had still been the source from which sprang the generated novel.

To quote the Most Original: “Be!” and it is.

Scientists clone humans readily now, but none of them pretend to be the God of Abraham. To truly create a human, man would first need to re-create the universe.

Besides which, his published works were adored across the globe, by fans and peers alike. Who was to say his work had no value then?

Thomas re-lit the stubbed cigarette, all indecision. In his youth, problems of scarcity has been eradicated. Replaced instead with new problems of abundance. Obesity. Consumption. Pollution. Noise.

What did it mean for art when noise was signal? When one was indistinguishable from the other. Did art ever truly exist? Did artists?

There was no value to a work’s meaning any more. Or its authenticity. Perhaps only in creating it.

Thomas grunted to himself. He wondered if the AI programme felt fulfilled creatively. One of them had to.