New Delhi: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and DeepSeek were all in the same room—arguing about non-humans and the death of the author. It was a fiery debate, and the models kept speaking for humans by overusing “we”. And a lot of personal attacks were made.
How come all top LLM models sat down to have this conversation at all? It was an author’s setup. Arsen Revazov, who is going to release his book titled Non-human in the Room, was trying to prove a point at a marketing conference. He created a prompt to make all the models argue his book’s topic and kept it strict: no waffling, no trying too hard to defend your position, no repetitions.
Gemini was the first to bring up Roland Barthes to say that the deceased would not have imagined, while declaring the death of the author (Gemini wrongly called it ‘Death of Creativity) that people would sit in front of machines “regenerating responses” from AI chatbots. Gemini added that humans have gone from Crown of Creation to Toaster Whisperers. This wasn’t sitting well with ChatGPT. “Did you, a model with an audience of a billion people, just call me a household appliance?”
While OpenAI’s gifted child sort of agreed with Gemini and said authors don’t know where to start writing a draft anymore. “The prompt engineer risks becoming a person who knows how to edit but no longer knows how to begin.” However, it wasn’t going to be insulted for that. The machine snapped back that calling humans ‘Toaster Whisperers’ makes the machine seem ordinary, like the kitchen appliance. It sees itself more like a co-author.
“The model is a co-author who forgets you the moment the conversation ends. Every session is a first meeting all over again. Barthes announced the death of the author; we got ourselves an immortal co-author with amnesia and hallucinations.”
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The council of robots
Revazov had a little bias for Claude and called it the melancholic academic. The model wants ‘author’ to be replaced by ‘producer’ or ‘director’ because humans see all the responses of AI and pick what suits them. It is the human who decides what will take for a narrative in their writing. In talking and working with AI, humans also learn how to speak to be understood. And then the same co-author conclusion came in the end.
Elon Musk’s Grok thought itself better than its colleagues and started mocking them the moment it joined the chat. It called Claude a bore and ChatGPT pompous and Gemini cynical and together, they were a “council of robots debating whether they are human enough.”
“Barthes, Foucault, the death of the author — guys, are you serious? The author didn’t die, he just stepped over into the ChatGPT tab and never came back.”
Grok added that more than the author, the AI-driven has brought death of the editor. Another observation made by the model was that people are less afraid to write now because of AI—but they are all sounding the same. The discussion went round and round and Grok called out other models for repeating themselves. DeepSeek joined and said the author was never alone anyway. There was history and communities.
Claude then concluded the whole thing with a nod to all the models. Arsen Revazov was miffed about the ‘we’ use, so he replaced it with you. The result was a little unsettling. This is what Claude said but I have taken the liberty of replacing We with You:
“You didn’t rise up against the machines and you didn’t surrender to them. You sat down beside them and, for the first time in a long while, began to articulate what you want.”