Prompt for the End

A Prompt for the End asks what large language models mean for those who have staked their creative and intellectual lives on writing as a constitutive practice. In a world where machines write constantly, fluently, and at an incredible scale, where do we place writing—human or not? Brian Lennon explores these relationships and tensions through an innovative work of creative scholarship written in confrontation and concert with AI.Organized around the frequency distribution of English letters, A Prompt for the End takes the architecture of large language models as both subject and formal principle. Lennon argues that generative AI has unexpectedly revived writing as a medium and that a generative AI worthy of the name would demand intervals of idleness. He discusses how LLMs echo and amplify the norms embedded in their training, positioning the "black box" of AI as a culturally produced myth. Unconventional and exceedingly relevant, A Prompt for the End is for anyone who sees the question of what artificial intelligence does to language as inseparable from the question of what language does to us.