Book Review: The Great Gatsby by the Xerox 914 Photocopier
Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, technophobes and Luddites have continued to insist that machines “can’t really write”—at least not the way humans can. Those naysayers will be hard-pressed to wave away The Great Gatsby, the debut novel from the super-advanced Xerox 914 photocopier—an exciting new voice that wrote Gatsby after being trained on a data set comprising a paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
The Xerox 914 was born in Rochester, New York—where its father, Chester Carlson, worked for Xerox. The influence of the device’s hometown and upbringing are obvious throughout its book, which it composed in just over twenty-five minutes after reading the training materials that had been placed face-down on its platen glass. This is an achievement that took Fitzgerald himself around two stressful years—and the faster writing time offers proof that the Xerox 914, via its use of electricity, bright light, and powdered toner, has exceeded the creative powers of the human mind. Its novel is a tour de force uncannily reflecting the tragic emptiness of endless striving in the hedonistic Jazz Age. It is unlike anything else this critic has seen before, with one possible exception.
Gatsby is, first and foremost, evidence that, propelled by its synthetic genius, the Xerox 914 has mastered prose. But its talents don’t end there—the novel’s striking cover, too, sprang from the photocopier’s imagination. The Art Deco painting, called Celestial Eyes, resulted from a training set with a single painting by the Spanish artist Francis Cugat, coincidentally also titled Celestial Eyes. Cugat’s mark is evident in the final product, but the Xerox 914 has expressed its own unique vision. Unlike Cugat’s colorful work, the Xerox 914’s black-and-white depiction of a flapper is a perfect fit for the dark themes of the story, in which between West Egg and New York lies the Valley of Ashes.
