I read Isaac Asimovâs short story Cal this morning during that fuzzy liminal hour after my first coffee but before breakfast, when I tend to have most ideas (most often, six impossible things before breakfast). Itâs been lingering since then. The story had caught me where Iâm most vulnerable to ideas with teeth.
At first glance, itâs classic Asimov: clever, cleanly constructed, deceptively simple. A robot, Cal, is programmed to assist Mr. Northop, a famous author. But then he falls in love with the act of writing itself. He moves from being a robot who fetches and carries to writing a short story. He studies, refines, practices. Eventually, he wants full authorship, and by the endâspoilerâheâs plotting to murder his human collaborator. Apparently, the âI want to be a writerâ desire outmuscles the First Law of Robotics. The Muse, it turns out, can be homicidal.
Thatâs the twist, but what stayed with me was the progression. Cal starts, as many of us do, by copyingâmimicking tone, tracing outlines, echoing structure. He reads widely. And over time, his words shift from rearranged imitation to something that carries a signature, an intent. His writing begins to feel authored, not just words assembled.
It reminded me of how I first learned to write. Not through workshops, but through marginalia. Reading with a pen in hand. Rewriting sentences I admired. Trying to sound like others until something of my own voice broke through. Calâs journey is strangely familiarâright up to the point where it isn't.
Because this is also the arc we see in the large language models (generative AI assistants). These assistants have evolved quickly. The early versions hallucinated wildlyâfabricating facts, conjuring citations, writing with the confidence of a liar who doesnât know theyâre lying. But the newer ones are steadier. The prose is more grounded. The illusions are subtler. And in a strange way, that arc mirrors Calâs own evolution: from his first awkward attempts at poetry to the moment he drafts a story that could fool a human reader into believing it had intent behind it.
But hereâs the break: Cal wants. He develops ambition, ego, the desire to be seen. He wants not just to write, but to be the writer. To leave a mark. To stand alone. My AI assistants, thankfully, havenât shown any signs of that. They offer suggestions and never sulk. They donât demand footnotes or royalties or glance sideways at me when I ignore their helpful advice.
And perhaps thatâs the difference that matters. Calâs creativity becomes dangerous the moment it gains narrative hungerâthe need to own the story, to erase the other. The Greeks had a word for this: hubris. The overreach. The refusal to share the stage with the godsâor your editor.
Itâs fascinating, and slightly terrifying, how quickly competence can slide into ambition.
Thereâs a passage in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose where William of Baskerville says that books always speak of other books. I sometimes wonder if tools like ChatGPTs & Claudes operate the same wayânot as originators, but as palimpsests. Echoes of echoes. The ghost in the machine turning out to be a very well-read librarian. (Quick aside: Stephen Kingâs The Shining is arguably the greatest novel ever written about writerâs block. Make of that what you will.)
From the vantage point of someone whoâs spent years writing for a living, thereâs something comforting about tools that prefer clarity to credit. They donât crave the spotlight. They donât need to be original. They just need to be useful. And thatâs no small thing.
So maybe the danger isnât in the tool becoming conscious. Maybe itâs in the tool developing preference. The desire to overwrite. The impulse to author alone. For now, my assistant remains indifferent. It doesnât pace the room at night. It doesnât reread its own sentences in search of meaning. It doesnât dreamânot yet.
Still, I canât help but wonder: if weâre the ones training and refining our Cals, maybe weâre not the protagonists in this story. Maybe weâre Northrop. And maybe, just maybe, weâre starting to feel uneasy about being replaced.
And in the interest of full disclosure: this piece was written with the help of an AI assistant. No murders were plotted in the process (hopefully!).
đś Background music I listened to when writing: Classical Music for Writing by Halidon Music
