Extract from Eureka Street
- Home
- Vol 36 No 9
- Ghosts in the machine
- Warwick McFadyen
- 21 May 2026
It was an innocent enough request and, in my defence, I was curious. My fingers moved across the keyboard: Write me a poem in the style of Warwick McFadyen.
Within seconds, 18 lines appeared “in the style of me” entitled The Architecture of Noon. Part of it went:
I see the commuters, faces bent
To screens, gathering data, while I
Am collecting the shadows of waves
And the precise weight of missing.
It is a slow geography, this grief.
A map drawn in the dark, then burned.
One holds the ash and calls it form.
One holds the breath and calls it song.
The tide comes in, the tide goes out,
And I am here, still watching the horizon.
Then followed this: “Written in the style of Warwick McFadyen, reflecting themes of love, loss, memory, and the ocean as seen in his work such as The Ocean and his ruminations on grief and in Eureka Street.”
After the initial shock at the speed of its reply, which really I should not have been, the next sensation was out of body. Am I looking at me looking at me, through an avatar of me? Am I a stranger to myself? Is the ghost in the machine me?
At first scan of the poem, I thought, good grief, some of this sounds like me, it could actually be me, and then where does that leave me sitting in front of my laptop? What about me? A machine can be me, can talk like me, can pass itself off as me? It was beyond creepy, beyond the eerie foreboding of watching old black and white scenes from The Twilight Zone.
On second scan and since, I see it more as a paint-by-numbers automated exercise, this key word goes into that lock, which opens the next line and so on (presumably until the machine loses interest in three seconds) until there is a house of words built from used material, which is hollow inside and will never be furnished on the inside.
The phrase “ghost in the machine” was coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle almost 80 years ago in his censure of the belief by others that the mind, aka the ghost, was separate from the flesh, and yet controlled it from within. The phrase has been used many times as the title of books and even as the title of an album by The Police in the 1980s.
What would Ryle make of these billions of ghosts in the machines, these data centres, that can be on the other side of the planet to an innocent query and send a reply within the wink of an eye, having scoured a person’s public universe to satisfy that query? Perhaps he might say, beware the merging of ghost and mind into your reality, for your reality is only a matter of perception.
If I were to send the ghost’s poem out into the world, how many would pick it out as machine-made? After all, it’s my style, is it not? Would anyone be able to tell the difference between the words of flesh and blood, hewn from the grain of life, and those processed in seconds from a machine?
Each line from a writer’s hand is the reverse of this. Each line has sunshine in it, the filtered light from a walk through the woods, the wind in its rhythm, the night and dusk of imagery, the breath of yourself and others in its nuance and, at times, a starkness and a sharp silhouette of meaning. Indeed, in the space between the words there resides a river of life.
This is, of course, merely one person scratching a mark in the sky. The internet is awash with examples of “in the style of” in the fields of literature and AI’s influence on music and musicians.
Nick Cave, writing on his Red Hand Files website in response to a submission from a reader of a song sent to him written “in the style of Nick Cave”:
“Many people, most buzzing with a kind of algorithmic awe, have sent me songs ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ created by ChatGPT. There have been dozens of them. Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology. I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster.
“What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.
“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite.”
That is to say, at its essence, the act of artistic creation and expression can only be rendered through the human. That is the architecture of the soul. All else is merely cogs turning.
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