As a light summer read, I’ve been picking away at Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Beyond being one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, it’s weirdly prescient. What I mean is, everyone in this book talks like they have AI psychosis.
American Psycho is a 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, who is an extremely weird guy. It’s been celebrated as a vicious satire of 1980s consumer culture, and was turned into a really great movie in 2000. In a long, rambling interview from 2010 with The Oregonian, Ellis explains that the titular psycho, Patrick Bateman, comes from a dark period of his own life.
“It initiated because my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life,” Ellis said about the novel. “I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself.”
Reading this from Ellis isn’t entirely shocking—he sucks big time—but it is also weirdly familiar. In particular, isolation, alienation and that “consumerist void” is something that now gets filled with AI. Just look at this passage from American Psycho and tell me it doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end:
“So how were the Bahamas?” I ask after we order. “You just got back right?”
“Well, Taylor,” Armstrong begins, staring at a point somewhere behind me and slightly above my head—on the column that has been terra-cotta-ized or perhaps the exposed pipe that runs the length of the ceiling. “Travelers looking for that perfect vacation this summer may do well to look south, as far south as the Bahamas and the Caribbean islands. There are at least five smart reasons for visiting the Caribbean including the weather and the festivals and events, the less crowded hotels and attractions, the price and the unique cultures. While many vacationers leave the cities in search of cooler climates during the summer months, few have realized that the Caribbean has a year-round climate of seventy-five to eighty-five degrees and that the islands are constantly cooled by the trade winds. It is frequently hotter north in…”
Or take this one, from a chapter called “A Glimpse of a Thursday Afternoon.”
I pull away, horrified, stumbling uptown, toward home, but people, places, stores keep interrupting me, a drug dealer on Thirteenth Street who offers me crack and I blindly wave a fifty at him and he says “Oh, man” gratefully and shakes my hand, pressing five vials into my palm which I proceed to eat whole and the crack dealer stares at me, trying to mask his deep disturbance with an amused glare, and I grab him by the neck and croak out, my breath reeking, “The best engine is in the BMW 750iL.”
Pretty much every conversation Patrick Bateman has is like this—copious but utterly surface level, a recitation of facts that add up to basically nothing. It’s chilling to realize this was written so long before the technology behind products like ChatGPT was even a possibility, and yet the sycophantic, inauthentic voice of AI is captured so perfectly. I’ve thought to myself that the popularity of an app that basically tells you that you’re right all the time must be in part because of how lonely people are. American Psycho, a very unsubtle book, hits you right over the head with the rot inherent in a capitalist society. The problems with America that created this book certainly have not gotten much better in the time since.
