The Straussian Reading of 'If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you'

Recently Sam Kriss wrote If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you and, despite its very clear title, I left puzzled about what Kriss is really saying. In the middle of the piece there's a little joke:

AI writing is almost comically easy to detect. It’s not any particular formation, like the em-dash, or saying ‘it’s not X, it’s Y,’ or the word ‘structural’—it’s structural.

Sam Kriss, If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

It's a massive cliche to use an emdash while writing about AI writing. Of which I'm guilty as well:

It doesn't mean much on its own but I started to notice similar behavior throughout the piece. On hallucination he claims:

This is why you can still ask an AI to tell you about the scene in VS Naipaul’s Dashed Against the Rocks in which a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and it’ll tell you that ‘what matters in Naipaul’s handling is not the event’s cruelty in isolation, but its emotional flatness and the sense of mismanaged modernity,’ despite the fact that there is no scene in Dashed Against the Rocks where a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon, and also no novel by VS Naipaul called Dashed Against the Rocks.

Sam Kriss, If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

But this is a pure hallucination. In fact when I tested it chatgpt correctly cited the Sam Kriss essay. If you tell it not to use the web it says it cannot recall this work.

Kriss gives examples of AI writing which from context I assume are meant to be particularly bad or obvious. He doesn't explain exactly what the issue is which makes sense. No one wants to out themselves as not being in on the joke and admitting they don't "get it".

My grandmother’s hands smelled of jasmine blossoms and memories.

The Serpent in the Grove, according to Sam Kriss, for all I know another hallucination

What exactly is wrong with this sentence? Is it the mixing of a literal and figurative meaning of smell? I don't think Kriss's metaphors are any better in terms of physical coherence, "a cold shudder like someone’s poured jelly down the back of my neck." Jelly doesn't pour!

I’m literally the size of a dry martini—shaken, stirred, and nursing the burn of every sip.

The Littlest Wife, according to Sam Kriss, for all I know another hallucination

Maybe the issue with this sentence is it doesn't mean anything. But what does this sentence mean: "But what they speak is the language of angels, in which, like the chirping of birds, there is neither truth nor lies." I've never heard the language of angels and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of truth and lies in the chirping of birds if you could properly understand them.

Or what of his intro about finding a caterer. Of course I don't believe for a minute that Sam is actually throwing a party or he pulled any of those quotes. The quotes of course smell like LLM writing but underneath the emdashes they also smell a lot like normal marketing copy drivel. Are these phrases that different from "When you're here you're not just a customer — you're family" or "No Rules. Just Right." or "The Sizzle Says it All" or "Always Fresh. Never Frozen". All phrases looking to elicit an emotional response while ultimately not saying anything.

Of course I hate LLM writing too. But mostly for the same reason I hate prize winning essays and marketing copy and substacks full of lies. Those with nothing to say should be silent. Perhaps it would be too on the nose for Sam Kriss to make that critique.