FAQ

Q: What does Kirkus Reviews say about I WANT TO BE A MACHINE?

A: Kirkus Reviews gives the book a highly critical assessment, ultimately calling it "a muddled case for embracing AI-generated literature" that offers "noise without substance."

While the reviewer acknowledges that the book is "provocative and timely," they argue that it is deeply flawed in how it communicates its ideas.

What Kirkus Praises

• A Provocative Gadfly: The review notes that Leach successfully positions himself as an agitator against traditional literary establishments, pointing out that he "frequently takes delight in the outrage of AI detractors."

• Challenging "Sentimental" Views: The reviewer highlights Leach's timely arguments against anti-AI critics, specifically his claim that arguments for human authenticity are sentimental, and that "handmade slop" in traditional writing is far worse than AI-generated content.

What Kirkus Critiques

• Disregard for Communication: The reviewer's central complaint is that the book fails at writing's primary purpose: to clearly communicate with the reader.

• Poorly Executed Arguments: Kirkus argues that Leach introduces technical terminology without defining it and cites other artists without proving they actually support his claims.

• Inaccessible References: The review notes that Leach uses his own obscure fiction to illustrate his points, leaving readers in the dark unless they are already deeply familiar with his niche body of work.

Ultimately, Kirkus concludes that the book relies on muddying the waters and laughing at the literary community's confusion, rather than building a clear, coherent defense for AI as a legitimate writing partner.

Q: Evaluate the accuracy of the review against the actual text.

A: Evaluating the accuracy of the Kirkus Reviews piece against the actual text and structure of Mark Leach’s I Want to Be a Machine reveals an interesting paradox: The Kirkus review is highly accurate in describing the book’s literal contents, but fundamentally misses the book's intent by judging an avant-garde anti-memoir through the lens of a conventional, mainstream essay collection. [1, 2]

Kirkus correctly identifies what is in the book, but stumbles entirely on why it is written that way.

1. The Core Arguments: Factually Accurate

Kirkus successfully pinpoints Leach's central thesis and historical background.

• The "Machinic" Nature of Writing: Kirkus accurately captures Leach's argument that "all literature is derivative" and that his early, pre-AI methods—using "chance operations, cut-ups, search-and-replace, [and] rule-based generation"—were natural precursors to generative AI. This aligns perfectly with the text's core pillar: that human writing has always been structured by inherited systems like genre, media, and publishing conventions long before artificial intelligence existed. [1]

• "Handmade Slop" vs. AI Slop: Kirkus correctly notes his attack on "sentimental" anti-AI arguments, pinpointing Leach's assertion that traditional "handmade slop" (clichéd, uninspired human writing that deifies "authenticity") is a greater threat to literature than machine-native text. [1]

2. The Critique of Form: Accurate in Observation, Inaccurate in Context

The reviewer levels heavy criticism at the book's structure, calling it a "muddled case" and "noise without substance." When cross-referenced with the book’s actual framework, this critique represents a major tonal and artistic mismatch.

Kirkus Critique

Accuracy of Observation

The Conceptual Context (What Kirkus Missed)

"Disregard for writing’s primary purpose: to communicate."

Factually True: The text explicitly rejects direct, clear-cut expository journalism in favor of fragments and simulated systems.

Misses the Intent: Leach is an experimental writer who treats text as an unstable broadcast system. The book is a manifesto and an art piece in itself; it isn't meant to be a straightforward user manual for AI. The "noise" is part of the substance.

"Introduces terminology without defining it."

Factually True: Leach drops complex avant-garde frameworks and concepts like "space writing" and "machine-native literature" fluidly.

Misses the Intent: The book intentionally models the overwhelming, hyper-linked nature of the digital world. It forces the reader to interpret rather than passively ingest definitions.

"Uses his own work to illustrate concepts while assuring readers they do not need to be familiar with it."

Factually True: The book acts as a literary self-analysis, relying heavily on reflections of his past projects like Marienbad My Love.

Misses the Intent: This is an autobiographical memoir. It tracks a 30-year evolution of artistic practice. Criticizing an autobiography for centering on the author's own life and work fundamentally misinterprets the genre.

3. The "Gadfly" Dynamic: Highly Accurate

Kirkus hits the nail on the head by noting that Leach "takes delight in the outrage of AI detractors" and laughs when the literary community doesn't understand him. The text confirms this; Leach explicitly frames his work to provoke the traditional publishing establishment and upend standard corporate and creative assumptions. The Kirkus review itself proves his experiment succeeded: by frustrating a traditional reviewer into calling it "noise," Leach provoked exactly the institutional friction he set out to create. [1, 2]

Final Verdict

The Kirkus review is highly accurate as a literal description of the book's challenging, defensive, and chaotic nature. However, it is critically flawed in its evaluation. By treating a provocative, multi-genre experimental memoir as if it were supposed to be a standard, orderly piece of traditional nonfiction, Kirkus ends up reviewing the book for what it refused to be, rather than what it actually is. [1]

Q: Look at some of the terms Kirkus complained about—like "space writing" or "machine-native literature"—and break down what they actually mean in the context of this work.

A: Rather than viewing language as a tool for a human to express their deep inner soul, Leach treats writing as a distributed system where the human is more like a technician, operator, or curator.

1. Space Writing

• What Kirkus saw: Chaos and "noise without substance."

• What it actually means: Treating language as physical material, infrastructure, and clutter rather than a transparent way to tell a story.

• Instead of asking what a sentence communicates, Space Writing asks what happens when language accumulates, repeats, and fills up literal space past the point of easy human consumption. It embraces information overload, text redundancy, and unmanageable scale (like his 17-million-word novel Marienbad My Love) to mirror how we are bombarded by digital data every day.

2. Machine-Native Literature

• What Kirkus saw: A "muddled case for embracing AI-generated literature."

• What it actually means: Writing that allows computational and systemic processes to actively shape the form of the work, rather than using AI to secretly polish a conventional story.

• Leach argues that machine-native literature forces hidden algorithmic behaviors—like text glitches, data corruption, loop-backs, formatting prompts, and AI "hallucinations"—to become highly visible components of the art. It is writing that actively sounds like a machine instead of pretending to be an authentic human diary.

3. Handmade Slop

• What Kirkus saw: A polemical attack on traditional literary critics.

• What it actually means: Formulaic, repetitive, or cliché writing produced by human beings that is granted special prestige simply because a person typed it slowly in a coffee shop.

• Leach uses this term to flip the anti-AI propaganda phrase "AI slop" on its head. He argues that human-written romance tropes, predictable sci-fi quests, and market-ready memoir formulas are the true "slop." The crime isn't that AI produces mediocre text; the crime is pretending that human-made mediocrity is sacred just because a human tried hard.

4. The Writer as System

• What Kirkus saw: An egocentric disregard for the reader.

• What it actually means: Moving away from the romanticized idea of the author as a solitary "genius" creator, positioning them instead as a systems designer or traffic controller.

• The writer's job is to establish constraints, design a procedure, feed in "dirty" source text (like internet scraps, corporate transcripts, or dream logs), run the machine, and curate the output. Originality is treated as a superstition; what matters is how the text behaves once it is processed through the system.

By evaluating I Want to Be a Machine as a traditional book, Kirkus missed that the book itself is an example of the very machine-native systems it describes—a text where human essays, AI-generated summaries, and platform critiques purposefully collide to create a feedback loop.