Once upon a time a young woman had a dream of becoming the greatest bull rider there ever was. She wanted to win rodeos, receive tons of awards and have millions of fans. Unfortunately, bull riding turned out to be more difficult than she had realized. No sponsors were impressed, and none of the other bull riders were interested in helping her in what was an extremely competitive enterprise. It was very discouraging.

Then one day she heard about a man who had invented a mechanical bull. Not the kind you see in saloons, which are basically leather-covered barrels that can emulate the moving back of a bull – sort of. No, this was a life-like bull that she could program to produce whatever moves she wished. The bull’s moves were a bit jerky and predictable, but it didn’t cost anything to run. She happily bought her first bull, programmed it with all the basic moves and entered herself in a rodeo. The other bull riders sneered, but to everyone’s amazement, the audience enjoyed the show. It wasn’t a huge enjoyment, but for the price of the ticket, they were content to applaud the bull’s antics.

Through word of mouth, her bull riding event became popular, drawing crowds who really didn’t care that they were watching something mechanical and predictive. Real or programmed, it was exciting to watch as they ate their hot dogs and drank their beer. The other bull riders complained to the management, who shrugged and said, hey, people liked it, and it was even attracting some folks who never before paid to watch bull riding. So who were they to say no?

A number of the bull riders began posting signs and took to the internet, protesting that their bull riding was the genuine thing, a real human rider on a real live bull. People split into camps of loyalty. Some demanded the fake bull be outlawed; some praised the young woman’s ingenuity. Many didn’t care either way as long as they were entertained at a price that didn’t carve a hole in their wallet.

The young woman raked in her share of the ticket money and figured out how to program better and better moves, delighting in how realistic her bull riding was becoming. She bought and programmed more bulls. The adoration of fans made the fact that she had programmed the bull’s moves seem inconsequential. Eventually she started her own rodeo and programmed more mechanical bulls, at the rate of several a month, all essentially the same but in different colors, different sizes and with subtly different moves. It felt to her like she was an honest-to-God bull rider. She had the awards to prove it. After all, hers was the brain that drove the thing. It was all about her being a successful rodeo personality, which was what her dream had been about in the first place.

You may have guessed where this story is coming from. I just wish I could tell you where it’s going. People are using A.I. to “write” more and more books, using not the creativity of a writer but the enthusiasm of a programmer and billions of words stolen from hundreds of years of published works found on the world-wide web. The sound of authors crying “but my books are written by a real human being!” is being lost, not just in marketing indifference but in audience indifference as well.

Let’s move back a bit, to the eighteenth century when furniture was made by hand, each piece lovingly crafted by one gifted creator in what were called “cottage industries”. Then along came the assembly line. Workers were trained not to think or create, but simply to run machines that mass-produced parts of furniture that were quickly glued together and, at a light glance, resembled their expensive forbears.

Those few who could afford “real” furniture sniffed. Surely no one would waste their money on junk that would wear out in ten years, leaving nothing to pass on to children and grandchildren. They were convinced that these makers of shoddy furniture would find themselves driven out by public good taste.

On the other hand, the mass-producers were convinced that most homemakers would be happy to “settle” for something they could live with⸺now, not when they were too old to enjoy it.

To everyone’s shock, they were right. People of economic levels previously shut out of the ownership of fine things discovered the pleasure of filling their home with perfectly acceptable, if a bit tacky, brand new furniture. It more than made up for the fact that it would all require a trip to the dump in the foreseeable future. Okay, their children would eventually have to buy their own, but did those children really care? Most preferred to pick out their own rather than be saddled with the products of a moth-eaten era.

Can we say this is wrong? Was Henry Ford wrong to invent the auto assembly line, nearly ruining the individuality of car design (imho) but providing each and Everyman with affordable mobility? Was Penguin Books wrong to provide soldiers overseas with cheap small books that fit in their back pockets, “paperbacks” that fell apart so fast, purists were sure they would never be accepted by the reading public?

Is the era of ‘great literature’ over, along with handmade automobiles? Has it become a dated idea of the past like that handcrafted mahogany table that our great-grandparents prized? Will the next “The Good Earth” be displaced by works that A.I. users scrape and patch together from everything that has already been written (including “The Good Earth”)? In this world of throwaway everything, will new works of art be overlooked as people reach for the sensory pleasure of the next and the next and the next self-replicating bestseller?

Is A.I. an abomination, the death-knell of human creativity? Or just the next discount store selling glued-together dining room tables?