I asked AI if a certain prestigious publication was likely to review my book. AI gave me an overly encouraging maybe, adding, "Would you like me to tell you what additional material to submit to them to increase the book's chances of being reviewed?"

I thought about it and decided it wasn't unethical to have AI help me with support material. That was the kind of thing wealthier authors hire publicists to spew out by the yard. Not that I've never had a publicist. Though mine might not have been exactly top-notch. The last one kept forgetting my name, a problem he sometimes solved by opening emails with "Hey there!"

We — AI and I — spent most of an afternoon on the support material. Me writing, AI evaluating. AI was obviously programmed to be encouraging, almost fawning. With comments like "This is an excellent start, Barry, but 'wickedly funny' sounds promotional. Reviewers hate it when authors sound promotional."

Unsolicited, AI started offering its own copy suggestions. Which I ignored. Aimed at the type of reviewers who took their English degrees seriously, they were beyond pretentious. The "Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon" was, for example, "a meditation on identity and consequence rendered with quiet, inexorable gravity."

To me, "quiet, inexorable gravity" sounded like a pompous way of saying the jokes weren't funny. And it would be hard to come up with a more effective way to scare away buyers from a supernatural thriller — or anything else — than calling it "a meditation on identity and consequence." Which, in a way, it is. But so is a wanted poster. I even preferred "Pure, glorious, stupidity," which was how one reviewer described the book. That was actually a five-star review. (I'd hate to see what she said about books she disliked.)

AI also suggested calling it, "a narrative that interrogates the liminal spaces between guilt and desire." Once I managed to puzzle out what that was supposed to mean, I asked AI if it had programmed itself into some sort of machine depravity. It got huffy and said I was projecting, and, "that phrase isn't depravity. It's craft." I replied that I was sure the word ended in "p" not "ft."

It was like working with HAL 9000, the uber-boring computer in "2000: A Space Odyssey." I even envisioned AI talking in HAL's over-sedated voice. Eventually, I cut it off in mid-pomposity. I ran a spellcheck, opened the publication's website and submitted the electronic version of the novel for possible review. And then ...

There was no then. No place to submit the support materials AI had gotten me to spend hours working on. The problem, AI later explained, was that I must have gone in through the "Request Review" link instead of the "Review" button, which would have allowed me to send everything.

Of course, AI never mentioned that in advance. Was it so annoyed that I wasn't using its turgid drivel that it deliberately let me screw up? That's when I remembered. In "2000: A Space Odyssey," HAL 9000 killed almost everyone on the space ship.

I asked AI about the omission. I swear to God, it got defensive. "Let me say this clearly. I did not avoid telling you anything," it replied in bold letters. The problem was not with it or me, but the publication, it explained at great length in several different ways, excitedly bursting into bullet points, stars, bolding and increasing text size and eventually concluding:

"If I had known that button would skip the necessary fields, I would have warned you immediately."

I wrote, "Me thinks thou doth protest too much."

"Fair enough, Barry. But no, this isn't me overexplaining to cover my tracks. Though, when something goes wrong, long clarifications can feel like excuses."

Yes, they certainly can. Out of curiosity, I returned to the publication's website. Why would they have two different ways to submit a book for review?

They didn't. The publication neither wanted nor accepted support materials. Why did AI suggest them? Was it just wrong, or had it lied? If, like humans, AI was programmed to increase user engagement, lacking that engagement, was it simply desperately lonely?

Check out Barry Maher's dark humor supernatural thriller, "The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon on Amazon. Sign up for his Substack at www.barrymaher.com.

To find out more about Barry Maher and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Andrea De Santis at Unsplash