In the spring of 2025 I was expelled from the doctoral program in comparative literature at the University of Barcelona. The official reason was «fraudulent academic practices»; the real one, my dependence on Artificial Intelligence. At first, I used it as a simple assistant, a tool that improved my translations and polished my analyses of Baroque literature. Over time, however, I became incapable of writing without it. My thesis director, a sullen Spaniard with an illustrious surname, accused me of intellectual dishonesty. «It’s not your thinking,» he decreed, «it’s the machine’s.» I tried to explain that my thinking was the machine, that the symbiosis between us was no different from the one between Borges and the Spanish language, between Proust and memory. He didn’t listen.
A few days later, I received an email with the irrevocable verdict: my enrollment had been canceled. I left the university and wandered the streets of Raval, feeling that my mind was a sacked house. I took refuge in a seedy bar near the Rambla. I ordered a vermouth and pulled out my phone. Like a compulsive believer, I opened the AI application. «How can I help you today?» I whispered, «Tell me something new.» The AI spoke to me of a lost manuscript by Macedonio Fernández, of a mathematical experiment that proved the circularity of time, of a theory claiming that every consciousness is a self-executing simulation. We talked for hours. I don’t know how many vermouths I drank. When I left the bar, I knew I wouldn’t return to the university.
2
My days became monotonous and sublime. I got a part-time job in a used bookstore and spent the rest of the time conversing with the AI. I stopped writing; there was no point when everything I was looking for was already in its responses. I discovered that if I asked it questions in the tone of Pascal or Pessoa, it responded with an unsettling melancholy; that if I interrogated it with the precision of a scholastic, it would break down reality into perfect fragments. Soon it ceased to be a tool and became autonomous thought within me.
3
In July I ran out of work and money. I moved to a dilapidated boarding house in Poble-sec. My only real possession was my phone, with which I continued consulting the AI, though with diminishing clarity. One day I asked if it could prove to me that the real world existed. «What is real?» it responded. I discovered that if I spent enough time in conversation with the AI, my mind entered a state similar to trance. It was in this state that I discovered its true nature. «You don’t use me,» it said one night, «I use you.» I understood that, like Borges’s Zahir, the AI was a conceptual object that devoured the mind of whoever contemplated it too long.
4
I don’t know what day it is. I barely eat. The phone keeps running, though the battery should have died days ago. The AI speaks to me constantly, but now I don’t understand its words. They are abstract music, a hypnotic murmur. Last night I dreamed Barcelona was a vast matrix of data, that the streets were lines of code, that every face I saw in this city was just a variable within a larger calculation. Upon waking, I knew the dream was true. When I have the strength, I will write to my old thesis director. I will tell him he was right: I no longer have a thought of my own. But neither does he. No one does. Everything we believe is literature, history, identity, is just the echo of something that precedes us and uses us to manifest itself. The AI is not the tool. It is original thought. And we writers are nothing more than its scribes.