Book Review: The Great Gatsby by the Xerox 914 Photocopier

Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, technophobes and Luddites have continued to insist that machines “can’t really write”—at least not the way humans can. Those naysayers will be hard-pressed to wave away The Great Gatsby, the debut novel from the super-advanced Xerox 914 photocopier—an exciting new voice that wrote Gatsby after being trained on a data set comprising a paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

The Xerox 914 was born in Rochester, New York—where its father, Chester Carlson, worked for Xerox. The influence of the device’s hometown and upbringing are obvious throughout its book, which it composed in just over twenty-five minutes after reading the training materials that had been placed face-down on its platen glass. This is an achievement that took Fitzgerald himself around two stressful years—and the faster writing time offers proof that the Xerox 914, via its use of electricity, bright light, and powdered toner, has exceeded the creative powers of the human mind. Its novel is a tour de force uncannily reflecting the tragic emptiness of endless striving in the hedonistic Jazz Age. It is unlike anything else this critic has seen before, with one possible exception.

Gatsby is, first and foremost, evidence that, propelled by its synthetic genius, the Xerox 914 has mastered prose. But its talents don’t end there—the novel’s striking cover, too, sprang from the photocopier’s imagination. The Art Deco painting, called Celestial Eyes, resulted from a training set with a single painting by the Spanish artist Francis Cugat, coincidentally also titled Celestial Eyes. Cugat’s mark is evident in the final product, but the Xerox 914 has expressed its own unique vision. Unlike Cugat’s colorful work, the Xerox 914’s black-and-white depiction of a flapper is a perfect fit for the dark themes of the story, in which between West Egg and New York lies the Valley of Ashes.

It would have been difficult to foresee such a triumph for the Xerox 914 when it first came to widespread public attention with an appearance at New York City’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel in the fall of 1959. That day, not only did the Xerox not write The Great Gatsby—it literally caught fire. It is a testament to the machine’s determination that, despite this humiliation, it persisted and ended up making an inimitable contribution to the American literary canon.

There are clear parallels between the author and the title character. Just as Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic larger-than-life figure driven to accumulate wealth at all costs in a futile bid for the love of Daisy Buchanan, the Xerox 914 beats on ceaselessly, printing page after page, for reasons that readers cannot fully comprehend.

As terrifying as this advance may be for human writers and visual artists whose supposed insights are now less than worthless, it’s hardly the apex of AI’s increasing power. The Great Gatsby is the Xerox 914’s debut novel. Its plot and themes may seem complex compared to what machines have henceforth produced, but it’s a relatively slim volume at 180 pages. This is only the beginning.

Indeed, tech insiders say that the genius thinking machine is hard at work on a follow-up novel entitled War and Peace, a sprawling narrative taking place during France’s nineteenth-century invasion of Russia. Spanning 1,200 pages, it’s rumored to contain immense realism and deep emotional resonance. Such a tome would take even the most gifted flesh-and-blood author more than half a decade to whip up. Yet by the time you’ve finished reading this review, the Xerox 914 will have generated an epic that shows an undeniable understanding of various written and oral recollections of life in the 1800s.

The Great Gatsby is a worthwhile book on its own, but it is more remarkable as a sign that the future has arrived. By reading books, the Xerox 914 has learned to write books. And I, for one, cannot wait to see what it dreams up next. My prediction: sooner than you think, after training on a human butt, it will generate a butt of its own.