I couldn’t help but wonder, did AI write Carrie’s novel?
I don’t mean to pile on the hatred for And Just Like That … because I was never expecting it to be as good as Sex and The City was. I also think it’s easy to sit here and criticize a show when so many people put in so much work to create something, even if it wasn’t a masterpiece. Nonetheless, I just finished watching the show, it’s Saturday, and I feel lazy, so I am going to pile on.
AJLT indulged a nostalgic, hedonistic desire for me. I was happy to see these familiar faces and delight in the eye candy that was the wardrobe, the real estate, and Anthony’s young, hot Italian boyfriend. It was all okay and nothing had irked me until Carrie’s revived voiceover revealed passages of her novel. Contrary to most of the Internet’s disdain for most parts of the show, this was the first and only time AJLT truly gave me the ick.
“The woman threw open her windows to let the city in. She could hear the horses coming and going with their carriages, each one bringing an exciting possibility. The unexpected cool breeze on this hot afternoon reminded her that each day need not be an echo of the one before.”
What was this supposed to be?
I decided to ignore it the way one ignores the ick in the middle of a date because you’re already sitting there and the other person is not bad to look at. You bring them down from whatever pedestal you put them on based solely on their looks, but it’s no reason to walk out when you’re craving something pretty. To me, the show was always like a hot, mindless date—more form than substance. This was working out fine until Duncan, the renowned biographer who was also Carrie’s neighbor/beta-reader-turned-sex-buddy, gushed over the novel and described it as “brilliant.”
I couldn’t help but wonder—was I supposed to believe this was good writing, or was I missing something here, like was it supposed not to be good since she was writing fiction for the first time and maybe this was the only part of the show that sort of resembled how the world works, as in you’re bound to write shittily before you write brilliantly? And maybe Duncan didn’t know what he was talking about or maybe he was lying because he liked her? I had so many questions.
The more I thought about it, Carrie’s fiction passages sounded a whole lot like AI to me. Is it possible the writers delegated the prose writing to an LLM? I know that, when tasked with producing a creative piece (either prose or poetry), AI’s output is as shallow, uninteresting, repetitive, ornamental, and clichéd as “Sitting in the sunlight, the woman felt the fog of the last few nights lift. She realized her tossing and turning and insecurities were remnants of another time.” And then there’s the question of why the writers would do this. An experiment, efficiency, or an honest belief in AI as artistic partner? I’m operating under assumptions, but one can only make assumptions when something makes as little sense as this does and there’s no one to pester for answers.
The show and its showrunners could get away with most of their faux pas, as far as I’m concerned. I know Carrie was never known for her masterly prose, but why her writing would be so awful while every internal point of reference insisted that it was brilliant is beyond my grasp. Maybe if I also sit in the sunlight, I will feel the fog of Carrie’s novel lift, too.
