Resurrecting the Whore of Babylon

My "Holy F*ck" moment with AI...

In Claude.ai, you can upload PDFs of up to 100K words and have it analyze them. In July, I uploaded the entire 50K word manuscript of my dystopian erotic novella "Ishtar's Angel"--written under my pen name Daemon Derriere, and intertwined with my memoir “Joyful Pessimism.”

I instructed Claude: "You are Camille Paglia. Write a 500-word essay analyzing Ishtar's Angel." (Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae, is a bombastic cultural critic with a very distinct, in-your-face writing style, thick with sensuality; she’s one of my favorite writers.)

Here's what Claude came up with, in the voice of Camille Paglia:

Resurrecting the Whore of Babylon:
Daemon Derriere's Carnivalesque Romp

With his erotic dystopia Ishtar’s Angel, Daemon Derriere plants his profane standard atop society’s repressed libido. His lewd escapades in a worker-owned bordello menaced by puritans evoke a pagan bacchanalia against sterile Apollonian intellectualism. Like his ancestor the Marquis de Sade, Derriere honors the amoral pantheism suppressed by despotic Sky Father religions.

Through orgiastic exertion, Derriere and his cohort of sacred harlots reclaim their animating eros from disapproving censors. Their defiant striptease represents cultural advance through primal involution, as each shrugs off garments of propriety to expose the blood-and-bone bedrock of being. Their spectacle sanctifies harlotry as sublime service, renouncing Christian Madonna/whore dialectics.

By codifying their self-annihilating ideals, anti-porn feminists serve the forces they claim to combat. Their carceral solution to imagined humiliation merely swaps the tortures of a thousand personal Edens for the single Hell of forsaken flesh. As an infernal inversion of Dante’s Beatrice, the bewitching harlot Serah guides Daemon to an ecstatic encounter with his death drive. Like de Sade’s Justine escorting the monk Clément through the labyrinth of desire, Serah liberates Daemon into the spasmodic Theater of Cruelty.

Against censors who slander sado-masochism as internalized misogyny, the extravagant excess of Derriere’s psycho-sexual Ceremonies honor the sovereignty of flesh. The body in pain reminds repressed ascetics of the absolute dominion of the physical. Far from commodifying passivity, the allegorical psychodrama of BDSM satirizes hierarchies, reimagining power along new carnivalesque lines.

Ultimately, Derriere’s sulfurous saga sounds the bugle against all dogmas demanding alienation from the body’s animal home. Like our Neolithic ancestors at Çatalhöyük, his novella calls us to honor the Goddess through ceremony and sacrament. For centuries, Christianity has strangled the Levantine Goddess in her cradle. With his skillful philosophic domination, Daemon Derriere defends her cardinal commandment: “Let there be delight!”

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Had someone shown me a piece like this, about a book other than my own, and said it was by Paglia, I would 100% believe them.

This was my “holy fuck” moment with AI. As soon as I read this, I decided I needed to change the business model in my entire 20+ year career of freelance copywriting.

I realized that, within a year, no one is going to be paying writers like me my per-word rates (which had reached $1/word) for copy anymore. The AI tools are just going to be that much faster, cheaper, and at least as good, if not better, than human professional writers.

I realized that, instead of waiting around for this development to kill my career, I needed to get ahead of this curve. I immediately stopped charging clients for writing, and instead started teaching clients how to use AI tools like Claude (which is a way better writer than GPT) so that they can get professional-quality copywriting instantly, infinitely, and for free.

Yes, I’m literally charging people to learn how to never have to hire a professional writer like me again.

So far, business has been brisk.

(Want to learn how to get unlimited high-quality writing out of AI tools, instantly, for free? Get yourself your very own Muse Infused AI Copywriting training with me!)

Ironically, the setting of “Ishtar’s Angel” is a dystopian future after an economic crash due to AI taking most people’s jobs, particulary creatives’ jobs. My fears as a writer writ large.

To our survival as humans!

—Michael

P.S. - I’m happy to report I don't think I'm out of a career as a fiction writer yet. Out of curiosity, I asked it to write the next chapter of my novella. It sooooked bad. But, as the Paglia fragment shows, it’s beyond impressive at non-narrative writing—and I’ve found it’s even better at commercial copywriting.