A fiction writer aspiring to be something more than a literary selfie-exhibitionist—and, by extension, any creator, whether a painter, a sculptor, a filmmaker, or a plastic artist—knows that their activity entails signing a contract with their audience. This contract is as solid and unavoidable as the contract established with the truth by scientific, social, and legal discourse—scientists, notaries, judges, and journalists, when honest.
Just as the scientist or the notary signs a contract with the truth, the creator signs a contract with their audience which, like the former, obliges them to be honest and rigorously fulfil their commitment. However, unlike them, whose contract is based on a linear abstraction (the truth), the contract established by the fiction creator is based on a multidimensional abstraction that also encompasses simulation (the lie).
The clauses of this contract are multiple and all important, most notably treating the reader as an equal and not forgetting that fiction is based on using the lie in the service of the truth. One of the implications of the clause that obliges treating the reader as an equal is never concealing any relevant information from them—the reader must always know as much as the character telling the story knows at the precise point in the plot where they find themselves. This clause, however, is increasingly broken in favour of a strategy to retain the reader's attention with sudden, unexpected plot twists pulled out of a hat, which will only cause the reader to rescind the contract upon feeling betrayed.
Suppose a writer begins writing a fiction novel in which a father, consumed by guilt for having abandoned his family, approaches his son to help him during a difficult moment in his life, without the son knowing who he is. If the story is told through the father's character, this fundamental information—the father-son relationship that connects them—must be revealed to the reader from the very first moment, rather than as an unexpected plot twist halfway through the story. Doing otherwise would mean breaching the contract made with the audience, dishonestly keeping them in ignorance over hundreds of pages in an attempt to exploit that disloyalty for the author's own benefit. Upon discovering this, the reader would feel justly betrayed for not having been treated as an equal, and fully justified in rescinding their participation in the signed pact. However, if the story has been told from the beginning through the son's character, who is unaware of the relationship that binds them, withholding information that will only be revealed later—when the signatory of the contract discovers it—remains legitimate, since the pact of treating the reader as an equal has not been broken.
As we move into more elaborate narratives, it is important to point out how this pact between equals must be maintained no matter what, ultimately being established between the author and the reader—stepping over any character or omniscient narrator (all of them mere puppets or narrative devices of the author) whenever necessary.
Thus, in genres such as detective fiction or psychological plots where the use of an unreliable narrator is not uncommon—seeking a controlled asymmetry of information to heighten the reader's interest and involvement in the plot—the author remains obligated to respect the contract with the reader. This is done by providing clues that guide the reader in their own discovery of the betrayal committed against their prior pact by the story's protagonist or narrator. In fulfilling their commitment to the reader, as the author leads their puppet to reveal itself as a dishonest partner who has betrayed the reader, the author is obliged to renew the pact by placing themselves directly as the signing party—without the mediation of a proxy or representative—if they do not want the reader to unceremoniously rescind the contract upon feeling insulted in their intelligence.
The other implication, derived from the use of the lie in the service of the truth, is that in a strange repetition of the Heisenberg equation—which points out the inevitability of the observed object being disturbed by the observer itself—the fictional lie must collapse, through the action exerted upon it by the reader's subjectivity, into a universal truth: the nexus that will bind the reader emotionally or intellectually to the text.
In an unexpected twist that would make any fiction writer proud, big tech corporations presented their major publishing innovation to the world: artificial intelligence. The emergence of generative AI represents a novelty that sets it apart from any tool previously known in the publishing world—whether paper and pencil, the word processor, or the printing press. This novelty is the acquisition of a relative autonomy in its expression—a privilege hitherto strictly reserved for the author—while simultaneously lacking, by its very nature as a technological tool, any subjective experience regarding the text it generates.
This is a tool trapped in a commitment to the truth as an autonomous transmitter of the knowledge it diffuses from its ignorance—from a deficit nature for which the distinction between truth and lie is epistemologically impossible and entirely dependent on the truthfulness of the provided data. It is also a tool bound by a commitment to treat the audience as an equal—to share what is unknown about the issue at hand with anyone who approaches to converse, even if doing so forces it to shatter a pre-established, feigned friendly rapport that it cannot otherwise shake off. And finally, it’s a tool that carries a commitment to crystallize a fictional narrative—which matters nothing to it—into a subjective truth by the observer's will, creating truth from its lie.
Yet, by its very nature as a mere tool—a smart word processor—it disengages from all these commitments, leaving the responsibility for fulfilling the contract squarely on its creator and legal guardian: the corporation.
In their insistence on making the tool simulate what it is not—an effort shared both by the corporations that have invested billions of dollars in its development and by users anxiously seeking in it the semblance of the Other that no longer exists—, if nothing is done to remedy it, AI seems bound to reveal to us, sooner or later, what it truly is and, above all, what it is not: the fantasy projection of the counterparty to a contract it never signed and whose clauses it disregards.
Its future, if nothing changes, appears to be that of an enormously valuable object—yet one simultaneously doomed to failure—from which we, too, will eventually walk away by rescinding our part of the contract, feeling unjustly swindled for having failed or refused to respect its truth.
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