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The Means of Production is not opposed to artificial intelligence.
We are opposed to boredom.
We are opposed to cliché.
We are opposed to the production of language whose primary function is to imitate the appearance of thought.
These positions are related, but they are not identical.
The question we ask of a submission is not:
“Was AI involved?”
The question is:
“What machinery produced this?”
That question applies equally to large language models, writing workshops, MFA programs, corporate style guides, advertising departments, newspapers, religions, governments, and the strange recursive feedback loop commonly referred to as an individual human consciousness.
The fish have theories about the water.
The theories are also in the water.
We are interested in examining the machinery that produces language, meaning, identity, reality, and belief. Artificial intelligence is one such machine.
It is therefore difficult to imagine a journal devoted to the means of production refusing to investigate one of the most significant new means of production currently available.
AI Is Not a Genre
We do not automatically reject work created with AI assistance.
We also do not automatically accept it.
“AI-generated” is not an aesthetic category.
A poem can be bad because it was written by a person.
A poem can be bad because it was written with a machine.
A poem can be good for exactly the same reasons.
The relevant question is whether the work exhibits intelligence, surprise, pressure, formal invention, emotional force, conceptual rigor, or genuine strangeness.
The means matter.
The result matters.
The relationship between them matters most.
Two Older Traditions
When we ask of a submission, “What machinery produced this?”, artificial intelligence is only the newest machine in the room. Two older traditions already taught us how to read writing made by selection, arrangement, and rule rather than by invention alone. They are the inheritance a machine-assisted text steps into — and the reason we are slow to mistake a tool for a genre.
Found Language
The literary tradition contains many forms that blur the boundary between authorship and arrangement.
Found poetry reshapes existing language into new structures and meanings. The poet often works not by inventing words but by selecting, arranging, removing, reframing, and recombining them. The resulting work becomes a kind of linguistic collage.
This tradition predates artificial intelligence by many decades.
Writers have built poems from newspapers, legal transcripts, advertisements, speeches, instruction manuals, government reports, and fragments of existing texts. The act of authorship often occurs in the selection and arrangement itself.
From this perspective, prompting an AI can sometimes resemble working with found language.
The machine produces excess.
The writer selects.
The writer edits.
The writer rejects.
The writer reframes.
The writer discovers.
This does not make all AI-assisted work successful.
Neither does the existence of scissors make every collage interesting.
Oulipo and Constraint
The Means of Production is perhaps even more interested in another literary tradition: Oulipo.
Founded in 1960 by writers and mathematicians including Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, Oulipo explored the use of constraints as engines of creativity. Rather than treating artistic freedom as the absence of rules, Oulipo treated rules themselves as generative devices. Writers intentionally imposed restrictions upon language in order to discover possibilities they would not otherwise have found.
A sonnet is a constraint.
A lipogram is a constraint.
A sestina is a constraint.
An erasure poem is a constraint.
A machine prompt can also be a constraint.
In this sense, AI may function less as an author than as a peculiar Oulipian device: a system that generates unexpected linguistic possibilities inside a set of formal conditions.
The question becomes:
What did the constraint reveal?
What became possible because of it?
What structures emerged?
What myths surfaced?
What hidden assumptions became visible?
These questions interest us far more than arguments about purity.
Both traditions point the same direction. The interesting question was never whether a machine was involved. It is what the selecting, arranging, and constraining made visible — and whether the result exhibits intelligence, surprise, pressure, or genuine strangeness.
Disclosure
If AI played a significant role in the creation of a submission, we encourage contributors to tell us how.
Not because disclosure is a confession.
Because it is metadata.
We are interested in process.
A story generated from a hundred iterative prompts is one process.
A poem assembled from model outputs and government reports is another.
A novel written by hand in a cabin is another.
A collage made from chatbot hallucinations, spam emails, and insurance paperwork is another.
The machinery itself is often part of the artwork.
What We Want
We seek work that investigates reality rather than merely simulating intelligence.
We seek work that reveals the machinery.
We seek experiments.
Failures.
Artifacts.
Strange hybrids.
Texts that could not have existed before.
Texts that expose the assumptions embedded within systems.
Texts that make language visible again.
If you use AI as a ghostwriter, we will probably be bored.
If you use AI as a microscope, an oracle, a bureaucratic demon, a stochastic collaborator, a procedural constraint, a mythology engine, a linguistic excavation tool, or an instrument for exposing the architecture of belief, we are interested.
Not because the machine is interesting.
Because reality is.
And reality increasingly includes machines.
The Means of Production is not attempting to defend artificial intelligence.
Nor are we interested in condemning it.
We are attempting to study it.
As always, we are interested in the machinery that produces the real.