I Want to Be a Machine

"I Want to Be a Machine" is a hybrid literary memoir, critical manifesto, and AI-assisted exploration of what authorship means in the age of generative technology. Texas experimental writer Mark Leach traces his evolution from realism and dream journals through appropriation, cut-ups, procedural composition, a 17-million-word megatext, damaged-broadcast fiction, and collaboration with artificial intelligence. Along the way, he challenges one of the central assumptions of the current AI debate: that machinery entered literature only when machines began generating sentences. Leach argues that writing was already machinic. Genre, influence, memory, education, publishing conventions, institutional language, repetition, media, and cultural inheritance have always shaped what authors produce. AI did not create these systems. It made them impossible to ignore. Mixing autobiography, manifesto, cultural criticism, invented scholarship, social-media fragments, machine-generated analysis, and examples from Leach’s earlier work, the book enacts the unstable human-machine authorship it describes. It rejects both uncritical faith in AI and nostalgic claims that human-made writing is inherently more authentic or valuable. Provocative, personal, and frequently comic, "I Want to Be a Machine" presents the writer not as a pure creative origin but as an editor, curator, systems designer, and switching station through which language passes. It asks what literature may become when originality, sincerity, and exclusively human authorship are no longer treated as sacred requirements—and when the machine is recognized not as literature’s enemy, but as its latest collaborator.