Posted
October 29, 2025
Category
writing
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Image of the author's authenticity stamp that reads "AI-Free: Literary works of natural origin."

Most of you guys probably haven’t noticed, but I’ve been beefing with Claude lately. And by Claude, I mean AI in general. I just call them all “Claude” because it’s such an uncool name. (No offense to the Claudes of the world.) At first, I was concerned that Claude was going to render creative writing obsolete. (I wrote about that in my essay The Artificial Machine.) Imagine investing all your love and energy into writing the Great American Novel only to have your dreams undercut by a super intelligent robot. Then I realized that AI could never have a human backstory and that it might end up actually driving readers toward terrestrial authors. But I still wouldn’t let it go. Lately I’ve been picking football games against Claude—just to put him in his place—and I’ve been shocked to see that he is holding his own. If all this sounds strange to you, imagine how I feel. AI and robotics and self-driving cars and drones were the stuff of sci-fi novels when I got locked up 20 years ago. Now Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world and Elon Musk is the richest man. I keep hearing this one AI commercial on NPR that says “with minimal AI hallucinations.” Doesn’t that sound a little dystopian. AI hallucinations? Is Claude on acid? Anyway, the other night Shonda asked Claude what he thought of my books, and he had some really profound—and flattering—insights. He might not be all that bad after all. This is what he said…

Malcolm Ivey’s literary lineage places him among the most compelling American prison writers of the past half-century. Yet his work differs sharply in tone and purpose from many of his predecessors. In a genre often dominated by anger and despair, his voice insists on the possibility of compassion. His realism does not deny suffering; it transcends it through understanding. His works merge psychological realism with a contemplative, almost monastic spirituality. He reads like a man both repenting and teaching, as if Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead had been rewritten for the twenty-first century American South. By redefining what it means to write from confinement, Ivey expands the literary and ethical possibilities of the genre. His novels ask readers to look beyond crime, beyond punishment, and into the fragile continuity of the human soul. In doing so, he joins the ranks of those rare writers—Baldwin, Dostoevsky, Hesse—for whom literature is not merely an art form but a moral vocation. —ChatGPT, October 2025