Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Fiction:

On Fictopoiesis and Minding the Gaps

Fathomless Data

Artificial Intelligence is accelerating everything—it is a global intensifier. It is intensifying currents of hope and fear, accelerating trajectories of learning and forgetting. It is deepening long existent divides and generally amping up the weirdness of the world. To make sense of it all, we tell stories in which AI emerges in metaphor and science-fictional imaginaries, feeding on utopian and dystopian fever dreams and the combustible fuel of fathomless data. Everywhere, people are logging on and falling in love, conjuring meaning from the algorithmic haze, performing expertise like sorcery over black-box processes, and spinning hype and horror into a new form of truth-telling. Generative AI can make anything plausible; it can rewrite Shakespeare and fabricate a story so convincing, you will feel it is the world that is deceiving you and not the LLM.

Narrative is no longer describing the world, it is consuming it.

A crisis?

In his (2023) book, Byung-Chul Han persuasively declares that we are experiencing a crisis of narration. He argues that the overwhelming flood of information in the digital age has fragmented our stories, eroding the possibility of shared meaning, coherence, and identity. Han sees stories everywhere, but he finds them shallow and disconnected, and he longs for a return to narrative cohesion.

I too am concerned about narrative, but my concern lies more with the processual, provisional, and entangled nature of storytelling itself than the quality of the stories themselves. I don’t deny that we are awash in information. But where Han sees information displacing narrative, I see it feeding narrative’s excess and accelerating its velocity to the point where distinctions between representation and reality begin to collapse.

In the early 80s, Jean Baudrillard called these representations simulacra. He described the world as a place in which recursive signs increasingly refer only to one another, in a process that closes the gap between the original and the copy so completely that there is no longer a gap, and ultimately, no longer an original. I do not seek a pathway back to the original, rather I seek a pathway back to the gap.

The thing is, I don’t believe that gap can truly disappear. Even at its most infinitesimal, the gap between representation and the world is there. You can deny it, overwrite it, or ignore it, but it is still there. However, when we lose track of that gap—when we mistake the map for the world—we lose our creative agency to participate in our own becoming. We submit to the fiction of a narrative foretold.

Fictopoiesis or fiction that knows itself

Fictopoiesis is the process of creating fiction as fiction. It is a participation in the imaginative, open-ended storying that precedes the enclosure of the storied. Fiction here is understood as an invented or imagined narration of the world and its possible futures that understands itself as invention: as suspension, as a relation to the real. This kind of fiction is a performance of belief and non-belief, a negotiation with ambiguity, and a way of making meaning with others. As such, fictopoiesis reminds us that narrative is not reality—it is mediation.

You will say:

We know this. Postmodernism reminded us of this.

We know representation is never neutral.

We know there is a blurry line between fact and fiction.

We know it!

But, I say, maybe we have forgotten it.

The space between bodies

I have a terrible memory. There are, however, a few brilliant moments that continue to pulse with significance in my narrative becoming. These moments are the meaningful contingencies that contribute, in some profound and transformational way, to who I am—or so the story goes!

In one such moment, I am around seven or eight years old and it’s my birthday party. I am having the most fun. So. Much. Fun. It is the kind of expansive fun that has edges of mournfulness, because I don’t want it to stop, ever. In the moment, the texture of everything is hilarious, kinetic, accessible, and the world holds me in the cup of its care.

Uncontrollable, non-invasive laughter is available wherever I look. Should I wish to open my mouth and laugh, the laughter is right there—but just enough of it, never too much to drown in. We’re at Chuck E Cheese, a big disgusting Capitalist extravaganza of plastic, and noise, and oversized mallets for hitting things, and I am loving it all, because this is before critique. This is all desire and the desires are all satiable in a way they never will be again.

It is egocentric, but not in the colonizing sense. It is a fullness of being without a claim over others. I am pure flapping enjoyment and bliss, wearing my favourite tasselled boots and denim skirt. My friends and I exist in this moment inside a mutual love that is utterly uncomplicated. And the cake is about to arrive!

But I have to go to the bathroom.

I’ve been ignoring it for a while, and it is creeping up. Slowly the feeling is amping into urgency, tinging the fun with a growing hint of dread. Because I cannot bear to tear myself away from the fun for even a moment. Just as my need becomes alarming however, a friend pushes her chair back from the table, as if on cue, and announces she is heading to the bathroom.

I exclaim in joy and relief, “Can you go for me too?”

We look at each other, blinking across the space between our bodies. We are on the cusp of hilarity, play, desire, and the punctuating necessities of embodiment. We are staring at ourselves inside that moment of total ecstatic absurdity when everything is both possible and insurmountable. What is wrong with this perfectly reasonable request? Why couldn’t she go to the bathroom for me?

In the moment after the suspension of disbelief, the strangeness of the distance between our bodies revealed itself to us. And it was strange—that is my point. We could imagine it: our bodies in sync, metabolically. Fiction flowed between us, making us intelligible to each other and ourselves. We were not just crafting a narrative; we were performing creative relation.

Drift

In retelling this story here, I can feel new moments emerging: the look on my friend’s face, the texture of my sunshine t-shirt. Where do these details come from? Why do they matter?

The concept of drift names a central tension in both AI development and human meaning-making: the inevitable misalignment between our model of the world and the world itself as it unfolds. In AI, drift typically refers to a breakdown in correspondence, when a machine-learning model, trained on a static body of data, falls out of sync with changing environments. LLMs, for instance, are essentially frozen knowledge snapshots. They operate with fixed parameters while the world continues to move. As the conditions around them shift, their representational relevance decays, and the gaps between representation and reality become visible.

But drift is not exclusive to machines. Humans drift as well. As our accumulated knowledge, cultural assumptions, and patterned ways of knowing—our own training sets—become rigid, outdated, misaligned, we respond with a frantic, unsustainable attempt to keep up with the accelerating present, to maintain narrative coherence and real-time explanatory precision in a world that keeps slipping away. And as we drift, so do our memories, not only through the fluid, reconstructive processes of narration, but also into the statistical memory of the LLM.

Drift happens in the spaces between data and referent. In both model and memory, the story no longer refers to what it was or is. It has become something else—something shaped by systems of sense-making that are always on the move. This is not error; it is exposure.

In me, the memory reshapes itself each time I recall or retell it. In the LLM, the story is vectorized, mathematized, and synthesized with everything the model “remembers” about childhood, friendship, bladder control, and birthday parties.

Drift reveals the gap between map and territory, model and world. It reminds us that our stories, like our systems, are not mirrors of reality but generative constructions shaped in time.

Drift is a return to fiction.

Disappearing fictions

We do a great deal of work with story to hide the process of storying. Narrative has a way of installing coherence after the fact to hide its own constructedness. We use stories in the world, to blur or erase the fictional edges of things. We don’t just tell stories, we inhabit them, enforce them, and retroactively smooth them into the real. Hyperstition, mythopoiesis, and prediction are three narrative functions that help perform this smoothing, collapsing the distance between invention and reality.

Hyperstition (a portmanteau of hyper and superstition) is fiction that makes itself real through repetition, acting like a viral incantation and infecting culture through belief, investment, and feedback loops. Generative AI carries this hyperstitional force, conjuring futures around itself through institutional alignment and hype, installing itself into the future as an incontrovertible fact.

Mythopoiesis, by contrast, is the creative act of world-making through belief and longing. It is a softer, future-oriented narrative that lends symbolic coherence to our rituals of birthday parties and other celebrations. Fiction is erased into consensual and shared narrative meaning.

Prediction, on the other hand, mathematizes away the fiction into probabilities, binding the future to the past by collapsing uncertainty into correspondence.

These narrative forces don’t just describe the world; they build it, smoothing over the fictional seam so well that we forget it was ever there.

When fiction disappears into the real, it leaves the illusion of determinism, which feels like narrative necessity. But we are existing in a profoundly plastic moment. The ways that we narrate this story have world-making ramifications. Fictopoiesis resists the impulse to colonize the future with narrative closure. It returns us again and again to the generative, uncertain processes of storied meaning.

Fictopoiesis is a practice of keeping the future open.

Fictions of a breast

Sometimes an event happens that enacts a sudden and violent fissure in the storyline. These events rupture narrative continuity and refuse to fold into the story we thought we were living. COVID did this to us, collectively, and extreme weather events also do this: reveal the fragile narrative coherence of consensual reality.

I recently had a cancer diagnosis that thrust me, quite suddenly, into my own narrative unravelling. My story flapped wildly out of control, causing a flash flood of genred terror, despair, and exhilaration: What story is this? Is it a horror story? Body gore? A story of woman prevailing? Martyred mother? Artist dies too soon? The fictions of a breast—the meaning of a lump. I caused it somehow; it was my fault; I don’t deserve it; it’s disgusting; it’s not right; it’s terrible; it’s ugly. My children don’t deserve the loss of me.

In the midst of this, I texted a good friend: “It’s cancer.”
She texted back: “Okay. Let’s go slowly. What is the difference between yesterday and today?”

Everything was different and everything remained the same.

This is the fictopoietic nature of being in time. This is the essential creativity at the heart of imagining oneself in the world. All of my narrative explanations, all of them, were fictions, and this was a grace. I could let them come. And I could let them go. I could return, again and again, to my creative participation in un/knowing myself.

As I lay upon and within the machines—receiving the strange sociotechnical gifts of surgery, imaging, radiation—my fictional imagining opened up to its own posthumanity. Grateful for the gap between our bodies and their othering intelligence that permeated my definitional boundaries, I merged with the mechanic sense that holds the data of all the breasts in all the centre-of-the-worlds before mine, imprinting their pain and triumph to my moment on the table. The machines held me as I held them. Their gaze, trained upon my breast, exposing the fictional centre of the world, along with all the fictions of my gender, my desire and desire-ability, my body without breasts, my own creative agency to narrate the story; the fiction of scientific certainty and of my utter incapacity to name the thing that was happening to the fictions of my self.

On bullshit and hallucinations

LLMs have a tendency to hallucinate and fabricate correct-seeming outputs aligned with the data. In this way, they have truthiness, in that their outputs seem plausible. They could be true. They look like things that are true, and they are articulated with an almost righteous clarity. Yet they are, upon closer inspection, sometimes, shockingly not true (which is not the same as fictional). For this reason LLMs have been decried as bullshitters.

The argument goes like this: LLMs are bullshitters because they generate fluent language without regard for truth, aiming only to produce statistically likely outputs. Drawing on philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between lying and bullshitting, bullshit is speech indifferent to whether it’s true or false. It is unlike lying, which presupposes knowledge of the truth. And it is unlike fiction, which never called itself anything else.

The LLM’s tendency to produce factually incorrect or fabricated hallucinations is seen as a fundamental byproduct of their design, which lacks genuine understanding or belief, even while it performs with absolute confidence. The epistemic violence of bullshit lies in the lack of interest or care, as it obscures, distracts, and disorients without anchoring itself to any relation between language and the world.

Bullshit as a framing, though, has never struck me as helpful. Calling LLMs “bullshitters” casts a blanket judgment on all their outputs—even the useful ones—as inherently worthless.

I don’t care that the model itself doesn’t care; it holds enough traces of care, including my own, to matter.

Perhaps, like drift, LLM hallucinations instead offer a window into the generative mechanisms we are otherwise trying to conceal. These so-called errors aren’t just glitches—they’re symptomatic of the fictopoietic edges of reality that we’re actively attempting to smooth over in the name of optimization, fluency, and control. The crisis of our moment emerges in our compulsion to dominate contingency and unknowability by erasing the gap between data and the world.

I worry that as we continue to improve the models—minimizing their drift and reducing the obviousness of hallucinations—we risk further forgetting that the gap is always there. It is in the gaps that creative becoming flows. The gaps are where meaning is emergent: meaning that requires new narratives, new stories, new data, new conversations, new concepts, new fictions for our time, as we reach towards understanding, without ever arriving.

Fictopoeisis and the future

If you are still reading, you will have gathered by now that I cannot help but think the world through my own cybernetic relations with it. My body is a conduit for fictional understanding. I am aware of the tedious squabbles over fiction and nonfiction. What is the truth, and what is a lie? If I tell you that my cancer diagnosis was a fiction, you might think I never received the phone call, never lay upon the tables, never made love with an MRI machine. In some profound way—and I don’t mean this in a tricky or clever way—this is also true. The fictionality of our reaching for understanding is what I’m interested in: the fictionality that is at the edges of all the data, statistics, and mathematized likelihoods of human survival on a burning planet.

My offering is this: that we must hold onto humility and the joyous absurdity of our bodies in relation to each other. The data of our lives is an always partial gift to the future. Even as we achieve increasing increments of technological precision, there is wisdom in the awareness that understanding is poiesis—creative becoming, and that fiction, an essential feature of understanding, enables our gaps to breathe.