Culture • Literature • Technology • Art • Film • Sound
How would William S. Burroughs see AI?
Cut the machine
The cut-up method, the Third Mind and the machine age of writing, art, film and music
From scissors, newspapers and magnetic tape to algorithms, synthetic voices, generated images and machine-made music — what might one of the twentieth century’s great disruptors of language have made of artificial intelligence?
By Gordon Lawrence Taylor — Voice In The Void
Why I started thinking about Burroughs and AI
William S. Burroughs is a writer, thinker and cultural agitator I have long admired and deeply respected. Not because he was safe. Not because he was polite. And certainly not because he attempted to please everybody.
What I admire is the independence of the man. Burroughs had an extraordinary ability to look directly at the machinery of society — language, authority, conformity, addiction, propaganda, sexuality, technology and control — and then start pulling that machinery apart. He could be provocative, abrasive, darkly humorous and deliberately uncomfortable. He was, in the best possible sense, a disturber of comfortable excrement — the polished nonsense, hypocrisy and manufactured conformity that society so often prefers not to examine too closely.
He questioned the things people were expected not to question. He pushed at accepted boundaries. He refused to polish every thought until it became socially harmless. That is part of what I respect about him.
I do not regard Burroughs simply as a favourite author. I regard him as one of those rare cultural figures whose ideas continue to make me think long after I have finished reading the page, watching the film or listening to the interview.
His work can provoke disagreement, but indifference is much harder.
For me, that is one of the marks of an important artist: someone who does not merely reflect the culture around him, but interferes with it.
I have read his books, watched his films and interviews, followed his ideas, listened to recordings, and returned again and again to the way he thought about language, society, control, technology and human behaviour.
There was something about Burroughs that always appealed to me. He could be strange, confronting, darkly funny, direct and uncompromising, but underneath all of that was an extraordinary ability to look at something from an angle that most people simply did not consider.
And I have always loved the way he spoke: straight to the point. No unnecessary decoration. No pretending. No desperate attempt to make an uncomfortable idea sound comfortable. His words could hit with the force of a gunshot — direct, sharp and difficult to ignore. Sometimes an entire argument could be contained in one Burroughs sentence.
That has stayed with me.
Burroughs was also never simply a novelist. He was interested in what words could do. He was interested in sound, tape, photography, film, collage, chance, dreams, recording, manipulation, cut-ups, power and, again and again, control.
The surviving Burroughs archive demonstrates just how multimedia his working process actually was. Alongside manuscripts and correspondence were clippings, photographs, cut-ups, notebooks and audio recordings.
So when we discuss Burroughs and artificial intelligence, we are not forcing a twentieth-century novelist into a twenty-first-century technological argument simply because it sounds clever.
We are dealing with somebody who already spent decades asking what happens when:
Human language encounters machines.
Burroughs was never built for conformity
Burroughs was never going to be somebody everybody agreed with. That was part of the point. He did not seem interested in becoming culturally respectable simply so that everybody could feel comfortable around him. He did not need universal approval.
He was an outsider in many respects — a gay man born in 1914, living through periods in which homosexuality itself could place a person outside the accepted social order. But Burroughs did not transform himself into some harmless version of himself simply to make society comfortable.
He remained Burroughs: difficult, funny, dark, provocative, independent, contradictory and frequently impossible to place inside the neat boxes that society likes to construct.
That independence matters to me. I do not admire Burroughs because somebody told me I should. I admire him because I have read him. I have listened to him. I have watched him. His ideas stayed with me. And after all those years, I still find myself returning to his words.
And then there were the cats
There is another side of William S. Burroughs that should never be forgotten.
He loved cats.
For all the familiar imagery surrounding Burroughs — the dark suit, the deadpan voice, guns, drugs, cut-ups, strange machines, apocalyptic visions and examinations of control — there was also a man capable of genuine tenderness towards animals, particularly cats.
That affection entered his writing directly. The Cat Inside is an entire Burroughs work devoted to cats, his relationships with them and the strange bond between humans and the animals with whom they share their lives.
I have always liked that contradiction.
Here was a man capable of writing about control, addiction, violence, language as a virus, social manipulation and the darker machinery of human behaviour — who could then turn his attention towards a cat with genuine affection.
That matters because Burroughs was never only one thing.
He could be severe and gentle.
Dark and extremely funny.
Detached in one moment and unexpectedly tender in another.
That complexity is another reason I continue to admire and respect him.
And somehow I can imagine the scene perfectly: William S. Burroughs sitting in front of an AI machine, questioning its answers, cutting apart its language and attempting to make it misbehave —
while a cat sits beside him, completely unimpressed by the entire operation.
The Burroughs sentence
Part of my fascination with Burroughs has always been his ability to compress an observation into a few words. Sometimes funny. Sometimes vicious. Sometimes absurd. Sometimes uncomfortable. Sometimes unbelievably precise.
One of my favourites is:
“I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”
— William S. Burroughs
That is almost Burroughs reduced to a single burst of language. The important question is not: Do people approve of me? It is: What power do they actually possess over me?
There is the Burroughs question again: control.
Another favourite:
“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager.’”
— William S. Burroughs
It makes me laugh. But underneath the humour there is something else. Look at the world. Look at the insanity. Look at the systems supposedly controlling it. Then ask:
Who exactly is running this place?
And this:
“There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.”
— William S. Burroughs
Then perhaps the ultimate Burroughs attack on interfering do-gooders:
“Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.”
— William S. Burroughs
That is exactly the quality I mean when I say Burroughs could fire a sentence like a gun. There is very little wasted ammunition.
And perhaps one of the statements that connects most strongly with the entire question of Burroughs, creativity and artificial intelligence is:
“How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.”
— William S. Burroughs
Producing conformity.
Those two words become extraordinarily important when we start talking about AI.
What happens if millions of people begin using the same systems to write, design, create images, compose music and generate film? Does technology expand creativity, or does it quietly begin standardising it? Does the machine help people discover their own voices, or does everybody gradually begin sounding like the machine?
That is exactly the kind of question I believe Burroughs would have wanted to disturb rather than neatly answer.
Build a good name — protect the work
There is another Burroughs quotation I have always loved because underneath the famous outlaw image, the experimentation and the provocation, it is remarkably practical:
“Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.”
— William S. Burroughs
That becomes even more important in an age of AI.
If machines can produce thousands of images, thousands of paragraphs, thousands of musical ideas and thousands of videos, then sheer quantity becomes almost meaningless.
Producing something is no longer necessarily the difficult part. The difficult part becomes: What do you choose? What do you reject? What do you change? What do you stand behind? What are you prepared to put your name on? What did you actually bring to it?
And ultimately:
Is the work any good?
Then, at four in the morning…
Early one morning I woke at around 4:00 a.m., and for some reason a question entered my head:
What would William S. Burroughs have done with AI?
Not simply: Would he have liked AI?
Not: Would he have hated AI?
Those questions immediately seemed far too simple.
The question that interested me was:
What would he actually have done with it?
How would somebody who physically cut sentences into pieces, rearranged printed texts, manipulated magnetic tape, collaborated with filmmakers and artists and spent decades examining language as a system of control respond to a machine capable of generating language almost instantly?
Would Burroughs sit there, type Write me a novel and obediently accept whatever came back?
I seriously doubt it.
My feeling is that Burroughs would have played with the machine. Tested it. Pushed it. Contradicted it. Fed its own words back into it. Made it argue against itself. Taken the output apart. Reassembled it. Combined things that were never intended to belong together. Generated something and then deliberately destroyed the structure of what had been generated.
He may have treated AI not as an authority but as raw material.
Burroughs would not simply let AI control him. He would try to control the relationship. Or perhaps even more accurately: he would play with control itself.
That thought started this article.
“Burroughs would not simply have asked what AI could do for him. He might have asked what he could do to AI.”
The machine has entered the room
Imagine William S. Burroughs sitting in front of a contemporary computer.
Not a typewriter. Not a tape recorder. Not a newspaper waiting to be attacked with scissors.
A machine.
You give it a sentence; it returns another. You describe an image; it constructs something that was never photographed. You provide a voice; the technology can create words that voice never actually spoke. You describe music; a system generates musical material. You describe a moving scene; a machine creates moving images.
Burroughs looks at the screen.
Perhaps he smiles. Perhaps he becomes suspicious. Perhaps both reactions happen simultaneously.
Then comes the Burroughs question:
Who is controlling whom?
Before AI there were scissors
Cut the page • Break the sentence • Interrupt habit
The technique most closely associated with Burroughs is the cut-up method. Its immediate development belongs not to Burroughs alone but to his friend and collaborator Brion Gysin.
In Paris in 1959, Gysin physically cut printed material into sections and rearranged the pieces. Burroughs subsequently began pursuing the possibilities of this approach intensively. There were earlier precedents in Dada, particularly Tristan Tzara, but Burroughs and Gysin transformed cut-up into something closer to a philosophy of composition.
The basic principle was simple:
Take an existing text. Cut it apart. Change the order. Read what emerges.
Burroughs explained that cutting a page into sections and rearranging those sections could reveal sentences and relationships the writer had never consciously intended.
That is critical.
The cut-up was not simply about creating nonsense. It was about interrupting habit.
Normally, a writer moves according to grammar, memory, expectation, taste, education, ideology and conscious intention. The cut-up introduces interference. Something enters from outside conscious control. The scissors become a collaborator. Suddenly combinations appear that the conscious writer might never deliberately have constructed.
The scissors interrupted the author — and from that interruption, another possibility appeared.
Burroughs used cut-up and related processes extensively in works associated with his Nova or Cut-Up Trilogy: The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964).
Already we arrive at a question that sounds remarkably contemporary:
If the artist creates the conditions for an accident, who created the result?
The Third Mind — when creative control exists between participants
Burroughs and Gysin gave another powerful phrase to this territory:
The Third Mind
Their collaborative book The Third Mind appeared in 1978 and brought together writing, cut-up material, visual elements and collaborative experiments.
The phrase becomes incredibly useful when thinking about AI. When two creative forces encounter each other, the result may not belong completely to either. Something happens between them.
Burroughs + Gysin. Writer + scissors. Voice + tape. Human + camera. Musician + sampler. Artist + accident.
And now perhaps:
Human + generative system = a third creative space
That does not mean a machine suddenly becomes human. It does not mean AI deserves identical artistic status. It means that creativity can happen within a relationship.
A person enters with an idea. The machine produces possibilities. The person rejects most of them. One fragment survives. Another is transformed. Two outputs collide. Human writing is added. The order changes. An image becomes sound. Sound becomes text. Text becomes visual collage.
What finally emerges might not have existed without either participant.
But the human remains responsible for selection, judgement, direction, intervention, meaning and ultimately responsibility for the work.
AI is not a giant pair of digital scissors
We should also avoid a lazy technological comparison. Generative AI is not literally the cut-up method.
A language model does not simply contain a cupboard full of books and pull complete sentences from them like strips of newspaper. Modern generative systems learn statistical relationships from large quantities of data and generate new outputs according to learned patterns and probabilities.
So technically:
Cut-up ≠ generative AI
But culturally and philosophically there are fascinating overlaps. Both destabilise linear authorship. Both can generate unexpected juxtapositions. Both challenge conventional concepts of originality. Both operate through material already existing within culture. Both can produce outcomes the human operator did not completely anticipate.
And both force us to confront a deceptively simple sentence:
“I made this.”
What exactly does made mean?
Writing — would Burroughs have used AI?
It is difficult for me to imagine Burroughs encountering a machine capable of instantly mutating language and not wanting to experiment with it.
This was somebody who already allowed external mechanisms into composition. Scissors were technology. A typewriter was technology. A tape recorder was technology. Magnetic tape was technology. Photography was technology. Film was technology.
Eventually, the computer was simply another stage.
The interesting question is therefore not Would Burroughs use AI?
It is:
How would Burroughs misuse the intended use of AI — creatively?
What happens if the machine is designed to make language smooth and you deliberately make it rough? What happens if it is designed to answer questions and you make it argue with its own answer? What happens if the technology wants coherence and you demand rupture?
Burroughs might feed it news reports against dreams, advertising against obscenity, political speeches against medical documents, police reports against science fiction, religious language against pornography, computer code against poetry, one AI answer against another AI answer.
Then cut the results. Rearrange them. Feed the rearranged material back. Do it again.
Instead of allowing the computer to remove uncertainty, Burroughs might deliberately use it to manufacture uncertainty.
“He might not have asked the machine to write for him. He might have asked the machine to misbehave.”
The great AI contradiction
Here something particularly interesting happens.
Burroughs used randomness to escape predictable language. AI can certainly create unexpected associations, but AI can also generate language that is extremely safe, statistically probable, polished and familiar.
This creates a beautiful contradiction:
AI can be a machine of surprise. AI can also be a machine of averageness.
If everyone feeds their creativity through similar systems, are we expanding human imagination? Or are we gradually producing the average paragraph, the average face, the average song, the average advertisement, the average opinion?
Everything professional. Everything polished. Everything grammatically correct. Everything technically impressive.
Everything strangely familiar.
Burroughs, the man who said he hated those dedicated to producing conformity, might find that possibility deeply disturbing.
From Burroughs to Bowie — when the scissors became software
There is a remarkable bridge between Burroughs’ analogue experiments and the digital era:
David Bowie.
Bowie became fascinated by Burroughs and used versions of the cut-up method in lyric writing. Eventually the scissors became software.
During the 1990s Bowie used a computer system commonly called the Verbasizer, developed with Ty Roberts, to reorganise and randomise textual material.
That gives us an extraordinary cultural path:
Dada → Brion Gysin → William S. Burroughs → scissors → magnetic tape → David Bowie → computerised cut-up → generative systems
This is not a claim that Burroughs invented AI.
He obviously did not.
It is a history of artistic desire.
Artists repeatedly search for ways of disrupting themselves. The machine becomes useful because it can sometimes return something the conscious mind did not intend.
The tape recorder — Burroughs was already thinking like a remix artist
Perhaps the most important technological connection is the tape recorder.
Burroughs did not simply use tape to document a voice. He experimented with recording as material:
Cut it. Loop it. Move it. Repeat it. Overlay it. Play it somewhere else. Transform its context.
That is enormous because it means Burroughs was already participating in one of the central transitions underlying modern digital culture:
From receiving media to manipulating media
That road eventually leads towards sampling, remixing, looping, digital editing, DAWs, mash-ups, video manipulation and now:
Generative AI
The Electronic Revolution — when language becomes a virus
Burroughs’ interest in recording went far beyond artistic novelty.
In The Electronic Revolution, first issued in 1970, he developed provocative ideas about language, recording, playback, propaganda and control.
Some of those ideas were deliberately extreme. But beneath the strange machinery is a profoundly modern concern:
What happens when technologically reproduced language can manipulate reality?
Burroughs frequently described language using the metaphor of a virus.
Words spread. Messages infect. Repetition changes behaviour. Recordings detach a voice from the physical speaker.
And once a recording exists, it can be altered.
Cut. Moved. Recontextualised. Repeated.
Something someone actually said can be rearranged into something else.
Suddenly we are uncomfortably close to the age of synthetic media.
Burroughs and the age of the deepfake
Imagine showing Burroughs modern voice cloning.
A person apparently speaks words they never said. A dead performer can apparently speak again. A face can appear in moving footage depicting an event that never occurred. A photograph can represent something that never stood before a camera.
The old relationship between recording and evidence begins to fracture.
Burroughs would likely recognise both the creative possibility and the danger, because this is where artificial intelligence stops being merely a creative toy and becomes:
A machine of informational power
Film manipulation is not new. Photographic manipulation is not new. Propaganda is not new. Fabricated evidence is not new.
But generative systems radically lower the technical threshold.
That changes scale.
And scale changes society.
Film — cutting reality itself
Burroughs’ experiments also moved into film through his collaboration with filmmaker Antony Balch. Cut Ups, released in 1967, used fractured imagery, repetition and collage in a cinematic extension of Burroughsian disruption.
Film itself has always involved cut-up principles. A scene is filmed several times. The best fragments are selected. Two people photographed hours apart appear to have one continuous conversation. Music recorded months later appears underneath. A street in one country becomes a fictional street somewhere else. Different moments become one sequence.
Film has always manufactured reality through arrangement.
Digital editing intensified that possibility. AI pushes it further.
We can now generate backgrounds, voices, faces, objects, storyboards, visual effects, dialogue, moving imagery and potentially entire scenes that never stood before any conventional camera.
Burroughs would probably have recognised the logic immediately:
Cut reality. Change the order. Create another reality.
Visual art — destroy the image to find another image
Burroughs should not be understood solely as a writer. He produced visual art, worked with image and text, collaborated with artists and increasingly devoted energy to visual practices later in life.
His famous shotgun works pushed chance into the physical act of making imagery.
Again, the importance is chance.
He establishes the conditions. Something unpredictable happens. Then the artist responds.
The pattern becomes:
Action → accident → observation → selection → intervention
That is another useful way of thinking about AI-generated imagery.
The first generated image need not be the artwork. It can be the accident. The starting point.
The artist can crop it, paint over it, combine it, destroy it, print it, photograph it, collage it, regenerate sections, combine it with analogue material or reject it entirely.
Then AI stops functioning as an automatic artist.
It becomes one stage inside a human process.
Design — when generation becomes material rather than answer
The same principle applies to design.
AI can generate layouts, textures, typography concepts, compositions, colour relationships and visual ideas extremely quickly.
That speed is useful, but speed can create its own danger.
The designer can stop asking Why this? and begin accepting because the machine produced it.
Burroughs gives us another possibility.
Treat the generated design as something to attack.
Cut it. Reverse it. Remove half of it. Put the wrong element in the wrong place. Make the typography fight the image. Introduce human damage. Do something the software did not predict.
Perhaps the most interesting relationship with AI is not:
Machine → finished product
but:
Human → machine → accident → human → transformation
Music — Burroughs was already inside the sampler
For me, this connection is particularly important.
Burroughs’ influence does not stop at literature. It runs directly into experimental music and industrial culture. His ideas influenced a culture in which tape loops, found sound, samples, manipulated voices and cut-up structures became creative language.
That line runs deep into underground electronic music.
Because what is sampling?
Take recorded material. Cut it. Move it. Change its context. Loop it. Layer it. Transform it.
Cut the tape. Move the fragment. Repeat it. Distort it. Destroy the original context. Create another meaning.
Eventually those physical operations became digital.
Tape became waveform. Scissors became mouse clicks. Splicing became editing. Tape loops became digital loops. The studio became a computer.
Then came sampling, remixing, granular synthesis, glitch, mash-up, algorithmic composition, DAWs and now:
Generative music
Machines did not suddenly enter music with AI. Machines have been inside electronic music for generations.
The question is not:
Was a machine involved?
The question is:
What did the human do with it?
Music — tool or replacement?
Suppose somebody asks an AI system:
Make me a dark electronic track.
The system produces everything. The person downloads it. Nothing is changed.
Compare that with another producer who generates twenty fragments, keeps three seconds from one, converts another to audio, resamples it, changes the rhythm, writes bass underneath it, adds field recordings, destroys the generated harmony, reorganises the arrangement and mixes the final composition.
Both used AI.
But describing the creative process merely as “AI was used” tells us almost nothing.
The degree of human authorship is radically different.
The machine produces possibility. The human decides what survives.
The scissors did not write Nova Express
This deserves to be said plainly.
The scissors did not write Nova Express. The tape recorder did not become William Burroughs. The Verbasizer did not become David Bowie. The sampler did not become the musician. Photoshop did not become the photographer. The synthesizer did not become the composer.
Technology changes the location of human action.
Sometimes the human performs every physical gesture. Sometimes the human directs. Sometimes selects. Sometimes manipulates. Sometimes combines. Sometimes destroys. Sometimes rejects.
Sometimes the most important artistic decision is simply:
No. Not that one.
AI is cheating / AI is the future
Both statements are too simple.
That is part of the problem with the current argument.
One side declares:
AI is cheating.
Another declares:
AI is the future.
Neither statement tells us very much.
A synthesizer can be used lazily. A synthesizer can also transform music. A camera can take a meaningless snapshot. A camera can create extraordinary art. A DAW can produce formulaic music. A DAW can enable one person without access to an expensive recording studio to create something remarkable.
AI will be no different in that respect.
It can produce rubbish. It can produce clichés. It can imitate. It can help. It can accelerate. It can inspire. It can become a shortcut. It can become an instrument. It can become a crutch.
And it can become a system of control.
The question is never simply:
Did you use the tool?
It is:
What did you do with it?
The economic question
There is another side to AI:
Cost.
Historically, creating certain forms of culture required resources — a recording studio, producer, engineer, session musicians, film crew, editors, designers, equipment, processing, printing and distribution.
AI can reduce some of those barriers dramatically.
That can be liberating.
A person without significant money may suddenly be capable of experimenting with forms of production previously unavailable to them.
But the reverse question also appears.
If companies discover that one machine can perform parts of work previously undertaken by writers, illustrators, musicians, designers, editors and technicians:
Who benefits economically?
Does AI democratise creativity, or centralise creative production inside corporations controlling enormous technical systems?
Does the independent artist gain power, or does another middleman gain even more?
Burroughs would probably recognise the contradiction.
Liberation and control can emerge from the same machine.
Training data — whose culture is inside the machine?
This is where the comparison between cut-up and AI reaches an important limit.
When Burroughs cut a newspaper, the physical source existed directly in front of him.
AI systems may learn from enormous bodies of material: books, images, music, photography, writing, code, design, language and culture.
That creates serious questions.
Who created the original material? Were they asked? Should they be compensated? Can style be owned? What counts as transformation? What constitutes infringement? What happens when a commercial system learns from millions of creators and then competes economically with those same creators?
These are not minor technical arguments.
They concern:
Who owns culture?
And Burroughs was intensely interested in ownership and control.
But Burroughs would probably ask another question
Perhaps the most Burroughsian question is not:
Can AI create art?
It is:
Who controls the machine?
Who owns the system? Who writes its rules? Who determines what it can say? Who decides what it cannot say? Who owns the servers? Who chooses the training material? Who gets paid? Who becomes redundant? Which languages dominate? Which cultures become underrepresented? Which aesthetics are promoted? Which ideas become invisible? Who controls access? Who possesses the data? Who watches the users? Who profits from the interaction? Who can alter the rules tomorrow?
And what happens when enormous numbers of people begin relying on a small number of systems to help them write, search, design, compose, communicate, learn, interpret information and understand the world?
Now we are no longer talking merely about a useful computer program.
We are talking about:
Power.
AI as a control machine
This is perhaps where Burroughs becomes most relevant.
He spent enormous creative energy thinking about systems of control: advertising, language, government, addiction, mass communication, bureaucracy, behaviour, media and authority.
The visible controller.
The invisible controller.
And the internalised controller — the point where the controlled person begins policing themselves.
That brings me back to my original thought.
Burroughs would not let the machine control him.
Or at least, I cannot imagine him willingly doing so.
He would probably want to know:
Where are the edges? Where are the weaknesses? What happens if I refuse the intended workflow? What happens when I make it contradict itself? What happens if I cut its answer apart?
Conformity
Remember the quotation:
“How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.”