Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

A number of things inspired this story, beginning with my own feelings about artificial intelligence replacing artists. I chose to focus the story on the film industry because, in addition to providing work for many people outside the arts, it employs a variety of artists, including actors, writers, musicians, and more. I’d also closely followed the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, a big part of which had to do with the potential for AI taking jobs away from film industry professionals or using their likeness without consent. I saw this as an important fight that concerned all artists, even those of us not in the unions, because what happened in Hollywood was likely to have ripples elsewhere.

Another source of inspiration was in how much AI art featuring famous people you see online now. Because famous faces are so familiar, seeing weirdly-distorted AI-generated versions of them gives me the creeps. Even if the image is good enough that you can’t tell, it strikes me as a violation. These are real people being treated like products. Some might argue that Hollywood has always done that in the way celebrities are “packaged” for maximum appeal. The term “through the machine” isn’t something I created. It’s a real, if colloquial, way of referring to a person who’s gone through all the various steps for marketing an A-list celebrity. But in my story, it has the additional meaning of even all of that not being enough. I was seeing fans taking images of already professionally groomed and styled, conventionally attractive people, taken under ideal lighting conditions and no doubt cleaned up on Photoshop, and still using AI to tweak the images further to fit their ideal or play into their fantasies. To me that seemed like it took putting someone through the machine to a whole new level. One that’s unfortunately quite literal.

This reminded me of 1950s stories about nuclear weapons in terms of “cautionary tales about things we’re right in the middle of and barely understand,” and a lot of it was true to life. Were there any places you envisioned a worst-case scenario, and do you think we’re on a trajectory for a future like what the story depicts?

I think AI could have its uses, but I don’t think the technology’s ready to unleash on the world just yet. Nor do I think that art is an area where it needs to be put to use. I think a worst-case scenario could potentially be far worse than what I touch on in my story—something I also go into in my other cautionary tale “Bright Horizons” which was published last year and is about a high school run by an AI. That story turned out to be prophetic in that since its publication a school in Arizona has started doing this. More will likely follow. In the same way, we’re already seeing some of the things described in “Through the Machine” happening in today’s entertainment industry. For instance, Marvel’s Secret Invasion had an entirely AI-generated opening. More recently, AI was used to clean up the Hungarian accents in The Brutalist. AI-generated movies are already being made. Actors are already having their likenesses scanned. We’re seeing performances from people who’ve long been deceased, as happened with the controversial comedy special that disturbingly “resurrected” George Carlin. And as with my story, it’s not just the faces you recognize being affected, it’s also the adjacent jobs. Just recently, I saw a stunt performer vent online about losing a job to AI, just like one of the characters in my story.

I found it interesting that by a straightforward reading the story has no antagonist, one could make the argument that AI-powered capitalism and the uncaring audiences are the antagonists. Was this in your mind when you were putting the story together, and what do you hope that readers carry away from it?

That was absolutely in my mind while writing this. I was seeing so many people shrug and go on using AI like a toy, without a care to the impact it has on the environment and on peoples’ livelihoods. And of course the people making money off this naturally turn a blind eye to these impacts. It’s not in their interest to care, because their priority is the bottom line (something I also addressed in “Bright Horizons”).

What I’d like readers to take away from this is that there’s value to art. That it is in fact an essential service that provides us with something that can improve our lives just by being exposed to it. To give an example from both film and real life, take the story depicted in Sing Sing and the positive impact creating art had on the inmates of this prison. Imagine how different their lives might’ve been had they been exposed to art sooner. When you put art through the machine, you devalue it by filtering out the soul. How something is made is just as important as the finished product.

I also want readers to understand there are real people behind the art we consume. People whose livelihoods and emotional well-being depend on it. In the case of the film industry, streaming has already decreased the availability of work. Most film industry professionals aren’t the wealthy stars we see, but people struggling to book enough jobs to qualify for health insurance. People just trying to cover their basic needs by doing a job they love. This should matter.

Throughout the story AI is treated like a force of nature, and it left me with the feeling that finding shelter from the storm might be the best way forward we have. What led you to develop the ending of the story as you did?

I don’t know if finding shelter is how I’d put it. I think that as consumers we need to fight back with our wallets. And people are fighting back. We’ve seen it in fiction, with several markets making public that they won’t publish AI-generated stories or visual art. With writers and publishers adding clauses to contracts to prevent their work from being used to train LLMs or to run alongside AI-generated content. There are people in other art disciplines also taking a stand, including in the film industry. I wanted to end my story with the hopeful note that there will always be people who demand their art come from human beings, like the people in the little theater. There are also people in positions of greater influence, like Steve, who can perhaps go a step further to encourage human-made work and thus protect both the art and the people who make it.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I have quite a few short stories that’ll be published soon, including my third one in Lightspeed called, “Worlds Apart.” I’m also very excited that I’ll have two new books in the world pretty soon. The first is a novelette titled, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl. This is a genre blend of crime, romance, and retro-futurism, set in an alternate Toronto, that’ll be out in February 2026. I also recently sold my first short fiction collection, The Astronaut Among the Flowers, so that’s something else to look forward to. It should be out around August 2026. Readers can find out more about what I have coming up on my website, where they can also subscribe to my monthly newsletter so they don’t miss any new releases.