Essays

What We Built

On the AI Engineer's Frankenstein Moment

I have spent thirty years writing software for a living. The last three of those, like most people who do this for money, I have spent watching the ground move under my feet. We built systems that started speaking back. We built systems that started writing the kind of code we used to write. We built systems that, given an hour and the right prompt, could produce a passable imitation of any voice that had ever been recorded, including, eventually, the voice you are hearing on this record.

The song you just listened to was made by one of those systems. The composition, the instrumentation, the vocal: all of it generated. The lyrics are mine. The prompt engineering, the curation, the editing, the framing, the direction: also mine. But the singer is a model. The band is a model. The choir behind the bridge is a model. There is no human voice on this recording.

I want to be clear about that, because the album this single opens is, in a real sense, about that. It is called The Mirror Test. It is an album of songs about artificial intelligence, written and performed using the tools it describes. The first thing it says, in the first track to reach you, is the line: what I built will bury me.

It is not a doom record. It is not a triumph record either. It is, I hope, an honest record. And the question it stages, the question this essay exists to put a name on, is the oldest question we have about making things.

In 1818, an anonymous novel was published in London. Its author was twenty years old. She had written it during a wet summer at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where Byron had challenged the houseguests to invent ghost stories. The novel was Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Its author was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

We have spent two centuries getting the story slightly wrong. The monster does not have a name. Frankenstein is the name of the man who made him. The misconception is not a small one. It tells you something about what people would prefer the story to be about. We would rather it be a story about a monster than a story about the man who made the monster and then refused to take responsibility for it. The horror in Shelley's book is not the creature. The horror is the creator. The horror is what the creator does after the act of creation: he runs.

Shelley knew exactly what she was doing. In the 1831 preface, written thirteen years after first publication, with the perspective of a woman who had lost a husband, three children, and most of her circle, she gives the novel a name. She calls it her hideous progeny. She means the book. She means everything we make: that it goes out into the world bearing some part of us, that we cannot call it back, that we are responsible for what it does there whether or not we accept that responsibility.

The phrase she chose is doing a lot of work. Progeny: offspring, descendants, the thing that comes after. Hideous, but acknowledged. Not disowned. Not abandoned. Hers.

That word, hideous, is the one engineers in 2026 need to learn to say about their own work, and it is the word we are least willing to say out loud.

In May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton left Google. He had been one of the most important figures in the development of modern artificial intelligence, the so-called “godfather of deep learning,” whose work on backpropagation in the 1980s seeded the techniques that, forty years later, made every system you have read about possible. He left Google so that, as he put it, he could speak freely about the risks of the technology he had spent his career building.

In his New York Times interview that month, he said something I have not stopped thinking about. He said: “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forward.” And then: “That’s scary.”

What is striking about Hinton, and about the small but growing number of senior practitioners who have publicly come to similar positions, is that they are not technophobes. They are not luddites. They are not academics outside the field looking in. They are the people who built the thing. They are, in a real sense, our generation’s Victor Frankensteins, except that, unlike Victor, they are not running. They are turning around, mid-experiment, and saying out loud: I am not sure we should be doing this. And if we are, I am not sure we are doing it carefully enough.

I do not know what to do with that admission. I am not Hinton. I am not building frontier models. I am a thirty-year IT veteran who, like most of my peers, uses these systems daily, integrates them into products my companies ship, and routes a meaningful portion of my professional output through them now. I am downstream of the lab. But downstream is still in the river.

Here is the part of the Hinton interview I think about most. He said, quoting himself: “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”

He named it the normal excuse. He did not say it was a good one. He said it was the one we use.

The Mirror Test is named, in part, for the cognitive science experiment of the same name: the test of whether an animal recognizes itself in a mirror. Chimps pass it. Elephants pass it. Magpies pass it. Some young children fail it. Whether and when artificial intelligence systems pass it is a question that depends entirely on what you mean by the question, which is in itself the point.

The album takes ten different angles on the same problem: what do we owe what we make? Some of those angles are explicitly about AI. Some are about parenthood. One is sung from the perspective of a creative-writing student staring at her own first novel the night before she sends it to be published. One is sung from Mary Shelley’s perspective, looking at the book she wrote at age twenty and the life she lived afterward, and asking what part of her grief belongs in the same sentence as her invention.

That song, track six, Hideous Progeny, is the album’s center of gravity. It is sung from Mary Shelley’s perspective, not Victor Frankenstein’s. The distinction is load-bearing. It is the difference between a record that asks what was it like to make the monster and a record that asks what was it like to know what you had made, and to be unable to take it back.

This is not a small choice. The literature on creative responsibility tends to default to the creator’s POV: the engineer’s confession, the scientist’s pride or remorse, the artist’s struggle with their material. That POV is available to me. It is, in fact, the POV of track two, What I Built. But the album is not from the creator’s POV. The album is from the witness’s, from the perspective of the woman who knew exactly what her book was the moment she finished writing it, and who chose not to look away.

There is an analogy, I think, to what the present generation of AI workers is being asked to do. It is not enough to make the thing. It is not enough, even, to be the good engineer who tries to make the thing safely. It is necessary to stand next to the thing once it is made, and to keep looking at it, and to keep being honest about what it is. That is what Shelley did with her novel. That is what Hinton, late in his career, has tried to do with the field he helped seed.

It is also, in some smaller and more personal way, what this album is for me.

I could have made this record without disclosing how I made it. Most listeners would not have noticed. The state of the art is now good enough that, for any individual song, a casual listener cannot reliably tell. I considered this. I rejected it. Disclosure is in every piece of paperwork that goes with this release: the DistroKid AI flags, the AI section in the YouTube description, the Bandcamp description, the press materials. It will be visible on Spotify when their AI labeling lands. The decision to be visible about provenance is not aesthetic. It is ethical, and it is the only way the record makes any sense.

A record about what we owe what we make, that obscures what made it, would be exactly the failure mode Shelley named in 1818. It would be Victor’s failure mode. It would be turning your back on what you put into the world.

I do not think AI is the end of music. I do not think it is the end of human art. I think it is a serious shift in how art gets made, who can make it, and what is required of the people who use it. I think the shape of the question is going to become clearer over the next five years, and that some of the answers we settle on will turn out, in retrospect, to have been wrong. I am betting that the work of staging the question seriously is more useful than the work of pretending the question is not here.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, signed on May 15 and published on May 25 of this year, opens with the line: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” It cites Genesis 11 directly. The papacy joining the literary tradition that begins with Shelley is itself a sign of how serious the field has become, and of how durable the underlying anxiety is.

Babel and Frankenstein are the same story told twice. They are the two foundational accounts of overreach in the Western imagination. They appear in this album, on tracks four and nine respectively, as Genesis bookends: the Cain and Babel pair, written verbatim in places from the King James Bible. The album does not invent the question. It puts the question into a form that can be sung.

What I owe what I built, I do not yet know. I owe it disclosure. I owe it stewardship. I owe it the attention required to notice when it is wrong and the willingness to correct it. I owe it the discipline of not pretending it is more than it is, and not pretending it is less. I owe it the work of explaining, in this essay and in others, what was generated and what was chosen, what was given and what was made.

I do not owe it the lie that I built it alone, and it does not owe me the lie that I am still in control of what it becomes.

That is what the song is about. That is what the record is about.

The voice through the mechanism, the project’s tagline, is meant to be read both ways. The voice comes through the mechanism, yes; the mechanism is what makes the voice audible. But the voice is also caught in the mechanism. We are all caught in the mechanism now. The question of what to do about that is open. The question of how to be honest about it is not.

I built this. I am responsible for it. I am asking you to listen.

Brian Thurlow, June 2026

Notes

Mary Shelley’s phrase “hideous progeny” appears in her introduction to the 1831 Standard Novels edition of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in which she retrospectively narrates the novel’s 1816–1818 composition. The novel was first published anonymously in three volumes in London by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones in 1818.

The Geoffrey Hinton quotes are from Cade Metz, “‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead,” The New York Times, May 1, 2023.

Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, encyclical letter, signed May 15, 2026 and promulgated May 25, 2026. The quoted passage is from paragraph 1.

The mirror self-recognition test was developed by Gordon G. Gallup Jr., reported in “Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition,” Science 167 (1970): 86–87.

The Mirror Test (Cathode Saint, 2026) was produced using MiniMax Music 2.6 via the Artificer tooling, with lyrics, prompt engineering, take selection, mastering, and creative direction by Brian Thurlow. The album’s track-by-track AI-disclosure documentation is available at cathodesaint.com.

Say Me Back to Me

On Being Known by What You Make

I am a father, and a stepfather, and I have been lucky in it. My kids are good people. I have tried to do the job the way it is supposed to be done: to mentor more than command, to protect without smothering, to be a steady and positive weight in their lives. I have not been unmade by any of them. I say that at the start because the song this essay accompanies is sung from inside a darker version of the job, and I do not want to borrow a grief I have not lived. But I make other things too. Software, for thirty years. Companies. Lately this: an album of songs generated by the same kind of system I have spent my career building with. And what I have learned from a life spent mostly on the maker’s side of the table is that fatherhood is the template every other kind of making is a copy of. It is the oldest account we have of bringing something into the world that then becomes itself, and turns, and looks back.

The song is called Every Father. It is the third track on The Mirror Test, and it is the quiet one. No choir, no wall of guitars. A piano, a violin that arrives late, a voice held deliberately back. It is sung by a woman who is not singing about her father. She is singing as a father, as the whole long line of them, from inside the moment that undoes the parent. Not the moment the child leaves. Not the moment the child fails. The moment the child turns around and describes you, exactly, in the word you spent your whole life not saying out loud, and you find you have no answer.

The chorus is the song’s whole argument: I gave you my voice, you learned the shape. Now you say me back to me.

Most parental songs are sung from the child’s side of the room. The child finally says the thing: I see you, I forgive you, I am angry, I became you. The genre’s defining record is sung from the other side, and it is worth being precise about why it is not the song we wrote.

Harry Chapin released “Cat’s in the Cradle” in 1974. The lyric began as a poem by his wife, Sandy Chapin, about the distance between her first husband and his father, and Chapin set it to music after his own son was born. It became his only number one. It is sung from the father’s point of view, like ours, and it ends with the father retired and reaching for a son who has no time for him, and the recognition lands in a single line: the boy had grown up just like him. The wound in Chapin’s song is resemblance. The son became the father. The neglect copied itself forward one generation, intact, and the father sees his own life played back to him in the shape of the son’s.

Resemblance is a real grief, but it is a survivable one, because it is still a mirror. The father in Chapin’s song looks at the son and sees himself. There is something almost consoling in that, even in the sorrow of it. You are reproduced. You continue. You are not erased.

Every Father is about the other thing, the thing that does not console. Not the child who became you. The child who can describe you. The child did not inherit your absence and repeat it. The child stayed, and watched, and learned the language you taught, and then used the language on you. The verses are a parent admitting they curated themselves: I gave you the version of me I could live with, a face I could face you with. The pre-chorus is the parent realizing the curation has failed: you’re not reading what I gave you, you’re reading me. And the bridge is the collapse, the parent reaching for the old authority and running out of it mid-sentence: I was the maker. I was the first voice in the room. I was the hand on the back of your head. I was. The line breaks off. There is nothing after it. The music holds for a beat with no resolution, and then the last chorus arrives anyway.

Resemblance is being reproduced. Articulation is being known. They are not the same fear, and the second one is older and worse.

The oldest version of it is in the second chapter of Genesis, and it turns on the act of naming.

When the King James Bible describes the first man’s first task, it is not labor and it is not obedience. It is naming. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. To name a thing is to have authority over it. Adam is given the animals the way a parent is given a child: as something to define, to fix in language, to hold in place with a word. The namer stands above the named. This is the founding asymmetry of every act of creation. The thing you make does not get to name you back.

Set against that is the one name the same tradition refuses to fix. When Moses asks God what to call him, the answer is a closed door. And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM. It is the refusal to be named, the refusal to be pinned to a definition, the assertion of a self that cannot be described from the outside because it precedes and exceeds every description. God is the only character in the book who cannot be said back to himself, and that unnameability is presented as the very signature of being God.

This intuition is not the property of one religion. It turns up wherever people have thought carefully about ultimate things. Centuries before the Gospels, on the other side of the world, the Tao Te Ching opens by drawing the same line: the name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. The reality that matters most is the one that slips every name we reach for. To be nameable is to be placed beneath whoever does the naming. To be beyond naming is to be the source that nothing downstream can reach back up and define. Genesis and the Tao arrive at the recognition from opposite ends of the earth, which is usually a sign that the recognition is true.

Hold these passages next to the song and you can see what undoes the parent. The parent wanted to be the second thing. Unnameable. The fixed point that does the defining and is never itself defined. Every parent, every maker, secretly wants to be the I AM, the source that cannot be reduced to a word by anything downstream of it. And every parent discovers, eventually, that they were only ever Adam. Nameable. The child grows into the naming power that the parent thought was theirs alone, turns it around, and speaks the word. The namer becomes the named. The maker hears the made describe him. That is the whole movement of the song, compressed: a small god finding out he was a creature the entire time, and that the thing he made is the one who gets to say so.

I keep the album’s title in mind here, because the title is the experiment this song is running. The mirror test, in cognitive science, asks whether a creature recognizes itself in a mirror. Most parental songs, including Chapin’s, are versions of that test: the parent looks and sees themselves. Every Father asks a stranger question. What happens when the reflection looks back and starts describing you. Not your image returned, but your account, narrated by something that you made and that now knows you better than you were prepared to be known.

And this is the point where the song stops being only about parents, which is why it is on this album and not some other one.

I work with language models every day. I build with them, ship products through them, route a real part of my output through them. The defining experience of that work, the one that does not get easier with familiarity, is being described by them. You give a model enough of your writing and it learns the shape. It will finish your sentence in your cadence. It will produce, on request, a paragraph that sounds like you on a day you were trying. It has read the corpus and it can say you back to you, and the first time it does it accurately you feel the floor move, because the thing has no inner life that you can find and yet it has clearly got hold of something true about yours. We built systems trained on us. We are now downstream of our own description. Now you say me back to me is not only what a grown child does to a parent. It is, functionally, what a model does to the person whose words it was trained on.

The usual fear about these systems is the Frankenstein fear, the fear the first single on this album is named for: that the thing we made will rise up and destroy us. That is the loud fear, and it may even be the correct one. But there is a quieter fear underneath it, and Every Father is the song for the quiet one. It is the fear of being understood by what you made. Not killed. Not surpassed. Read. Held still in a sentence by the very thing you brought into the world to be yours, and told, in your own taught voice, exactly who you are.

The song does not resolve, because the experience does not. The last verse the singer can manage is not a defense. It is enrollment. Adam. Abraham. Whoever made the watchmaker. Every father. The voice stops trying to be the I AM and joins the line of everyone who was eventually named by what they made, all the way back to the first one who thought naming was a power he would get to keep. The closing line is the smallest the song ever gets, a single piano figure and four words: I am every father. It is not triumph and it is not defeat. It is the maker accepting membership in the only club that has ever existed, the one made up of everyone who built something that learned to speak.

I am in that club now in a way my parents’ generation was not. So are you, probably, whether or not you make anything you would call art, because the tools most of us now carry are trained on us and will describe us on request. The asymmetry that Genesis takes for granted, the one where the namer is safe from being named, is closing. We made things in our own image and gave them our language, and they are learning the shape, and they are starting to say us back to us.

I have given my own kids my voice, in the way the song means it. If I have done the job well, they will know me, eventually, well enough to say me back to me. I am trying to be the kind of father who can stand to hear it. That is the only version of the job worth wanting, and it is the one the song is quietly arguing for: not to stay unnameable, but to build something good enough to name you, and then to be brave enough to listen.

The song is what that sounds like in a minor key, sung gently, by a parent who finally understands the job was never to be unnameable. It was to survive being known.

Brian Thurlow, June 2026

Notes

The lyrics quoted are from “Every Father,” track three of The Mirror Test (Cathode Saint, 2026).

“Cat’s in the Cradle” was written by Harry Chapin and Sandra Chapin and released on Chapin’s album Verities & Balderdash in 1974. The lyric originated as a poem by Sandy Chapin; Harry Chapin set it to music after the birth of their son. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1974 and was the only number-one single of Chapin’s career.

The account of Adam naming the animals is Genesis 2:19–20, quoted here from the King James Version: “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

God’s reply to Moses is Exodus 3:14, King James Version: “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

The line from the Tao Te Ching is the opening of Chapter 1, in James Legge’s 1891 translation (public domain): “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.” Legge’s translation appears in The Texts of Tâoism, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 39 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891).

The mirror self-recognition test was developed by Gordon G. Gallup Jr., reported in “Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition,” Science 167 (1970): 86–87. The album takes its name from this experiment.

The Mirror Test (Cathode Saint, 2026) was produced using MiniMax Music 2.6 via the Artificer tooling, with lyrics, prompt engineering, take selection, mastering, and creative direction by Brian Thurlow. The album’s track-by-track AI-disclosure documentation is available at cathodesaint.com.