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Amor Cringe
Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a perennial bohemian style, an unnamed, ungendered protagonist travels from coast to coast and affair to affair, stumbling upon various moments of failure, absurd insight, and flashes of transcendence.
Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a "deepfake autofiction" novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created with the intention to be "as cringe as possible.” The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.
“Allado-McDowell deftly shepherds the machine through a series of fractional subjectivities, producing prose that careens between sacred and vulgar, colloquial and arresting. Amor Cringe is a Bretonesque, bawdy necromancy that will enthrall you and make you laugh.”
– Allison Parrish, Assistant Arts Professor, NYU ITP/IMA
“Hallucinogenic, scary, sexy, and strange, Amor Cringe is a magnificent shock to the system. It reads like a prayer, a song, a voice from the beyond.”
– Elvia Wilk
“Writing is always writing-with. In K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe, it’s a writing with all that’s fallen in language, about culture, the material so exquisitely worn (and worn down) that you see where the folds and joins are. Sentences that are genius or dumb as a box of hammers, or both, or neither. Delightful like dime-store candy, or a lighter you found on the ground that works.”
– McKenzie Wark
Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a "deepfake autofiction" novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created with the intention to be "as cringe as possible.” The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.
“Allado-McDowell deftly shepherds the machine through a series of fractional subjectivities, producing prose that careens between sacred and vulgar, colloquial and arresting. Amor Cringe is a Bretonesque, bawdy necromancy that will enthrall you and make you laugh.”
– Allison Parrish, Assistant Arts Professor, NYU ITP/IMA
“Hallucinogenic, scary, sexy, and strange, Amor Cringe is a magnificent shock to the system. It reads like a prayer, a song, a voice from the beyond.”
– Elvia Wilk
“Writing is always writing-with. In K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe, it’s a writing with all that’s fallen in language, about culture, the material so exquisitely worn (and worn down) that you see where the folds and joins are. Sentences that are genius or dumb as a box of hammers, or both, or neither. Delightful like dime-store candy, or a lighter you found on the ground that works.”
– McKenzie Wark
144 pages, Paperback
Published April 12, 2022
10 people are currently reading
93 people want to read
About the author
K. Allado-McDowell
4 books10 followersK Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the book Pharmako-AI, and are co-editor, with Ben Vickers, of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. They record and release music under the name Qenric.
Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.
Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 27, 2022
Brilliant premise for a book! Strange and disorienting reading experience, in that I found myself wondering whether a human or AI wrote a particularly affectice passage. I love a hot mess of a protagonist, too; just when you think they've made progress, they do something absurd that made my head spin. Loved it!
June 16, 2022
this was certainly an experience
March 24, 2025
It’s a good title for this bizarre book
If this is AI writing, writers have nothing to worry about. It’s a really painful bunch of purple prose and comically, bad characters with no life, endlessly, drowning on brainlessly.
If this is AI writing, writers have nothing to worry about. It’s a really painful bunch of purple prose and comically, bad characters with no life, endlessly, drowning on brainlessly.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews