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The Andy Warhol Diaries never existed as such. They began as a record of business expenses the artist rang in to his assistants, including Brigid Polk; editor Pat Hackett transcribed the artist's calls, apparently giving pages to Warhol to sign off as she went, and published the collection in 1989, after his death. The collection is more analogous to a blog or Twitter feed in the nascent days of the web when readers didn't police those comments either.

Previously Polk and Hackett (along with Bob Colacello and Steven M.L. Aronson) were behind The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), published in 1975, during the artist's lifetime, which is more consciously articulated to support Warhol's image in the (near) prime of his career.

It was the approach of both books to present all the artist's half-ideas and murmurings as being on the same level. The 2022 Netflix documentary The Andy Warhol Diaries amplifies this by recreating Warhol's voice with AI that is universally flat. There's no lightness to this mouthpiece, no camp, no variation in tone – nothing to signal to the less discerning viewer what might be unthinking or earnest, important or irrelevant, colourful or dark.