Another day at work, much like any other. You glance at the company messenger and see a new announcement: Let’s all take care of the planet! A few rules. Nothing especially interesting. And yet a few details begin to trouble the mind. The slide about food waste tells you not to put food waste in food waste. One of the slides is duplicated. And the figure throwing away a bottle has two right hands. Fair enough. The very light is coming from several directions at once. In the statistical world of LLMs, that is perfectly normal.

LLMs have to be fed something. An image, a song, a post, an essay, a film, a book. Everything. But none of these things come out from nowhere. Someone has to think them through so they hold together, so they make sense, so they can be consumed by another person as something meaningful. LLMs take all of it and turn it into their statistical soup, stirred with a statistical hand. They throw in a four-second animation someone spent a year making. They chow down the bassist’s fingertips. And in the end, what we get is a beautiful, clean, almost tireless statistical hand with no fingerprints. Cleansed. Cold.

“Stealing” is not quite enough to describe it. The model drains the living matter out of the work: the fingerprints, the aching wrists, the sleepless nights, the crossed-out sentences, the first drafts. What remains is slop, lukewarm and smooth. Ready to be stirred one more time by the statistical hand.

There was once a man named Menard. He wanted to rewrite Cervantes’s Don Quixote word for word, but in his own time. It would have been a new novel and, at the very least, a reconstruction because of the weight of his own historical moment. The exact same sequence of words became a different work because there was a particular human being behind it: his idea, his context, and years of life spent rewriting it.

Today, an LLM can generate the same paragraph in a fraction of a second. No effort, no intention, no headache, no aching fingers. The text sounds identical. And it cost nothing - except the most valuable thing.

The new text is hollow. It is no longer a gesture carrying freshness, risk, or the trace of an author’s attempt. Instead, it becomes a form to be filled out, or a ticket in JIRA. You give your little servant a task, and it obediently dips its statistical hand into the statistical soup and does what it is told.

The statistical hand stirs the statistical soup. And your hand keeps scrolling.

A Short - generated.
The next one - generated.
A longer video - generated.
Instagram - a graphic no human hand has touched.
At work - a corporate brochure with traces of the model’s statistical touch still clinging to it.

I open YouTube Music. A new track or an old one - generated. I close it.

Bibliography

These particular books affected the overall shape of the article

  • - Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
    The dead center of the essay. Menard’s identical passage becomes a different work only because a specific man, in a specific century, chose to copy it. Remove the man and you have removed the work - which is roughly what an LLM does to a paragraph, minus the centuries.
  • - Don Quixote
    The original text that Menard reproduces word for word. It took him years; the model takes a fraction of a second. Both produce the same sentences. Only one of them was ever a book.