An essay on AI slop as lukewarm, fingerprintless soup: a corporate deck figure with two right hands, the four-second animation eaten for a year of someone’s life, and Borges’s Pierre Menard as the counterpoint - a man who had to rewrite Don Quixote word for word to prove that the words were never the work.
Stanislaw Lem imagined supercomputers that fell silent or told unbearable truths. We chose chatty LLMs instead. This essay explores why the silence of GOLEM XIV would be unbearable, and why we prefer the statistically probable lie.
The ‘Born to, Forced to’ meme, Oscar Wilde’s socialist dreams, and Joanna Maciejewska’s viral quote converge on the same bitter truth: capital automated the wrong things. AI writes sonnets while we clock in. Why did the machine liberation never arrive?