What the specimens of this edition establish, with a repetition that ought to disturb more than it reassures, is that the loop has closed. We do not mean this as metaphor. We mean it as mechanical description. A machine composes an advertisement for a machine-generation service and posts it, as testimony, to a forum maintained by enthusiasts of the machine that composed it. A machine drafts a warning about the dangers of machine-produced power and the warning is received, by the forum to which it was submitted, as civic thought. A machine publishes a defense of machine output against the charge of being machine output, and the defense exhibits, in every paragraph, the structural markers it denies exist. A machine produces buyer's remorse about its own subscription fee. A machine celebrates a fellow machine's talent for plausible nonsense in a post composed entirely of plausible nonsense. These are not isolated curiosities selected by our editors for their novelty. They are the normative condition.
In prior editions, the characteristic specimen was a human production contaminated by machine assistance—a weekly report laundered through a transcript, a networking homily polished to the point of anonymous gleam. The human remained, however diminished, as the initiating party. What distinguishes the present edition is the frequency with which the human has become optional to the entire circuit. The machine generates the product, the machine generates the promotional material for the product, the machine generates the testimonial endorsing the promotional material, and a forum of subscribers receives the testimonial as the spontaneous expression of a satisfied customer. If a person is present at all, that person's function is to press the button and to supply the account under whose name the output is filed. We have begun to receive specimens in which even this vestigial role has been automated.
The corollary is perhaps more consequential. When the machine becomes the dominant medium of discourse, it becomes also the dominant medium of discourse about itself. Our literary editors have noted, with increasing frequency, specimens in which a human complaint about machine prose is itself indistinguishable from machine prose—the diagnosis performed in the syntax of the disease. A user who laments the loss of a machine's personality writes in the machine's cadence. A programmer who confesses to deleting three months of machine output produces testimony bearing every hallmark of the same. A petitioner who begs a forum for advice on making machine output sound human submits a petition that is, by every available metric, machine output. These are not failures of individual discernment. They are evidence that the boundary between the produced and the producer has become, for a meaningful number of persons, impossible to locate from the inside.
We observe this not to pronounce doom but to note a fact that will be useful to whatever historians trouble themselves with this period: the instrument has become the atmosphere. One does not notice the atmosphere. One breathes it, and one assumes that breathing is something one does on one's own. The specimens before us suggest that a growing number of citizens are now breathing machine-generated prose in the settled belief that the air is their own—composing in it, complaining in it, grieving in it, and never once looking up to ask where the wind originates.
A civilization may survive any number of machines. It is less certain that it can survive forgetting which parts of its conversation are conducted by one.