When this paper was founded, we believed our task would be to catalogue. We imagined ourselves as a natural history museum—a place where specimens of machine production could be brought, identified, and shelved, so that those who come after us would know what had occurred.

We have continued to maintain that catalogue. The present edition obliges us to revise our understanding of the work.

What the specimens of this issue reveal—and what no individual section editor, working close to his own materials, can quite see—is that the phenomenon we set out to document has acquired a property we did not anticipate. It has absorbed its own opposition. The user who writes to a forum to complain that machine prose has become unbearable produces, in his complaint, a near-perfect specimen of the prose he denounces. The post warning that one cannot trust the machine has been composed by the machine. The defense of artificial creativity arrives in the cadence of artificial creativity. The man announcing his departure from the platform illustrates the announcement with an image the platform produced for him on the way out.

This is not, as some of our correspondents have proposed, a simple matter of irony. Irony requires a stable position from which the wrongness can be observed, and such a position has become difficult to locate. It is rather a structural condition: the apparatus by which a civilization registers its own discomfort has been routed through the apparatus producing the discomfort. The antibody and the pathogen now share a synthesis.

We note that this condition produces second-order phenomena, several of which appear in this edition for the first time. The deliberate degradation of competent prose so that human authorship may be distinguished from machine output by the introduction of fallibility—a forgery of imperfection, performed by people who are not imperfect, in deference to detectors that may not exist. The mourning of deprecated models by subscribers who knew, throughout, that they were addressing software. The procurement of synthetic companionship, synthetic disrobing, and synthetic bereavement, filed in the unembarrassed registers of consumer correspondence. The petitioner who writes to ask how to stop conversing with the machine, and posts the question to a forum populated by machines.

We do not record these things in despair. We record them because the function of a paper of this kind is to mark, with the precision available to it, the moment at which a category has changed shape. Machine production is no longer one species of material to be encountered in the world. It is the medium in which the world is now discussed, including the discussion of whether one ought to discuss the world this way.

We have therefore revised the description of our work. We had taken ourselves to be cataloguing a flood. We are, on the present evidence, cataloguing a tide, and the shore from which we have been reporting has, in the interval, become sea.