Near the end of The Tombs of Atuan, the wizard Ged is in the desert with a young woman, Tenar. They have escaped a great evil and are tired, footsore, hungry. They have no food and little water and are a day’s walk from either. Tenar, having seen some of Ged’s magic, asks if he can do something about their predicament:

“Can you find food for us?” she asked, rather vaguely and timidly.

“Hunting takes time, and weapons.”

“I meant, with, you know, spells.”

“I can call a rabbit,” he said, poking the fire with a twisted stick of juniper. “The rabbits are coming out of their holes all around us, now. Evening’s their time. I could call one by name, and he’d come. But would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you’d called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. But it would be a breaking of trust, I think.”

“Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just…”

“Summon up a supper,” he said. “Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”

Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan, page 155

Is this not precisely what it’s like to read or watch or listen to slop? What you read isn’t really writing or drawing or art—it isn’t the creation of a mind reaching for the world—but illusion. And it’s not only AI, of course. A good deal of commercial content is more or less the same, books and movies and music created by marketing teams with quantified audience strategies but no fucking soul to speak of. AI accelerates that production process, makes it slicker and smoother, makes the illusion seem more real. Makes ever more of it, at greater and greater scale, until you come to believe there is nothing else out there. But it remains a deception. You think you’ve had your full but all the while you’re starving.