AI Listicle Slop

Sometime in 2023, I came across an article titled "Who’s at Your Door? Check with These Tips to Stay Safe". It reads like the paranoid ramblings of a Philip K. Dick character who has recieved a court-mandated lobotomy. Solidarity Project, "a nexus of knowledge and understanding," was one of the first obviously AI-generated listicle sites I'd come across. I was captivated by works like "Get Ready to Flaunt your Assets with 10 Dollar Ass in TJ", a mysterious guide to gambling, ass, and TJ Maxx. It feels quaint to remember a time when this garbage was a novelty and not an unavoidable plague preventing almost all meaningful internet research.

I just started learning to use Linux MultiMedia Studio to sequence samples for the music I'm working on. LMMS isn't a very widely known DAW, and I keep finding AI-generated guides that reference menus and buttons that don't exist in the program. I'm assuming they're an aggregate of information gathered from guides to more popular DAWs like Ableton and Logic.

This gave me the idea to write a story about a fictional music software called AugmentedHymns that allows the user to create music telepathically. I structured the story in the format of a shitty AI-generated tutorial for the program and imagined what kind of horrible Faustian bargain a person would have to make to access this technology under capitalism.

Written February 2026, edited Sept 2026.