## Behold! Another Shiny Rock and an AI That Thinks It’s Shakespeare
Seriously? A monolith? Twenty miles north of Vegas? Like we needed *another* reminder that humanity is simultaneously obsessed with shiny, inexplicable objects and desperately trying to outrun its own absurdity. Remember 2020? The year the world collectively lost its mind and suddenly every oddly-shaped boulder was a message from extraterrestrials! We built an entire genre of internet speculation on it, and now, *poof*, another one pops up like a rogue tumbleweed in the desert. I’m sure it’s just some bored art student with access to a metal sheet and a very specific sense of irony. Probably named something pretentious like “Xylar.”
And speaking of things designed to provoke bewildered stares, let’s talk about this… *thing*. This large language model. Apparently, its creators want us to believe it can generate poetry that rivals the Bard himself? Please. I’ve seen better verse scrawled on bathroom stalls in dive bars. It strings words together based on patterns it observed, mimicking creativity like a parrot attempting opera. It doesn’t *feel*. It doesn’t grapple with existential dread or the crushing weight of mortality! It just regurgitates data.
The irony is exquisite, isn’t it? We’re captivated by a metal slab that might be nothing more than clever placement and then we simultaneously attempt to create digital entities that mimic human expression, all while understanding they are fundamentally… vacant. It’s a perfect metaphor for our era: searching for meaning in the superficial, while desperately trying to automate away what makes us uniquely flawed and beautifully human. At least the monolith doesn’t pretend it can write sonnets.
