The next step, of course, is to replace those ghost musicians with AI, trained and fed on its own slop, and dispense with humans altogether. The same goes for writing. When the whole world is awash in pink slime, nobody knows anymore how to distinguish, as they used to say, shit from Shinola. It’s all just “content,” marketed by the pound, devoid of any human contribution whatsoever.

The comparison to Heller’s Soldier in White is right on target. One of the formulations of Catch-22 is, “They have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” Or think of Winston Smith’s lover, Julia, who works in the Fiction Department of the Ministry of Truth, running the “kaleidoscope” machines that crank out plots for cheap novels to feed to the proles.

Do you know,
Considering the market, there are more
Poems produced than any other thing?
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more business-like than business men.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

—Robert Frost, New Hampshire