AI represents the ironic first fruits of a supposed intelligence revolution: not a golden age of creativity, but an industrial-scale engine for producing plausible, yet fundamentally hollow, content. The promise was automation and insight; the initial deliverable is often just noise with a glossy veneer.

Stepping back, this torrent of slop forces a sobering question: what if this is the main output? The staggering investments—hundreds of billions in chips, data centers, and engineering talent—begin to look less like a foundation for the future and more like history’s most expensive experiment. We are burning vast capital and planetary resources to create systems that excel at mimicry but falter at genuine understanding, that automate the creation of mediocrity while destabilizing creative professions. The experiment is whether machine intelligence can truly integrate into the fabric of human endeavor without dissolving its value. The early results suggest we may not be building a bright new world, but rather a fantastically costly machine for generating the digital equivalent of fast-food packaging: instantly produced, uniformly generic, and destined to be discarded.