If anything, we’ve become dumpster divers, rummaging through the garbage produced by LLMs.

Does this not tastefully describe how we’ve been generating content lately, ladies and gentlemen?

What’s a prompt? It’s a fishing net we throw into the sea of processed human knowledge.

And after the prompt comes the statistically assembled answer, which is the fishing net pulled out of the water, filled with … what? Synthesized trash (perceived as treasure by some) and mutated sea creatures.

An LLM’s answer, is it anything more than a heap of fragments probabilistically woven together to resemble an intelligible reply? No. It is just that.

Every prompt tears open a trash bag in the landfill of knowledge and spills its contents. We are scavengers, and we pick what we like and make it ours. We eat what’s edible, i.e., whatever isn’t rotten, spoiled, wilted, rancid… We’ve been “already eating from the trashcan all the time.” Of course, it may no longer be the (force-fed) ideology that we’re used to. But it’s a statistical remix of existing ideological material, compressed, processed, customized, regenerated. It tastes familiar, however, so… whatever.

Much of what we consume online today is, in fact, the work of ragpickers of ideas. They gather fragments from everywhere (most of which come from LLMs these days) and nail them together into something that resembles a thought. Every post is a shanty built from intellectual debris.

(In a world where content is produced endlessly by machines, the thinker is no longer the architect of ideas but a scavenger of fragments. Perhaps the ragpicker is the thinker of an age drowning in excess.)

Our homeless minds have embraced sloth, the most addictive drug of all (the one that is often confused with satisfaction), and now live comfortably on the spare change dropped into their paper cups. Why think?

The machines replaced us, we accepted it, we’re still pretending it hasn’t happened.

And those of you who haven’t been replaced by machines should think twice before you laugh at us. Ask yourselves why. It’s because you work for the machine.

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This piece was first published on my Substack on March 4, 2026.