WHY DOES ANYONE care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer’s Odyssey, or Christopher Nolan’s? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a “historically accurate” version of the The Odyssey—turning epic poetry into atrocious slop—even as AI companies are literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. Meanwhile, Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand. I think of that world as the Artificial State.
