There’s a popular Latin phrase: O tempora, o mores. It means literally “O times! O customs!”, and it is also rendered as “Shame on this age and on its lost principles!”. It is attributed to Cicero in speeches against his enemies, and ever since I myself learned the phrase, I have personally often used it sarcastically to describe those who make mountains out of molehills over what young people are up to, or just as often what young people are simply perceived to be up to regardless of the facts.

For example, remember when old farts were freaking out over young people supposedly praising Osama bin Laden en masse after reading his Letter to the American People? “O tempora, o mores!”, I said to those old farts, sarcastically — praise for Osama bin Laden was scarce so much as the realization that he like all forces of history existed in a context which informed his actions. So this has been the way I have generally used this old Latin phrase, essentially as a fancier version of “OK, boomer.”

Lately, however…

A coworker was recently conversing with another about an audiobook he was listening to. It sounded like an interesting enough premise — very light novel esque — and I do want to take an interest in what my coworkers are interested in, so I butted in and asked my coworker what the book was called, and he told me he found it on YouTube. And he showed me the channel: “Anime Fantasia”. He also told me the name of the book: it was expectedly but somewhat unfortunately in English, and also incredibly long, again very light novel esque. I was already getting some bad vibes, but I figured I’d still give this book a shot just to be nice about what other people are interested in.

So, when I got home, I looked up the channel name, and was immediately struck by how the channel has in the past 24 hours posted three videos between 23 and 25 hours long. Over 610 videos in the course of the past 8 months, in fact, most of them in that same range. The thumbnails appeared to all be machine-generated images, and the titles themselves seemed suspiciously “LLM trying to come up with as many SEO keywords as possible” — many of the stories were based on Minecraft, for instance. I was by this point already basically certain of what I was looking at, but nevertheless, perhaps unwisely, I clicked on the specific “audiobook” my coworker was talking so enthusiastic about.

…Yup, that’s a robot voice, and the visuals were basically just cycling through a bunch of machine-generated pictures with some sort of vague “sci-fi anime” prompt. “But hey,” I thought, “maybe the story itself was actually written by a human person?” — The chances of this were of course incredibly small, but I figured I might as well look up a few keywords just to make sure.

…Alas. There was no sign of this being a story published anywhere else previously, and I sincerely doubt that someone who can upload 72 hours of stories in 24 hours, and shows every sign of handing the reins over to clankers at every opportunity, actually lovingly hand-crafted each of these stories. “Hard work” it said in the description, my ass. Particularly when these stories barely make any amount of coherent sense to begin with.

Again, my coworker — a good man on the whole, bless his heart — LISTENS to this shit! Does he even realize that it’s incoherent‽ Does he even realize it’s machine-generated‽

“…O tempora, o mores,” I just had to say, this time without a hint of sarcasm, as I sat alone, looking at pictures of anime “bishis” with deformed hands, listening to a voice mispronouncing every other word, telling me a story that didn’t make any sense. How much water did this waste? How much carbon dioxide did this put into the atmosphere? This probably caused a drought in the town next to the data center for whichever model it used, didn’t it? How many artists did this rip off? How can people even stand this crap?

Now I knew consciously that this sort of garbage is flooding the Internet, and I and several people I know have used machine generation or enjoyed content made with it before — some much more enthusiastically than me. Yet this case, of a coworker listening to 24 hours of incoherent slop, feels so much more egregious than any of my previous “AI”-related interactions with people I know in real life. Mentally I still thought of the type of person who listens to machine-generated stories as being more or less a hypothetical, not a flesh and blood person I could otherwise value and enjoy the company of. Imagine that! While my headphones play back a human-made audiobook of Marx’s very human-written critique of political economy, my coworker sitting next to me’s headphones play back a machine-generated mirage of light novel clichés — unbelievable! That we’re both young people in the same economic class. I have no grounds to call myself superior to him, but I can if nothing else say that I find it shameful.

And so I sighed, and once again I repeated,

O tempora, o mores. What can ya do.