Marina stared at the laptop screen with blurred vision. In his apartment in Pinheiros, the sound of a leak in the kitchen compounded his anxiety. The deadline for submitting your column to Jornal da Metrópole would pass in two hours. On her lap, her pet cat demanded attention that she couldn’t give; the animal was prostrate, and the concern for its health, combined with a pile of bills and a poorly cured flu, drained any trace of creativity. The theme she had chosen — “The Permanence of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s Poetics in Urban Chaos” — seemed, at that moment, a Herculean task.
On the other side of the city, Ricardo, a columnist for the competing Diário Nacional, was experiencing a symmetrical collapse. Between noisy construction upstairs and the traumatic end of a relationship that still echoed in notifications on his cell phone, he couldn’t line up three coherent sentences. Ironically, he had chosen the same subject for Sunday’s edition: João Cabral’s rigor in the face of modern disorder. It was a literary event that both could not ignore, but Ricardo’s mind was as dry as the backlands of the Pernambuco poet.
Exhausted and operating in survival mode, they both had the same idea, almost out of professional preservation instinct. Marina opened a . Ricardo did the same.
Marina typed: “Write a 2,500-character column about the influence of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poetry on contemporary aesthetics, focusing on technical precision against excess digital information. Use a sophisticated and melancholic tone.”
Ricardo, looking for the same shortcut, formulated an eerily similar command: “Create an opinion text with around 2,500 characters discussing how João Cabral de Melo Neto’s dry rigor dialogues with the noise of the digital age. The tone should be intellectual and slightly nostalgic.”
The AI processed orders in seconds. To Marina, he handed over a text entitled “The Knife Only a Blade in Background Noise”. For Ricardo, it generated an essay called “The Architecture of Silence in Times of Algorithm”. Although the suggested titles were different, the body of the text was a mathematical construct based on the same databases and the same syntactic probabilities.
Without time for in-depth revisions, Marina just adjusted a paragraph, moved a comma and sent the file. Ricardo read it diagonally, did a “copy and paste” and sent the email to the editor.
On Sunday morning, disaster materialized on paper and on pixel.
On newsstands and feeds, the columns of the country’s two largest newspapers were perfect mirrors. Marina’s first paragraph began: “In a world saturated by visual stimuli, the dryness of ‘Death and Life Severina’ resurfaces not as an archaism, but as an antidote…” Ricardo’s, word for word, said the same. Quotes about the “verse engineer” appeared in the same spots. The conclusion about the need to “sculpt the void” was identical.
The scandal was instantaneous on social media.
How do you think readers would react if they discovered that both texts were generated by AI?
PS: Column generated by AI from a prompt (which did not mention João Cabral).
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