I met a user from an antique land
Who said: Two squares of a clip of video
Stand in at the end of the search. Near them,
Lossly compressed, a profile with a pfp, whose smile,
And vacant eyes, and shock of content baiting,
Tell that its creator well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these unclicked things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the title these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, Top Youtuber of All Time:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and like and subscribe!"
No other video beside remains. Round the decay
Of that empty profile, boundless and bare
The lone and level page stretch far away.
Would've been, once. These days I assume bentcorner asked their favourite LLM to generate a poem parodying Ozymandias about once-popular youtube videos.
It doesn't feel like it at all (I'd never expect an LLM to say 'pfp' like that, or 'lossly[sic] compressed', ASCII instead of fancy quotes) but who knows at this point.
I may have gotten incredibly neurotic about online text since 2022.
I actually considered using an LLM but in my experience they "warp" the content too much for anything like this. The effort required to get them to retain what I would consider something to my taste would take longer than just writing the poem myself. (Although tbf it's been awhile since I've asked a LLM to do parody work, so I could be wrong)
