I was once at a demonstration of a poetry-writing machine. The thing had been fed, or uploaded with, or otherwise given, the words that constituted the complete works of Joseph Conrad, if I remember correctly, and it had some grammatical logic programmed in, such that phrases stayed phrased and were handled correctly, as such. What it did, when it did its thing, was churn out poetry, surreal cut-and-paste stuff, using only those words from Conrad, thus, if I remember correctly, maybe offering some inadvertent postcolonial critique or something, along with proving that poets were now obsolete and machines could take over even the most extreme of avant-garde jobs, like the scissoring task work of reformatting a shelf of Joseph Conrad paperbacks into a few chance-tumbled, parlor game lines. The exquisite corpse of human literary production was exposed for all to see. The horror, the horror, etc.