Coda: Florian

Coda: Florian

I published the piece above today.

Proving that Big Data is always watching, my algorithm pushed a memory at me, published by my wife, as a eulogy for a llama.

His name was Florian. He had lived ten or more years in the high desert outside our sanctuary before a neighbor called with urgency to report a llama in distress out on Old Wilson Road. The rescuers found him overheating in the sun, his coat tangled with cholla spines, his eyes clouded with the infection that had stolen the sight he needed to keep himself safe. He let them help him. He loaded into an SUV like he'd been born for it. He lived out his remaining years at our sanctuary as a guardian to the elderly mohair goats and a steady presence to the rest of us. In his last week he stood watch while we buried Bubba the pot-bellied pig. One morning, after breakfast, he lay down under his favorite tree and was gone. Rainbow bridges and Better Places take a back seat to the weight of grief.

The eulogy was written by Krystal Lynn, who knew him from the day he arrived to the hour he died. Her piece is the work of a writer in grief writing carefully through the grief, because that is what she has always done with her hands.

Here is the thing that should stop you.

If you have spent any time in the comment sections of social media in the last two years, you know exactly what would happen to Krystal's eulogy if it crossed the wrong timeline. Someone would scan the first three paragraphs, spot the em dashes, count the ellipses, register the anaphoric He knew the wild. He knew distance. He knew how to stay unseen., clock the italicized refrains, notice the Not X, ...Y inversions, file the closing benediction — May the tree that rises above you grow strong. May the wind that once carried you through the mountains pass gently through its branches. — as a tell, and post some version of this is AI slop. They would do this in under a minute. They would feel sharp about it. They might even tag a friend.

Now read the piece they were not reading.

The eulogy is for a specific animal who died on a specific date in a specific place. The cholla spines that had tangled into his overgrown coat are named because the writer cut them out with her own shears. The $350 paid to the excavator — a friend of a friend who came on short notice because Flo's body was too large to bury by hand — is named because the funds came out of a pine pellet fundraiser and have to be quietly repaid. The mohair goats are named because they are real goats. Jazzy the racehorse who never raced is named because she is a real horse who really does flap her flag of dramatic energy over the corral panels every morning. Bubba the pig who was buried the week before is named because he was a real pig who lived with us for eight years and died in his sleep on January 2nd. The sycamore for Harry and the olive tree for Knight are named because those trees stand at this sanctuary right now, marking the graves of two earlier residents, and the tree that will eventually rise over Flo will join them in the same dirt.

No machine on Earth produces those details. No prompt summons that excavator's invoice. The model can imitate the cadence; it cannot reach into a specific morning in a specific desert and tell you that the picture taken mid-dig at Bubba's grave was the last picture ever taken of Florian alive.

Here is what makes the eulogy a perfect exhibit for the argument above.

Krystal Lynn is exactly the kind of writer the models were trained on. The curriculum revisions she wrote for the University of San Diego's evolutionary biology core ten years ago are still in use. The lab manuals she wrote for the San Diego State cadaver lab are still in the binders. Her published work is in the world explaining the history of X-ray crystallography in SIAM. The award she won while an International Baccalaureate in ninth grade for her treatise that The Boy WAS Godot. The cadence the language models now produce — the careful parallelism, the lyrical accumulation, the structures of ceremony and emphasis and breath — is the cadence of writers like Krystal, scraped without consent and rebroadcast back to a public that no longer recognizes the source.

When a sneerer dismisses her eulogy as slop, they are accomplishing something almost too elegant to describe. They are accusing the source material of imitating its own derivative. They are calling the spring polluted because the river it feeds runs muddy downstream.

That alone would be damning enough. There is one more turn worth making, because it is the deepest one.

Look at the markers themselves. The anaphora. The triadic structures. The italicized interior voice. The May... May... May... benediction. The lyrical fragments. The slow accumulation of parallel clauses. These are not the markers of AI. These are the markers of ceremony. They are the ancient technologies of honoring the dead, present in every culture that has ever buried its loved ones, written into eulogies and funeral rites and liturgies and prayers from long before any of us were born and long before any model was trained. They appear in Krystal's eulogy because she is doing the work those structures were invented to do. She is using the rhythms of human ceremony to grieve a real animal she really loved.

The slop detectives have learned to flag those rhythms as fraud. This means — and this is what should make the rest of us serious about pushing back — they have decided that grief itself becomes suspect when it sounds too much like grief. They have made the language of mourning into a tell. They have rendered the careful prose of a person writing through tears indistinguishable, in their reading, from prompt-and-publish filler.

That is not a failure of AI. That is a failure of readers.

Krystal would have written this piece if no language model had ever been invented. She would have written it in the same cadence, with the same em dashes she has used since middle school, with the same ceremonial structures every literate culture has reached for when peering over the precipice of a grave. The piece would have existed exactly as it now exists. The only difference is that we now live in a moment when a meaningful fraction of readers will look at her grief and call it counterfeit.

She does not owe them an explanation. We do not owe them an explanation. The piece stands on its own legs. Florian stands on his. The work — of writing, of grieving, of telling the truth about an animal who mattered — continues regardless of who is or is not paying attention.

Read her eulogy. The link is below. Read it slowly. Notice the cholla. Notice the excavator. Notice the picture taken mid-dig. Notice the sycamore and the olive tree and the not-yet-chosen tree for Flo.

Then tell me which piece was made by a mind... I'll wait.

https://www.facebook.com/krystal.tronboll/posts/pfbid02SUwX4Bb3TXutR8pWY2XPo5577fM6LPqA6Q9kJmu2nx9NQJUGmaefJvUssN4ww8F2l