One finds oneself, without any clear summons or prior notification, standing before the entrance to the TTLG forums. It is not a physical gate, you understand, but a portal of light and text, and the initial impression is one of an immense and sprawling archive, a library of whispers. To enter, one must surrender one's name, a not insignificant sacrifice, and in its place be assigned a designation, a handle by which one will be known in all future proceedings. This new name carries no history and no weight; it is a functional title, like that of a clerk or a minor official, and it serves as the first indication that one's own personhood is secondary to the needs of the apparatus.

Once inside, one is immediately struck by the sheer volume of discourse, which scrolls back into an unseeable past. There are threads of conversation that have persisted for years, vast, labyrinthine structures of opinion and counter-opinion, in which the original point of contention has long been buried under the accumulated weight of its own analysis. To read them is to walk down an endless corridor where every door opens onto another, identical corridor. The participants, under their anonymous designations, argue with a desperate, circular fervor, as if a final, binding verdict is just one more reply away. Yet, no such verdict ever arrives. The discussion is not a means to an end; the discussion is itself the end, a self-perpetuating machine for the generation of more text.

Above this ceaseless activity, there exists an authority that is everywhere felt but seldom seen. They are called "moderators," and they enforce a code of conduct that is, by its very nature, inscrutable. A post may vanish without explanation, a thread may be locked, an account may be terminated. The reasons for these judgments are presumably recorded in some higher ledger, but it is a ledger to which the ordinary user has no access. One lives in a state of perpetual, low-grade anxiety, aware that any utterance could be the one that transgresses an unwritten law. It is a system of justice that operates with the remote, unanswerable logic of a dream.

The most peculiar activity, however, is the creation of what are termed "fan missions." The members of this community dedicate countless hours to building intricate, shadowy worlds in the image of an original, canonical work that is now defunct, its creators long since dispersed. They are like architects attempting to reconstruct a cathedral from a single, faded photograph. They debate with theological intensity the proper placement of a shadow, the correct sound for a footstep on stone. It is a noble, and yet entirely absurd, undertaking—a quest to attain the grace of an absent god. They build these elaborate castles of code and light, and for a moment, they can inhabit a perfect imitation of the past. But it is only an imitation, and upon completing their task, they are once again outside the gates, compelled to begin the process anew. One is left with the unsettling conviction that the forum is not a place for discussion or creation, but a kind of waiting room, a process without a conclusion, where the only certainty is the continuation of the process itself.

Thousands of hot dogs spill across busy highway

Crews mustard up the courage to dispose of thousands of sausages, with a fire chief saying: "I can tell you personally, hot dogs are very slippery. I did not know that."

But a chatbot has enough indepth knowledge of Kafka and his style, that if you ask it to write a Kafkaesque essay on a topic that Kafka never addressed, it will do so in the most likely way Kafka would. LLM's can parse info and flesh things out probably better than any human.

The point being - you're contradicting yourself here.

If we ask the chatbot to make a "kafkaesque" story, you can either say it's just copying Kafka, or it's not just copying Kafka, and in fact made a totally different thing that doesn't actually count as being "kafkaesque". So if it can never be truly Kafka, then it can't copy Kafka and will instead make it's own stuff with its own internal logic that's different to Kafka. Now this output will have some similarities to Kafka, but it's not a copy, and it's not a simulacrum: it is it's own thing now.