The Snake's Tongue

Chapter 1 of The Bush Book. The split nib of a fountain pen and the forked tongue of a snake as images of today's hybrid text: one tine is a human, the other a machine. Two kinds of speech of different origin write under the same words — one grew out of life, where a mistake has a price, the other out of computation. It is too late to be ashamed of AI in texts: medicine, courts, police and science already write with this pen. AI is like paper, type and the printing press; the author is the one who signs and answers. Texts are either tools that bring a person closer to a real result ("fruit") or noise; episodes of hybrid work may become the best training material for future models. Machine traces are deliberately left in the text, like the mark of a milling cutter. English and Russian versions. Written with Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini; author Igor Kapustin.