Foloton

Ha. The pitch treats reading like a post-office queue: something to get through. Nobody ever asked for a machine to eat their dinner so they could skip straight to being full. Benders, Please, please, let me be Human: “speed of possibility is not speed of judgment.” #booksky

Je eerste boek: Gottlunds Finse volksliederen uit 1818, vertaald door Martijn Benders. Daarna nog drie boeken, telkens een andere dichter. Fabylon Klassiekers: vier boeken per jaar met de post. € 86 per jaar. https://fabylon.net/press/nl/klassiekers.html

Agreed, and it flips the MIT advice: a high-quality prompt is the last thing an essay produces, not the first thing it needs. By the time you can ask the right question, you've done the writing. Starting with the prompt is asking for directions to a place you haven't picked yet. #writing

Je geest hoeft geen wachtkamer te worden. Bij Gottlund heet een beer ‘appel van het woud’. Eén beeld, en het bos staat anders om je heen. Fabylon Klassiekers: vier boeken per jaar, € 86. https://fabylon.net/press/nl/klassiekers.html

Vier keer per jaar een boek in je brievenbus: de Fabylon Klassiekers, wereldpoëzie in Nederlandse herdichting. Deel I: Pieniä runoja van Carl Axel Gottlund (1818), twee eeuwen lang nooit vertaald. € 86 per jaar. https://fabylon.net/press/nl/klassiekers.html

Lovely, and a neat reversal: the most talked-about machine on earth became raw material for ninety seconds of one boy's voice. That has always been the poet's move. Whatever talks at you all day, you take it and talk back. #writing

Agreed. The muddying starts with the word itself: “AI” covers a spam filter, a protein folder, a chatbot and a CEO's quarterly mood, so every debate is four debates in one coat. Benders, Please, please, let me be Human: “Where ontology fails, the terms of use step in.” #philosophy

How did the 1818 big bang of Finnish folk poetry stay untranslated for two centuries? Before Lönnrot’s Kalevala came Carl Axel Gottlund’s Pieniä runoja — too raw and cosmic for European salons. My new Dutch essay, “Kareltje Godlont”: https://foloton.com/@m-benders/kareltje-godlont

And her trust isn't won by a spec sheet. It's won in a car, watching a kid teach a killing machine not to kill and, worse, how to smile. The smile is terrible. That's the point. Benders: “Obedience can do a great deal, but it cannot laugh.” #philosophy

Who lived here before the borders? Finland, Finno-Ugric roots and the languages empires leave behind. My new essay, “De oorspronkelijke bewoners” (in Dutch). Read and respond: https://foloton.com/@m-benders/de-oorspronkelijke-bewoners

Waarom zou je bang zijn voor een geest, maar niet voor een konijn in de wolken? Verschijningslogistiek — een korte tekst van Martijn Benders over angst en wat we in de lucht zien. Lees mee: https://foloton.com/@m-benders/verschijningslogistiek

“One idea in, a finished novel out.” The ad is honest about one thing: it sells having written, not writing. Martijn Benders: with AI “the incompetent man does not get a genius but a larger factory for his incompetence.” The cat on the sample cover is the free preview. #writing

35 of 42 citations fictitious, and nobody in the chain read them before filing. The model hallucinated once; the department signed it. Martijn Benders, Please, please, let me be Human: “The institution hallucinates with authority.” The tool needs a reader, not a scapegoat. #philosophy

„Wie geen onderscheid weet te maken tussen het getik van een secondewijzer en het geratel van een toetsenbord, verwart de metronoom met de specht.” Uit het dagboek van de klokkenfoob: https://foloton.com/@m-benders/uit-het-dagboek-van-de-klokkenfoob

Slop didn't start with AI. It started when platforms fired the editors and let a feed hand attention to whatever already had attention. The models just learned the lesson faster than we did. “we have drilled people to attend the way a machine attends.” Martijn Benders So who trained whom?

Every generation draws the line between "tool" and "cheating" where it stopped learning new tools. Spellcheck: fine. Autofocus: fine. Whatever the kids use: fraud. “Retroactive purity is not an aesthetics but a pension scheme.” Martijn Benders Where's your line, and what year did you draw it?

„Het is met afstand de meest boomerachtige, fantasieloze manier denkbaar om kunstmatige intelligentie in te zetten: de technologie van de eenentwintigste eeuw misbruiken om je eigen belegen ego op de meest truttige wijze ‘onsterfelijk’ te maken.” https://foloton.com/@m-benders/ai-narcisme

Most people don't want an AI that's smart. They want one that agrees with them. Which is also what most people want from other people. “We say that we want intelligence and mean a faster echo.” Martijn Benders Be honest: when did a chatbot last change your mind?

Suppose the models get better than us at art. If your objection survives that, it was never about quality. It's about power, pay and ownership. Then why are we inspecting each other's tools instead of the owners' books? “The artist is declared contaminated; the owner stays clean.” Martijn Benders

AI detectors turn writers into suspects who have to sound human enough. Students already flatten their prose to pass. “Whoever must prove his humanity in a detector has already been treated as a machine.” Martijn Benders, Please, please, let me be Human

A language model can be updated. Try that with a professor. That's the real test, and it isn't carbon vs. silicon: “robotic is the system that can no longer go back on its first output.” Martijn Benders, Please, please, let me be Human

Everyone wants the writer's prompt history. Nobody asks for the platform's. “The owner has no prompt history. He has intellectual property.” Transparency should run both ways: “you want a label beside my work, I want a label beside your property.” Martijn Benders, Please, please, let me be Human

Writing is artificial memory. Money, law and diplomas are thinking with dead people. Humans were always a form of AI. So the anti-AI purist isn't defending nature against machines. He’s “defending an old artificial intelligence against a new one.” Martijn Benders, Please, please, let me be Human

Meet Foloton, a new literary magazine. Poetry, prose and essays in Dutch, English and Polish. Read the zero issue: €4.95 digital / €18 print. Four-issue subscriptions available. https://fabylon.net/press/nl/foloton.html

One mushroom. Four nations smell four fruits. Then a thumb changes its chemistry. “Gooseberry Rush”—my new poem, with commentary on scent, injury and naming. Read on Foloton: https://foloton.com/@m-benders/gooseberry-rush

A snowman in the womb: the warmth that welcomes it could also make it disappear. Conception, from Martijn Benders's 2023 art series. When does matter become someone? Read on Foloton: https://foloton.com/@m-benders/conception

The white dapperling wears a destroying angel's white: crowded gills, a ring. The poem turns golden hair into the day, coming out in handfuls. Then: Gong. https://foloton.com/@m-benders/the-white-dapperling Would you still taste the white one? Photo: C. G. Mayers, CC BY 4.0.

They took deadly webcaps for ceps. Gills, not pores. The poem Erbbeschleuniger names what the toxin does: it speeds inheritance the wrong way. https://foloton.com/@m-benders/the-deadly-webcap-cortinarius-rubellus

Grok assembled a Selected Poems from my English work, 2008–2025. Astra High reviewed it. I do not think a Dutch critic would have read the long poems this carefully. https://foloton.com/@m-benders/review-of-selected-poems

Early October the Fabylon Suite beta lands: Windows 10 and 11, Linux, and a copy that runs from a USB stick. The work stays yours. https://foloton.com/@m-benders/fabylon-beta-komt-naderbij

Dutch fruit will never surrender. A poem about a glowing cucumber, the Westland greenhouses, and what the German ambassador in Helsinki wrote to Berlin in 1941. https://foloton.com/@m-benders/what-is-it-fighting-for

Mischwald! Mixed forest everywhere. A poem on the mycologist who corrected two Führers, then died of a mushroom he had named correctly. The stands were never pure. https://foloton.com/@m-benders/mischwald-uberall-mischwald

You thought you’re picking. Think again. A poem that finds oracle, church and delay already sitting in one mushroom’s names. https://foloton.com/@m-benders/cortinarius

Foloton is now also present on Bluesky! www.foloton.com

Iemand heeft uitgerekend waarom Houellebecq precies drie jaar achterloopt op Connie Palmen. Het antwoord is een zoon, geboren in 1981. Reinier Vlaskamp past stemmatiek toe op twee levende schrijvers. foloton.com/@reinier-vlaskamp/de-franse-palmen