Much like a rogue factory's clandestine sewage pipe spews outlawed effluent into the ocean, the powerful HVAC system at Oblomov Inc radiates raw ennui throughout every floor of the building. These regular blasts of lukewarm apathy swirl around our desks and I watch my colleagues wilt and collapse across their computers, never to rise again until called to the conference room for yet another pointless meeting.
If only we could vacuum the ennui away as if it were just dust. But it has become the very substance of our working lives. Without our frowns and half-closed eyes and stifled yawns we could claim no identity at all. At least here at our desks we are not crushed into nothingness like the rusting, redundant hulks of the unemployed at the scrapyard. We remain beings who can still measure our days in desultory mouse clicks if not in meaningful activity. Come friendly AI and annex Oblomov, it's too automated for humans now.
Nevertheless, I suppose making AI images does give me something to do during my lunch break, in between bites of stale chicken sandwich from the cafeteria, washed down with a century-old can of Diet Dr Pepper. Maybe in the future, when Oblomov is long-since bankrupt and the building transformed into a community arts and craft space, I will hold an exhibition of the AI pictures I created here, like a former Soviet dissident giving tours of the salt mine wherein he was forced to labor in the bad old times.
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