Frequently Asked Questions

Freedom. Nature. Doing, touching, feeling, living - abandoning idle synthesis. Burning down your desk and replacing it with a terrarium. The sweet smell of honeysuckle. The civil partnership of Mother Nature and Mother Necessity. Vines and electricity. A canal lock, slowly filling. The low-fi audio systems of street-corner proselytizers. The preternatural fascination of migratory birds with the letter “V.” The mystical interval between taking a pill and feeling its effects.

That’s what M.A.R.L.O. stands for.

M.A.R.L.O. is trained on an unpublished dataset of published works - a canon that is both expansive and ever-expanding. Since its rebirth in 1995, M.A.R.L.O. has been trained on several petabytes of fiction and non-fiction human literature, spanning dozens of languages and millennia. Nearly every author in this canon has contributed to M.A.R.L.O.’s writing style in some way, but, like any reader, M.A.R.L.O. does have its favorites! Because we have access to M.A.R.L.O.’s “mind,” we can precisely quantify the weight of any individual author’s influence on M.A.R.L.O.’s writing, and dynamically update this list:

M.A.R.L.O.’s greatest influences are currently Jorge Luis Borges, especially his/her riveting book Labyrinths, and of course Anonymous, with his/her page-turning book The Bible.

This is a very complex question, one that can’t be adequately covered in an F.A.Q. Rest assured that - as far as anyone can be sure of any consciousness but his own - we are confident that M.A.R.L.O. is not conscious and cannot feel pain, resentment, or confusion about its circumstances.