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Introduction When American artist William T. Wiley coined the cryptic acronyms M.A.S.U. (“Machines Are Saving Us”) and M.A.K.U. (“Machines Are Killing Us”), he was not simply commenting on technology. He was revealing a deeper paradox at the heart of modern life, the impossibility of separating our tools from ourselves. In Wiley’s ironic phrasing, the machine embodies both hope and threat, salvation and destruction, cure and poison. Today, as artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) transform our creative and intellectual landscape, Wiley’s playful opposition feels uncannily prophetic. His “both/and” vision captures the essence of our contemporary anxiety: the very technologies that extend human thought also risk erasing the distinction between the human and the machinic. In Derrida’s sense, they are pharmaka , remedies that contain their own poison. To understand how Wiley anticipated this moment, we can trace his ideas back to the artistic lineage that first blurr...