I picture a dystopian science-fiction movie. A young woman comes up with an idea: "Let's create a place where people can find useful sentences in many languages, linked to translations in many languages, so they can really understand how the sentences and the words in them work! We'll be different from whatever else is out there because we'll use full sentences rather than individual words, they'll be created by humans rather than machines, and we'll build a community of contributors. Sounds fun! Let's do it!"

Of course, this being the Internet era, this is done on a website, with the help of software and machines. But it's still a human place, and the sentences are quirky, sometimes TOO quirky, but at least diverse and interesting. The site's popularity grows and grows, and the number of sentences climbs past hundreds to thousands, tens of thousands, and eventually millions.

However, in an unnoticed corner, the bots plan a hostile takeover. They decide to invert the plan. They'll distract attention from the sentence seekers and make people focus on the act of contributing sentences. They'll plant the idea that proper nouns are actually people, and discouraging use of a particular noun is akin to abuse of a fundamental human right. Far more deviously, they'll plant the idea that the goal of the site is not to contribute diverse, interesting sentences, but to saturate it with every possible simple sentence that can be generated easily, either by a bot, or by a human acting like a bot.

This is a darkly ironic movie. One irony is that, in the name of avoiding duplication and near-duplicates that differ only in the use of names, they persuade the gullible humans that they can only use the names "Tom" and "Mary", thus introducing a sea of near-duplicate sentences that use the same name and sentence structure, varying only in the choice of another noun or verb. Another is that, by generating tens of thousands of sentences of the form "Tom is <adjective>", they will have undone the "We're not a dictionary!" mission of the founder.

The beleaguered humans who still forage through the site to find sentences that will illustrate words for them need to use special tools to sift through the sea of "Tom and Mary" clones. They are forced to transmit lore to each other: "If you want to find sentences that DON'T include 'Tom' or 'Mary', you need to type this," they are forced to whisper.

The movie ends with zombies stumbling around: "Must... create... more... sentences. Not... enough... Tom... Need... two... million... three... million... more... more..." And of course you can hear the bots cackling maniacally as they see that their takeover is complete.