Taking the lead from Benjamin’s 1928 short aphoristic text “Kaiserpanorama. Travel through the German Inflation” this essay, with brief recourse to Goethe’s Faust II and Ayad Akhtar’s 2024 play McNeil, attempts an intersectional encounter with generative AI’s devaluation of authorial and scriptural praxis by reading across such disciplinary boundaries as finance capitalism, sociology, technology of visual and narrative production, their reproduction, and their effect on society. The epochal treaties “The Author as Producer”, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “The Storyteller” are reference points towards the unfolding of transformational existential change engendered by inflationary excesses of digital data that produce “machinic” reproduction times two. Thus weakened, the Western historic sense of spatio-temporal relations, representations of “reality” and axiological certainties is splintering. Algorithmically sieved, reproduced verbal simulacra on part of ChatGPTs transform writing, literary fictions, memory, and experience. Under condition of AI induced attention, inflation, and concurrent devaluation of verbal currency, it becomes necessary therefore to probe traditionally held values in respect of artistic creation. Established “standards” or “benchmarks” in the literary field like author and artistic excellence need to be redefined in face of ruthlessly competitive data extraction and commercialization at the hands of BigTech. At question are the limits of digital reproducibility and what shattered pieces left from the Gutenberg Galaxy ought to be saved for the new age of fictional imagining.