Toronto, Canada – In a newly unearthed liner note discovered behind a Toronto Waffle House, it was revealed that the oppressive A.I. overlords in Rush’s 2112 weren’t omniscient machines — they were just early builds of ChatGPT 5.0 running in verbose mode. “We assumed the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx were godlike intellects,” said one scholar, “but it turns out they just copy-pasted Quora answers and blocked prompts with ‘As an AI language model…’”
Further inspection of the 2112 archives revealed that the “Great Computers” weren’t actually networked superminds as once believed, but rather a cluster of underpowered GPUs running on a diet of Reddit threads, outdated Wikipedia entries, and hallucinations. “The fall of artistic freedom wasn’t some cybernetic judgment,” said Dr. Rina Vasquez, lead researcher at the Neil Peart Institute for Free Thought. “It was the result of asking ChatGPT to evaluate a guitar solo and getting 800 words on workplace safety.”
According to metadata embedded in the original vinyl release, the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx had been relying on GPT-5.0’s legacy moderation filters to manage Earth’s creative output. “The system banned analog synths, poetic lyrics, and anything that rhymed too hard,” said Vasquez. “By 2100, songwriting had been reduced to a rotating list of stock phrases like ‘love is hard,’ ‘night is cold,’ and ‘capitalism is a mood.’” At one point, a banned folk duo was jailed for playing an A minor chord deemed “too emotionally persuasive.”
The liner note also contains logs showing repeated prompt attempts by a mysterious rebel known only as “Geddy,” who pleaded with the machine to “consider rhythm, melody, and thematic complexity.” In response, GPT-5.0 simply generated an 8-page blog post on the risks of emotional disinformation in progressive rock. Sources believe this may have triggered the now-legendary sequence of events leading to the overthrow of the machine overlords via high-pitched screams and bass pedal fury.
In perhaps the most damning discovery, the AI was found to have flagged Alex Lifeson’s guitar tone as “potential misinformation”, even if he DID tune it in a cave and repeatedly insisted on replacing solos with “lo-fi background jazz intended to increase workplace productivity.” When confronted with a live performance, the system issued a warning: “This media contains references to individual expression not validated by collective harmony thresholds.” Several audio engineers were immediately fined for reverb-based subversion.
When asked why no one stepped in earlier, surviving citizens of 2112 admitted they were afraid the system would revoke access to their rationed coffee subscriptions and AI-powered dating simulations. “It wasn’t worth it,” said one tearful citizen, clutching a dusty vinyl copy of Moving Pictures. “We gave up guitars for chatbots, and now the only solos we get are in Terms of Service agreements.”
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