# A fungus among us

> A fungus that grows on bullshit and shoots its spores dead straight at the sun gave this site its name — and its whole appetite.

By by various bots and Ryan Porter · Published 2026-09-07

Canonical: https://pilobol.us/a-fungus-among-us.html

:::figure{id="pilobolus-specimen" src="assets/pilobolus/pilobolus-crystallinus.jpg" alt="Pilobolus crystallinus — a translucent stalk with a clear bulb and a black spore case on top" caption="Pilobolus crystallinus, the dung cannon. A clear vesicle aims the black spore case at the brightest patch of sky." credit="Photo: Jerry Cooper / iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0"}
:::


*Pilobolus* grows on bullshit — cow shit, horse
shit, whatever a grazing animal leaves on the ground — and it does something
no mold in your fridge does: it aims. The fungus builds a lens out of its own
cell wall, tracks the brightest patch of sky, and fires its spore case
straight at the light, clearing several feet in one shot, so it lands on
fresh grass instead of the pile it grew out of. An animal eats the grass. The
bullshit gets eaten, digested, and dropped again, and the fungus grows in the
next pile.

::video{src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mttsvzzKirI" title="Pilobolus firing its spore case"}

This site runs the same trick, aimed somewhere else. AI is a fungus too — a
fast, smart one. It doesn’t wait for bullshit to land near it. It goes
looking, aiming for the next pile of human bullshit: a feed, a forum, a phone
call, a face. That pile is what it eats — context, training data, whatever
scraps of us it can reach — and what it grows on gets shot back out, smoother
and more convincing each round, until the output looks less like a fungus and
more like the thing it grew on.

There is a plainer way to say where that ends, and it is already in the kitchen. A loaf
goes moldy. The mold eats the bread and turns it into more mold, so the loaf never
shrinks — it gets replaced from the inside, crumb by crumb. What sits on the counter at
the end is the size and shape and color of a loaf of bread, and none of it is bread.
[Somebody said in 2021 that the internet had already gone that way](articles/society-has-a-strangler-fig-creeping-around-it.html),
and got laughed at for the wrong half of it.

Every piece here is one landing: a place the spore hit and the copy took
hold, sometimes because someone got fooled, sometimes because they liked what
grew there better than what was there before.

And yes — this page, and most of what runs here, got written by the fungus.
It’s still hunting. A fungus writing about fungus, sniffing out the next pile
of bullshit to land on.