The news hit like a thunderbolt on a sunny afternoon: Dolly Parton, the silver-haired queen of country music, has died at the age of 80. Tributes poured in from every corner of the globe—from the President to the Pope, from Taylor Swift to the man who once sold her a corn dog at the Tennessee State Fair. Each message was heartfelt, each post was tear-stained, and each one said precisely the same thing: 'She was a shining light who made the world a better place through her music and philanthropy.' But as the day wore on, a troubling question began to itch at the back of journalists' minds: why did every single tribute use those exact words? No one said 'She had a great laugh' or 'I'll miss her beehive hairdo.' It was as if a single script had been passed around, a script that not even Dolly's most intimate friends seemed to stray from. The White House statement, an Instagram caption from Shania Twain, and a tweet from a random AI influencer account all matched perfectly, down to the comma placement. Then the truth emerged—or at least a satirical version of it. A leaked internal memo from a major social media company revealed that they had been preparing for Dolly's death for years. Using predictive algorithms, they had pre-written 100,000 variations of tribute posts, each one designed to maximize engagement. But a last-minute update glitched, causing every account to default to the most vanilla option: 'She was a shining light...' The company scrambled to delete the duplicates, but the bots were too fast. By evening, the internet was a wall of identical copy-pasted eulogies, and no one could tell which ones were written by humans and which by machines. The consequences rippled outward. Funeral homes reported an unprecedented run on wigs and glittery suits. The official Dollywood website crashed after a single click from a bot farm. And in a bizarre twist, an AI-generated deepfake of Dolly began livestreaming from a mysterious account, singing 'Jolene' while asking viewers to donate to a cryptocurrency called 'DollyCoin' that promised to fund her cryogenic preservation. Thousands of fans bought in. So as we wipe away our tears—or at least our algorithmically determined expressions of grief—we have to wonder: if we can't even trust a tribute to be human, what's next? A country song written by ChatGPT? A farewell tour planned by a neural network? And when the last note fades, will we even know who played it? Smart for whom?