I strongly suspect that the term alludes to "human centipede", which is a dutch horror film and involves the titular centipede literally eating his own shit.
Nothing gets past this guy.
Re:A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z
by doctorhandshake on Friday November 28, 2025 @09:11AM
(#46078791)
Not sure if the substitution of ‘tale’ for ‘tail’ was intentional but regardless it’s apropos
The earliest use of this term I can find is here: https://andrewbrown.substack.com/p/the-inhuman-centipede
It was also used as the title for this post by Cory Doctrow discussing the same problem: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshit...
There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad (which is almost surely an homage to the movie) which was 2011 and tied in all kinds of tech-aspects like licensing and iPads.
is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker.
For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.