#plato

So yes, AI slop is bad for you. Not because AI-generated content is immoral to consume or inherently inferior to human creation, but because the act of consuming AI slop reshapes your perception. It dulls discrimination, narrows taste, and habituates you to imitation. The harm lies less in the content itself than in the long-term training of attention and appetite.

"How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space -- and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more -- in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters. So if you typed "W" then SHIFT-space then "O" then SHIFT-space then "B", "T", "A", "X", all with SHIFT-spaces in between, all those characters would plot on top of each other, and the result would be the smiley as shown above in the "WOBTAX" example. "