#slop

Slop is the result of humans actively deciding to take shortcuts and being okay with the shittastic results. If people genuinely put forth the effort to avoid digital distractions and actually create and make—not as a lifestyle hack, but simple decision making—then we’d have a much better place to live and work. Slop is deliberate, not inevitable.

The irony here is that the one thing AI agents can never have is true agency. Making a decision to reach out to a stranger and take time out of their day needs to remain a uniquely human decision, driven by human judgement. Setting a goal for a bunch of LLMs and letting them loose on Gmail is not a responsible way to apply this technology.

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.

But what happens in the generative world? In that world, the signal is broken - a complex, well-crafted artifact is much easier to build, so it’s appearance is no longer a proxy for quality. This is a familiar effect. But the other thing that’s happening is that the attentional transaction is now “inverted” - I may have spend a small amount of my time and attention to take up a large amount of yours. I’m no longer “paying” you with attention, or transferring value to you, I’m taking it away.

I have nothing against using AI as a writing assistant. It’s fantastic for checking spelling, grammar, and flow, it can help you out of writer’s block, and it can do something that you could never do, no matter how smart or creative you are: it can come up with ideas you’d never come up with. So yes, use AI, but you have to do some of the work, and you have to double-check it before putting that work out in the world!

I looked in my home directory in my desktop Mac, which I don’t very often (I run a tidy operation here), and I found a file I didn’t recognise called out.html. Here is out.html. For the benefit of the tape: it is a half-baked GeoCities-style homepage complete with favourite poems, broken characters, and a "This page is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher!" message in the footer. The creation date of the file is March of this year. I don’t know how it got there. Maybe my computer is haunted?

Former Wondery exec Jeanine Wright is leading a new firm, Inception Point AI, that's betting on flooding the zone with audio content As for how it stacks up against human podcasts? “I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites. Because there’s a lot of really good stuff out there,” Wright said.

Undoubtedly, the sloppification of the internet will likely get worse over the next few years. And as such, the returns to curating quality sources of content will only increase. My advice? Use an RSS feed reader, read Twitter lists instead of feeds, and find spaces where real discussion still happens (e.g. LessWrong and Lobsters still both seem slop-free).

It is nightmarish to me to read reports of how reliant on ChatGPT students have become, even outsourcing to the machines the ideally very personal assignment "briefly introduce yourself and say what you're hoping to get out of this class." It is depressing to me to read defenses of those students, particularly this one that compares an AI-written essay to using a washing machine in that it reduces the time required for the labor. This makes sense only if the purpose of a student writing an essay is "to have written an essay," which it is not. The teacher did not assign it as busywork. The purpose of an essay is to learn and practice communication skills, critical thinking, organization of one's own thoughts. These are useful skills to develop, even (especially!) if you do not go into a writing career.

Thousands of Dubliners showed up for the city's much-anticipated Halloween parade on Thursday evening. They lined the streets from Parnell Street to Christchurch Cathedral, waiting for the promised three-hour parade that would "[transform] Dublin into a lively tapestry of costumes, artistic performances, and cultural festivities." A likely story. There was no parade, and never was one.