Human Slop Is The Real Problem
(or is it... lack of taste?)
Why does AI get the blame in “AI Slop”? Is this a psyop from Big Human to try and convince us that AI is the true villain, when really it’s content posted by people with terrible taste?
For the first time in human history, lack of taste is no longer bottlenecked by lack of talent.
I suspect the real problem here is some kind of inverse “uncanny valley”-type effect:
The Sniff Test: You glance at an image for 0.1 seconds. It looks like a real photo. Your brain registers “Human Effort made this”
The Betrayal: You look for another 0.2 seconds. You notice the phone has 8 cameras and none of the gears mesh. Why does the sign say “Ggbyb is lhais i ss Hws tcooob”?
The Disgust: You were tricked into attributing authentic human effort to something that cost a prompter three seconds of their life. That wasn’t a real cave painting!
Unlike images, AI writing generally requires a little bit of reading to notice. It seems like real, human effort was used to make the thing, but once you “delve” into the “tapestry of innovation”, oops, no it wasn’t!
Have you seen AI stuff that was so carefully done you didn’t notice it was AI?
There’s also something tempting (because of that same sniff test working on the prompter) about generating an AI output, saying “yeah, that looks about right” and pouring it straight into the social media trough.
Before AI, text was mostly hard to create, and images would bear the scars of the tools used to create them. You had to open MS Paint and decide, yes, Impact is the best font. You had to learn how to pirate a copy of Photoshop. There was a “Proof of Work” inherent in every meme. And we humans, let me tell you (as a fellow human), do we ever love seeing the visible, unforgeable signals of effort and talent from other humans.
Now that natural and practiced ability isn’t much of a barrier, what remains? Taste.
How much taste is there in the average social meme septic tank filler?
Why don’t we point fingers at that guy who posted it?
I guess it’s easier to blame the content, since it fits in a neat category, and the guy is part of an amorphous... presence on social media.
We are currently living through a global, real-time demonstration of how little taste the average person actually has.
I love the magic wand that AI has given us for content creation, I just want to see it used more judiciously. I think curation is going to be very, very important in the future.
(I wrote this, though I did have Gemini look at it)
If you’re a fellow human, or a very sophisticated bot with excellent taste, come hang out in my Discord. Feel free to come agree with me and argue with everyone else.
