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LM: #372: AI is the least slop thing ever
Slop has nothing to do with AI. The age of AI in fact has great potential to see the elimination of slop. But it’s up to us.
Slop is made when a formula is followed to create something. All the individual expression and taste is taken out of the final product.
If you press a button and expect AI to create something, you will get slop. AI works by turning the process into a formula.
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But slop has been around for centuries.
If you have any pattern recognition, you’ve noticed formulaic movies, TV, music, and writing. You know what’s going to happen and it’s just cheesy and it sucks. It’s slop, and sadly most people don’t know the difference.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid-1800s was rebelling against slop. The art academies in Europe had reduced Raphael’s painting style to a formula. The P.R.B. called it “slosh.”
AI actually has tremendous potential to reduce slop.
Slop proliferates because of rigid systems of organization. When there are three channels, a few record labels, one local radio station, etc. it’s too risky to let artists simply express themselves. Shareholders need to be assured what they’re doing will work. So art gets reduced to a formula.
AI just copies the formulas we’ve already been using to make safe art.
In the ‘90s, we had to decide whether to browse the Action & Adventure or Comedy section of Blockbuster Video. These walls that balkanize taste have been gradually dissolving, and AI is the bulldozer.
Marshall McLuhan called this the shift from mechanical to electric technology.
“He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine.” —Marshall McLuhan
With AI not only can you do away with video-store shelves, but the BISAC subject codes for organizing books. Even hashtags are becoming obsolete. (Thank God, I hate hashtags.)
So write a novel or record an album – with your hands and mind – then let AI tell you how to categorize it. AI can then help others find it just because it has some weird quirk they specifically will enjoy. This flexible sorting isn’t possible in the rigid structures of store shelves.
It is not an exaggeration to say that AI is the most anti-slop technology in the history of humanity.
We only see more slop now because people are too afraid or have forgotten how to express themselves. Slop will only persist if humans decide it deserves to. If we accept it as art.
We’ve been doing that a long time, but admittedly, it’s been hard not to.
Eliminating slop requires us to be brave enough to create (and most importantly, seek out and consume) unique and authentic art.
Book: Weapons of Math Destruction (Amazon) is about how blunt algorithms mess up everything.
Cool: The AI Water Issue is Fake is a thorough analysis of why the issue of AI water usage is blown out of proportion by sloppy and disingenuous journalism.
Best,
David
P.S. For the first time, 100-Word Writing Habit is 99¢ on Kindle.
