When I read generated novels, I don’t even feel bad, or rather, as if I’m reading something meaningless and empty. When I look at AI-generated memes, I just don’t find it funny. When I listen to generated music I feel like it’s dead. When I watch AI generated videos I feel sick, this is clearly for some kind of consumers.
And now I don’t read or watch or listen to anything new at all. No, now I watch, listen and read old things and yes, I feel good sometimes I even cry understanding how I could not appreciate something so beautiful before.
Yes, I was once a consumer myself, but it always seemed to me that something was wrong, that everything was somehow not right, and when AI learned to create this fake art, I finally understood what exactly was wrong… There was no soul, there was only sterile garbage and now there is more and more of it. And AI makes it even worse. It is the worst invention of humanity at the moment, or one of the worst. Why is it the worst? Because such inventions always fall into unworthy hands, and I think it’s time for everyone to admit it.
Well, now to the main thing, are you also now watching, reading or listening to old things in which there is not a drop of AI and sometimes even tears come to your eyes? Or do you just feel alive?
The problem is it’s slop. I feel nothing but disappointment watching most media these days, it’s just so lazy and soulless
Yes, AI turbo charges slop production, but what has made me laugh the hardest over the past few years is AI being chaotic and interacting with real people. I love that a fake anime girl can play Minecraft with a bunch of people, suddenly decide to set everything on fire and cry for help, or hunt down a player for a perceived slight.
I love that another creator designs AI prompts on the spot and puts them and the viewers through challenges.
I love that someone made an escape room game where you must pacify an unhinged AI while trying to accomplish tasks
Some AI art is surreal and incredible, and people use AI with intent, passing a single picture through many different AI stacks with manual configuration
There was even a movie script “written entirely by AI”, but in reality it was a writer guiding an AI through creating a screenplay. It was about a writer who uses AI, then discovers it’s a far better writer than he could ever be, and the existential crisis he faces as he passes off the AI’s work as his own
But then you have something like Star wars, where the new trilogy was so lacking in soul and writing that I still feel loss when I watch any star wars media. I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the last movie, I eventually watched someone rewrite the trilogy scene by scene to fix it instead
AI slop is definitely a huge problem, but the real problem is societal. We have a grifting economy, everyone is so scared and desperate they’re just trying to exploit a system to “get theirs” while they can. You can’t make art like that, you can’t even make useful things like that
Creation requires soul, but just like you can hang a paint can and spin a canvas to create beautiful patterns, the artists who do it make hundreds, unsure of how it will turn out, and burn all but the one that speaks to them. If they released all of them, they’d just be kitche slop
AI is the same way - you can use AI to create very quickly, but if you don’t inject something into the process you’ve just made slop
And corporations want you to learn to love the slop
Well, you think sensibly. But you know, a person, how to say it, is not worthy of possessing great power, he treats it too badly and only makes it worse. Look, it seems like we have such technologies, but we have become even more lonely and anxious than before. Of course, I’m not talking about everyone, but still… Yes, and I consider utopia a sweet lie, there will be no utopia, it is impossible.
There’s no closing Pandora’s box at this point, but honestly I don’t know if it even really matters
I think AI is a tiny fraction of the true problem. Slop is just a symptom of late stage capitalism. It always goes back to that.
COVID moved everything online, and billionaires and corporations have enshitified the walled gardens they’ve managed to lock people into. YouTube is full of slop because they were happy to take the short term ad money. Hollywood is full of slop because Disney bought every franchise with good IP, and no one wants to take a risk. AAA gaming is slop because Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft bought all the big studios and doesn’t want to take risks.
It’s all slop because integrity and pride in your work is the enemy of slop factories. You have few individuals creating to create because if you can’t monitise your work immediately, you can’t survive
Also, you have a huge wave of anti intellectualism. People don’t know how to critically examine media anymore - before AI, clickbait and short form videos of reddit posts over gameplay were already taking over. Disinfo and misinfo was everywhere, echo chambers and the algorithms were already doing far worse to us then AI
I think if we can fix society, AI won’t be a problem. AI isn’t bad, corporations - large amalgamations of people that humans don’t actually control - they’re the threat
AI is only bad because its powerful at a back time. I might be ok with not allowing it as a service… Maybe if you want AI for something, you use it through an expert with the understanding to set it up for you.
But regulation scares me, because right now lobbyists would write the whole thing
Well, I have nothing to say here, you are right, we still live in a world where the strongest survives… And that means that there is nothing good to expect from the future. The world has always been shit and always will be, because it is just a rotting, decaying and crumbling nonsense.