AI Slop Wins Because Nobody's Watching
Gen AI is getting better, and looks useful. Maybe even good. But look closely, and it feels like we're just getting faster at churning out high-grade slop. The real question is, does anyone even notice the difference anymore?
None of these things is in any meaningful way "solved." The quality of the slop keeps rising, and is genuinely very very good now, but what we keep learning is that the gap between "slop" and "something actually good" is much wider than we thought. Every generation of this stuff feels "close" but then the next one also feels "close" and so on, but we never quite get to good.
What we ARE approaching is slop of high enough quality that the powers that be are seriously considering just using slop everywhere. The pictures don't look much like the inputs, or much like Studio Ghibli output, but nobody notices because nobody gives a damn, nobody looks. The essay is warmed over wikipedia, and contains a couple of wild errors, but nobody reads it, nobody gives a damn.
Aren't these the same guys that want to RETVRN to Rome because of the High Quality architecture or whatever? I don't even know what's going on. It feels like the same people going on about Quality and how things got messed up, are at the same time telling me that AI output is awesome and rightfully should replace all human activity.
The tragedy here is that all these AI bros apparently cannot tell the difference between AI slop and Renaissance Quality. They're exactly the unsophisticated slobs they desperately don't want to be.
But slop is probably fine. It's true that nobody reads, nobody looks, nobody gives a damn. The powers that be are correct, they can just use slop for everything and fire everyone.
Still, maybe the fear of replacement works just right for them. Lets them ignore the basics. Even Henry Ford knew he had to pay his workers enough to be able to afford his cars.