Unquestionably, this is the age of slop. If ever a technology looked liked an emerging phenomenon of the Zeitgeist, it is generative AI. Over the past two hundred years, what we now call “content” has been produced and distributed at ever greater speed and volume, and ever lower cost. What began with cheap printing has led to the internet in its smartphone iteration: we can now all consume and produce endless “content” during our every waking moment.
There are almost no barriers to publishing one’s material, and there is a bottomless need for more of it. Inevitably, the result has been that most of what is offered to us is almost devoid of meaning or worth. This thinnest of gruels is then much of the diet of generative AI, and what it feeds us in turn is “content” that truly has no meaning whatsoever, as there can be no meaning where there is no thought. Beyond the initial prompt, no one thinks even the shallowest thought during the creation of such texts, images or music, so that the volume and speed of production have rocketed to still more dizzying heights. Even the trashiest airport novel by the most shameless hack took a week or so to produce. Now I can “write” a book at the press of a button.
Most of what is offered to us is almost devoid of meaning or worth.
This technological and economic model may not be sustainable. Generative AI is vastly expensive to run and is offered to the public at a huge loss. Little that it does can really be called useful. Its productions will also seemingly get worse, as it feeds off its own previous excrement. On the other hand, our societies may have so commanding an appetite for slop that we will reconfigure them to keep it pumping out.
Either way, a retreat of generative AI is not for the immediate future. In this, paradoxically, there is a source of hope. The more acute, widespread and grotesque a disease, the harder it is to ignore, or to accept as a natural state. The slop of television, of mass advertizing, of corporate newspeak, of social media’s thirst traps (erotic or otherwise)—this was, for most of us, most of the time, some mixture of seductive, tolerable, and ignorable. But as all of this persists, and is amplified and supplemented by the work of generative AI, actively turning against the slop starts to seem less of a radical and socially dangerous possibility.
Previous forms of slop were some mixture of seductive, tolerable, and ignorable
Turning off all the machines, all the time, would still require building Hassidim-like separated communities (and in fact, even the Hassidim have internet cafés). But one need not belong to a purist sect to see the need to choose carefully what to turn on when, or to ponder what may be lost by allowing mind and heart to dwell mostly in the digital stream. One can after all live without a smartphone; never touch social media; tolerate nothing generated by AI; forego a podcast to read a book. Few may find it imperative, or even possible, to make all such choices, all the time. But the number of those considering making some of them, some of the time, may be far greater than that of those who chose to live without television, or without the earlier forms of the internet. The era of mass submission to every new content-producing technology may be at an end.
That is not to say that slop will be defeated by sheer public refusal to consume it: the majority will perhaps continue to slurp most it down, and few will turn down all of it. But I think most of us will now also know, if not be, someone who has cut some portion of the slop out of our diet. And the world will look different when an insistent taste for real food is not the exclusive province of snobs and oddballs.
