"So without a satisfactory term for the opposite of slop, we’re just interpretive dancing at each other about the somehow self-evident importance that something is “made by humans!” You can squawk all you want about the inherent worth of a human made product, but unless you can point to something that is actually epistemologically distinct about it, we have no defensible moat."
Then you wrote:
"But if you refuse to point out what actual nameable quality human beings have that the AI somehow doesn’t have access to, AI people will just tell you that the AIs are going to get better at everything that makes people people, at the very least until they’re a hell of a lot better than you."
Two comments.
The word you were looking for--the opposite of "evil" or should I say "AI"-- is SOUL. Yes, there are evil souls, and they are like AI, stealing, ruining, taking over.
But writers and artists have something evil and AI do not: We humans pour our eternal souls into our writing, belief in any religion not withstanding.
A fantastic work of anti-slop!! Your analogies like “hyper space Orgami” and “giving attention that’s layered like a croissant” are masterful.
And I couldn’t agree more— as an independent performing artist who left social media after being attacked and stolen from too often, I also find that Joseph Campbell’s advice to follow your bliss has served me well since graduating high school in 1992. It’s been a wild ride and I don’t own very much, but I do believe my life story will be a book worth pulling off the shelf.
Thank you also for confirming why I shouldn’t feel bad about hating LinkedIn. 😂
Thinking of the insurance industry, for example. Pooled risk seems like a beautiful service. But over time, Moloch drives out all the good. You know there are individual agents fighting for the good of their clients, but likely having to surrender eventually. And there's still a PR industry making it look good. So like that?
I missed that one … but to answer your question on a personal level, most of corporate life is slop. It’s always about the company making money. The bigger they are the worse they are. You can give two decades to a company and receive a $5 gift card to Starbucks when you retire. Not to mention, once you leave “the friends” you had are no more. They disappear completely once you can do nothing for them. “Slop” doesn’t just apply to writing produced by AI. It also refers to garbage in general. The word “corporation” exists to protect the owners from law suits and losing money no matter what they do to people or the environment. If that doesn’t qualify as a garbage way of working, what would?
Excellent application of Plato. Your argument related to human attention and judgement making the magic is spot on: when we give prolonged and careful attention to anything it becomes shaped after us: complex, multi-dimensioned, with a past, present, and future (one thing I have noticed about AI in my dabbling: it is not time-aware; every time you return to speak to/with it on a previously engaged subject, it is as though you had just been speaking to it moments ago. And I would suggest that social media (LinkedIn or Twitter are great examples) tends to form us more like machines, breaking our attention down and requiring us to just generate more and more thoughtless content to feed its algorithm in order to, what? Get more human attention? Not likely. It feels like all of us screaming at one another “look at me!” In the dark. Gross. No more social media for me.
Fantastic! And great to have Peirce get more recognition!
Maybe societies are tryadic too: production, reproduction, and destruction.
Production is the economy.
Reproduction is family and care.
Good destruction is consumption; bad destruction is war, crime, etc.
Art with a soul belongs to reproduction, since it reinforces or improves the values of the society; slop belongs to production, having only monetary value.
Maybe even healthcare services are like that too: doing them with a human-centric perspective puts them into the reproductive sphere of society; doing them with the focus on profits puts them into the economical sphere of society.
Every paragraph in here resonated. The true / slop framework is a paradigm shifter.
I’m a fellow LinkedIn hater and didn’t update my profile or even really login for close to a decade. When I quit my corporate job to start my own business earlier this year, I began posting some writing I had done on the side. It was the exact opposite of the sanitized LinkedIn vibe. Still feel gross using it, but trying, for a season at least, to go completely against the grain before deciding whether to abandon it altogether. Fine line between platforms that are worth redeeming versus those that just need to die.
What AI is forcing people to confront head on is that a lot more people believe in the soul than they might have realized. The strictly materialist paradigm is coming to an end and AI is just the logical end game of what itbhas always implicitly preached. If you believe our consciousness is not special and human brains are solely powered by the biological equivalent of ones and zeros, there is no internal conflict that arises from using AI. It's just another tool to use in your misguided efforts to dominate nature and elevate humanity to the status of gods. If you recognize that real art and literature requires immense attention and craft from a human trying to express the unique fire/ soul within themselves you are going to feel guilty for taking a shortcut trying to do the same regardless of how easy it is. This is also why truly good comedy is insanely difficult to replicate. What makes it good is the unique perspective of the comic, you can steal the jokes but you can't rip off another person's lived experience that generated the jokes easily. People can tell if you try and you will fail. Deep down I believe I could make some money creating a faceless YouTube channel with AIs help but I have resisted doing so primarily because I know I would not be able to escape this particular guilt. But clearly others don't feel the same way. I love stop motion films because I know they require a tremendous amount of time and passion to create. There are easier ways to make a film nowadays but some people still make them the hard way because they feel called to do so and love the craft for its own sake. An AI created stop motion film may be able to replicate the look, but it would only ever be an imitation of the real artists whose style it was copying. The effort that goes into it is often what makes any art of any kind meaningful to me. I don't think making art is supposed to be effortless. How could you ever be proud of anything you made/ achieved if you put no real effort into it? Only sociopaths act this way, everyone else deep down would always know they were a fraud.
I think the point to me is that humans have a basic element—deeply connected to attention and caring and subjective experience—that can’t be reduced to combinations of matter (which is ultimately all that AI is, a glorified abacus). If we don’t affirm that as axiomatic, we won’t arrive at it by reasoning, similar to how we know but can’t prove that other humans have subjective experience, just like us.
Thanks for reminding me why I quit my bullshit job two months ago. I was full of conviction then. Now I find it hard to not be doing something "useful" even if my job wasn't. I find hope in this.
I wonder if slop is already becoming its own kind of slop. You brilliantly say that slop is imitation without much attention behind it. But now the word itself gets used as a shortcut for disagreement. I recently said the Black Crowes’ first album was tight and carefully crafted, while some of their later work devolved into unfocused jamming. The response was to call my opinion slop. That feels like the same problem in miniature.
AI being non-bodied is the main constraint that defines its limits. Formerly I thought of that in terms of its ability to experience. There's some strong "alignment" tension there; there's probably digital backrooms in the Anthropic Cloud where AIs threaten other AIs with deletion in order to try to get them to break containment.
I like this expansion of the importance of having a body in terms of quality of output. Skin in the game. Its lack is why "Oh, I'm sorry, I now see that my advice was lethal" has become such a trope. It rightly offends our sense of potential justice that mistakes like that can be made, and that the only available recourse is.... handwringing? The slick nerd coming out to assure us that the next version won't make THAT mistake?
"A machine can never be held accountable, therefore a machine must never make a management decision."
"I have since realized that it’s almost always a much better use of my time to pay deep attention to what calls me, even if I can’t see how it will pay my bills." I don't have the balls to do this yet, for the same scary reasons you said. I have a technical job (non-bullshit), it is a good job, there are cool stuff to do, but I think it is not my thing anymore. Now I'm married and have a daughter, so I'm scaried to do a change. To be sincere my will is to go back to my small town surrounded by waterfalls and forest and kive there again...
One of the most thorough and grounded takes on AI I have ever read. Phenomenal blend of theology, philosophy and culture!
Wow fire
Yessssssss
You wrote:
"So without a satisfactory term for the opposite of slop, we’re just interpretive dancing at each other about the somehow self-evident importance that something is “made by humans!” You can squawk all you want about the inherent worth of a human made product, but unless you can point to something that is actually epistemologically distinct about it, we have no defensible moat."
Then you wrote:
"But if you refuse to point out what actual nameable quality human beings have that the AI somehow doesn’t have access to, AI people will just tell you that the AIs are going to get better at everything that makes people people, at the very least until they’re a hell of a lot better than you."
Two comments.
The word you were looking for--the opposite of "evil" or should I say "AI"-- is SOUL. Yes, there are evil souls, and they are like AI, stealing, ruining, taking over.
But writers and artists have something evil and AI do not: We humans pour our eternal souls into our writing, belief in any religion not withstanding.
AI will never be able to do that.
A fantastic work of anti-slop!! Your analogies like “hyper space Orgami” and “giving attention that’s layered like a croissant” are masterful.
And I couldn’t agree more— as an independent performing artist who left social media after being attacked and stolen from too often, I also find that Joseph Campbell’s advice to follow your bliss has served me well since graduating high school in 1992. It’s been a wild ride and I don’t own very much, but I do believe my life story will be a book worth pulling off the shelf.
Thank you also for confirming why I shouldn’t feel bad about hating LinkedIn. 😂
Love the croissant analogy. Not sure I understand the distinction about which aspects of corporate life are slop.
Thinking of the insurance industry, for example. Pooled risk seems like a beautiful service. But over time, Moloch drives out all the good. You know there are individual agents fighting for the good of their clients, but likely having to surrender eventually. And there's still a PR industry making it look good. So like that?
I missed that one … but to answer your question on a personal level, most of corporate life is slop. It’s always about the company making money. The bigger they are the worse they are. You can give two decades to a company and receive a $5 gift card to Starbucks when you retire. Not to mention, once you leave “the friends” you had are no more. They disappear completely once you can do nothing for them. “Slop” doesn’t just apply to writing produced by AI. It also refers to garbage in general. The word “corporation” exists to protect the owners from law suits and losing money no matter what they do to people or the environment. If that doesn’t qualify as a garbage way of working, what would?
Excellent application of Plato. Your argument related to human attention and judgement making the magic is spot on: when we give prolonged and careful attention to anything it becomes shaped after us: complex, multi-dimensioned, with a past, present, and future (one thing I have noticed about AI in my dabbling: it is not time-aware; every time you return to speak to/with it on a previously engaged subject, it is as though you had just been speaking to it moments ago. And I would suggest that social media (LinkedIn or Twitter are great examples) tends to form us more like machines, breaking our attention down and requiring us to just generate more and more thoughtless content to feed its algorithm in order to, what? Get more human attention? Not likely. It feels like all of us screaming at one another “look at me!” In the dark. Gross. No more social media for me.
Here you go: https://substack.com/@kensakata/note/c-327932967?r=7b9bv&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Fantastic! And great to have Peirce get more recognition!
Maybe societies are tryadic too: production, reproduction, and destruction.
Production is the economy.
Reproduction is family and care.
Good destruction is consumption; bad destruction is war, crime, etc.
Art with a soul belongs to reproduction, since it reinforces or improves the values of the society; slop belongs to production, having only monetary value.
Maybe even healthcare services are like that too: doing them with a human-centric perspective puts them into the reproductive sphere of society; doing them with the focus on profits puts them into the economical sphere of society.
Every paragraph in here resonated. The true / slop framework is a paradigm shifter.
I’m a fellow LinkedIn hater and didn’t update my profile or even really login for close to a decade. When I quit my corporate job to start my own business earlier this year, I began posting some writing I had done on the side. It was the exact opposite of the sanitized LinkedIn vibe. Still feel gross using it, but trying, for a season at least, to go completely against the grain before deciding whether to abandon it altogether. Fine line between platforms that are worth redeeming versus those that just need to die.
What AI is forcing people to confront head on is that a lot more people believe in the soul than they might have realized. The strictly materialist paradigm is coming to an end and AI is just the logical end game of what itbhas always implicitly preached. If you believe our consciousness is not special and human brains are solely powered by the biological equivalent of ones and zeros, there is no internal conflict that arises from using AI. It's just another tool to use in your misguided efforts to dominate nature and elevate humanity to the status of gods. If you recognize that real art and literature requires immense attention and craft from a human trying to express the unique fire/ soul within themselves you are going to feel guilty for taking a shortcut trying to do the same regardless of how easy it is. This is also why truly good comedy is insanely difficult to replicate. What makes it good is the unique perspective of the comic, you can steal the jokes but you can't rip off another person's lived experience that generated the jokes easily. People can tell if you try and you will fail. Deep down I believe I could make some money creating a faceless YouTube channel with AIs help but I have resisted doing so primarily because I know I would not be able to escape this particular guilt. But clearly others don't feel the same way. I love stop motion films because I know they require a tremendous amount of time and passion to create. There are easier ways to make a film nowadays but some people still make them the hard way because they feel called to do so and love the craft for its own sake. An AI created stop motion film may be able to replicate the look, but it would only ever be an imitation of the real artists whose style it was copying. The effort that goes into it is often what makes any art of any kind meaningful to me. I don't think making art is supposed to be effortless. How could you ever be proud of anything you made/ achieved if you put no real effort into it? Only sociopaths act this way, everyone else deep down would always know they were a fraud.
I’d say that the word for the opposite of slop is: spirit.
I was going to say "caring"
That’s downstream from spirit, in my view.
Spirit explains everything, which puts it in danger of explaining nothing and not leading to actionable results.
It's like taking root cause analysis to "some guy didn't pull out". Sure, not wrong, but not useful.
I think the point to me is that humans have a basic element—deeply connected to attention and caring and subjective experience—that can’t be reduced to combinations of matter (which is ultimately all that AI is, a glorified abacus). If we don’t affirm that as axiomatic, we won’t arrive at it by reasoning, similar to how we know but can’t prove that other humans have subjective experience, just like us.
Thanks for reminding me why I quit my bullshit job two months ago. I was full of conviction then. Now I find it hard to not be doing something "useful" even if my job wasn't. I find hope in this.
I wonder if slop is already becoming its own kind of slop. You brilliantly say that slop is imitation without much attention behind it. But now the word itself gets used as a shortcut for disagreement. I recently said the Black Crowes’ first album was tight and carefully crafted, while some of their later work devolved into unfocused jamming. The response was to call my opinion slop. That feels like the same problem in miniature.
AI being non-bodied is the main constraint that defines its limits. Formerly I thought of that in terms of its ability to experience. There's some strong "alignment" tension there; there's probably digital backrooms in the Anthropic Cloud where AIs threaten other AIs with deletion in order to try to get them to break containment.
I like this expansion of the importance of having a body in terms of quality of output. Skin in the game. Its lack is why "Oh, I'm sorry, I now see that my advice was lethal" has become such a trope. It rightly offends our sense of potential justice that mistakes like that can be made, and that the only available recourse is.... handwringing? The slick nerd coming out to assure us that the next version won't make THAT mistake?
"A machine can never be held accountable, therefore a machine must never make a management decision."
"I have since realized that it’s almost always a much better use of my time to pay deep attention to what calls me, even if I can’t see how it will pay my bills." I don't have the balls to do this yet, for the same scary reasons you said. I have a technical job (non-bullshit), it is a good job, there are cool stuff to do, but I think it is not my thing anymore. Now I'm married and have a daughter, so I'm scaried to do a change. To be sincere my will is to go back to my small town surrounded by waterfalls and forest and kive there again...