So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down.
There is a huge market for content that makes you feel smart without requiring thinking and makes you busy without requiring work. I'm not not saying it's inherently bad. I'm listening to music on my daily commute and it's the same thing: just enjoyable filler so that you can do something other than getting angry at other drivers. The internet just weaponized the formula, and now AI is the equivalent of nuclear weapons I guess.
If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen?
Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.
It doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Equally saturating all channels, metrics and indicator is enough to create hindrance so preventing relevant information to spread in meaningful time.
Attention is all you need, so distraction is all that will be given.
This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LARPing as one) telling you about their boogers and then being racist and then playing video games for 6 hours.
But it's wildly popular. Millions of people stream this kind of shit for hours every day.
There's a lot of people out there who just want to numb their brains, and there seems to be no floor. You can just keep making it dumber. The stuff people stream (and doom scroll) on the Internet makes 1980s daytime soaps look like high art from a lost golden age.
So it's not at all surprising that millions of people listen to low-quality un-curated AI slop podcasts.
I actually unsubbed from the podcast I heard. Meta discussion of crap like this isn't much better than the content itself. Keep driving. Do not look at the car accident.
I had kind of an epiphany like that in the last year. The Information Age means information is free. It costs $0 and is produced to infinity. That means you are not missing anything. Your attention is actually 100% yours, and if you choose to ignore the car wreck that's fine. There are infinity car wrecks. There are infinity everything. Keep driving.
--H. L. Mencken (or at least attributed so.)
I wouldn't be surprised if the same dynamic is playing out with these AI slop podcasts.
Dead Internet Theory.
AI produced, AI downloaded. No humans in the loop.
"My wife is a teacher, she used AI to help create an assignment, all the kids used AI to complete it, and now she's using AI to grade it. Nobody learned anything, nobody really did anything. What's happening?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens
I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.
I think a lot of the value in these AI Podcasts is just the self-validation of the listener. It really doesn't matter to the listener if there's nothing between Egyptian socks and Revelry because the point was to feel good not to learn.
But also because I've had a long standing pet peeve with news articles that include random ass stock footage in articles. If humans can get away with include a picture of _any_ ship when talking about a specific ship (that may have never been in the harbor the picture shows) then why does the AI need to be correct?
Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition.
AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention.
Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS
There's this (now old) meme called "Italian brainrot" - AI generated characters with vaguely Italian-sounding names like Bombardiro Crocodilo (note the incorrect spelling of the Italian word for crocodile).
One character stands out - Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Not only does it not sound Italian at all, that last word rang a bell.
Sahur (or Suhur) is the meal eaten before dawn during Ramadan.
After some digging I discovered this whole category originated in Indonesia. The country experienced an absolute explosion in the number of internet users in recent years and is home to internet phenomena which spread globally, but few in the west seem to realise that.
They also have money and can vote, so there will be an endless avalanche of slop being generated every single day, enough to bury organic content ten times over.
I haven't listened to those podcasts, but from Kate's description the recipe is the same as WWE. They appeal to the senses using only bullshit. The outcome is preordained, they are selling the hype only, the reality doesn't matter.
There is clearly customer base for this sort of thing that isn't going away. Amazingly it appeals to all age groups: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jN2Jxp_o4OtLZl4HuK2jWAtmUyy...
It works so well the USA has president who sold himself to the voters using this very same model.
See, I have some hobbies. You probably have yours too. The thing about hobbies, is that in many ways they are niche.
Of course, a lot of people enjoy running, but very few enjoy taking it seriously, delving into it beyond an occasional thing, to use it as an example. Replace running with any activity that may be approached as a hobby and that can be slopified.
And as any niche thing, there will be a separation of masses that consume it as slop, and those that engage with the real thing. They don't cancel each other out, just coexist as different things entirely.
The particular type of innovator ghoul that's enabled by generative AI dreams of filling the entire internet with bullshit content. Aggregators (media and content) should be actively pushing them out for their own long-term survival, IMO.
The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb - there is an initial shock of sadness, an initial dose of loss, an initial sense of what has been taken away.
But then for months and years afterwards, the daily occurrence of some other little humdrum experience, and only at the moment of the encounter does one think, "Ah yes, this too is forever changed."
Like sounding the depths of a dark well, where every day you lower the rope a little further, but every day there is nothing to feel but a pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.
Good art has something that is difficult to reproduce if one isn't already an artist who is just using AI as a medium - it's intentionality.
Take for example Floor796[0]. Every little detail counts and while you could use AI to generate single characters or even the whole thing, you'd inevitably find details which have no reason to be there. You could then remove them manually or modify your prompt or input image so that those you know about won't appear, but AI being AI will keep sneaking in new ones.
The longer your prompt, the more intentional everything becomes, effectively making it the art piece.
It’s style.
A lot of people regard technical measures as the signal of quality. The most realistic painting, the most expensive purse, the most technical flip on a skateboard, the most well drawn AI art.
It’s a cheap way to judge quality because you don’t have to understand what makes something good.
AI is really showing this divide.
Think about this for a moment - it takes a company of 8 people to make 3000 podcast episodes a week. It would take far more than 8 people to listen to that many podcasts. How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff? What happens when it's 30,000 episodes per week? 300,000. What possible hope does art and craft have against an army that is effectively infinite.
We can hope that the cream will rise to the top, but I am not optimistic. I genuinely believe we are watching the end of art and human creativity as it is absolutely drowned is mass slop.
tl;dr - we're fucked.
I knew that they were plenty of careless people with no taste for truth or quality in the world, but I didn’t realize there were so many of them.
Especially so amongst my friends and family members and coworkers. Here’s someone who’s now sending AI generated messages for daily communication. Here’s someone who’s now using AI generated slop art to promote their work. Here’s someone who turns to ChatGPT for any random question they have. No regard for beauty or truth or personal expression or the quality of expert work, only hooked to the “get this done” machine.
Indeed. Figuratively, generatively, and of course, generationally.
Or gaining a new, oddly misshapen and inexplicably placed limb of no apparent purpose or utility.
This is, increasingly, the front page of HN. Direct slop is uncommon, but not rare. I skip any headline that mentions AI. But sometimes you get baited, you start reading, and it's about AI anyway. A few days ago there was an article about someone hacking some device, and it was just the author vibe-hacking with AI.
It is not interesting.
I have intense AI fatigue. Make a containment board for AI sloppers. It's so much worse than all the previous fads combined, like blockchains and Rust rewrites. I'm not even anti-AI, but the exposure to it is just overwhelming and unrelenting.
It could be, that a big part of the the future of hobby's and entertainment in this way is the feeling and validation over the actual performance. Or it can be that a massive amount of people find their value in this content.
I'll add in an aside to this, which is not only are there fake knitting podcasts there are fake knitting and crochet patterns, which is a problem because people get a substantial way through making them only to discover that they don't work. In some cases the giveaway is that the supposed final image isn't physically possible, like the images in this article, but the fakers can use a real stolen image and just spam a pattern underneath it.
So: what is the knitting that is real? It has to be the use of your hands, needles, and yarn to produce a physical object, right?
The podcasts work towards something else. The identity of "being a knitter". This is a form of "hobby" that was already not unusual, that of discussing a thing without ever bothering to actually do it. Photographers are especially bad at this: too many lenses, not enough photographs. They've also got comprehensively run over by AI, because you can just generate the photographs now. Same for "authors".
But ultimately all these pleasant sensations aren't backed by a connection to the real. If you're going to talk about the history of knitting, shouldn't it be the real, evidenced history? As done by real (usually) women? Otherwise you're just knitting a pleasant fantasy for yourself.
The AI approach is "wireheading": the logical conclusion of all of that would be to find a means of inserting a wire in your head that provides constant pleasant sensations. Achieving happiness through a constant feed of generated images is less effective, but it's the same order of things.
(see also: authenticity in food, which could easily turn into another ten thousand words)
People who make patterns are already dealing with a saturated market. This includes historical/vintage patterns, which for many years patterns were primarily given away freely to incentivize yarn sales, or dominated by publishers. It wasn't until recently (internet, etsy, ravelry) when designers actually had the means to sell directly to consumers. People making an effort to produce usable patterns are now being dwarfed by AI nonsense in the speed of their output. It was already a difficult market. That everybodys images of real objects (along with AI generated ones) are being used to peddle and market patterns that will never work can be really demotivating.
One last thing is how many of the 8 people in this podcast company are actually generating slop and how many are actually just doing marketing?
> But ultimately all these pleasant sensations aren't backed by a connection to the real. If you're going to talk about the history of knitting, shouldn't it be the real, evidenced history? As done by real (usually) women? Otherwise you're just knitting a pleasant fantasy for yourself.
If the real is the feeling you get from listening to the podcast or identifying with a subculture, then that is the real for that person. Factual, grounded information is just one take. If it was not this way, we would have much less myths, religions, etc historically.
People will feel the same degree of joy and completion when the final word of the podcast is read like you feel when you finish a really complex piece of work.
We were used to having psychologists and doctors in person, now the most common form is to have it through apps, and the younger generation does not care, it's in fact more efficient to get a prescription that you like than to spend time going places and having in-person meetings. But older generation finds it hollowing out and horrifying.
You need to accept that society moves on, and it can look different from your perspective.
1) Money laundering - large content farm someone can argue makes xyz in revenue to hide an alternate source of revenue.
2) Ad fraud - leading up podcast charts or SEO results to attract clicks to sell ads. Bot farms could also be making clicks to pretend sell ads as well.
3) Attempt to dominate the niche for sale of knitting products. Or to pretend to dominate it so they can sell their the business later at a larger multiple.
4) Test the waters of a much bigger engine for doing 1-3 above in an innocuous hidden subject, before they do it with elections or some other more profitable field. Regulatory waters as well - seeing what they can get away with.
Feel free to brainstorm more incentives for making something like this.
Perhaps there are.
My hot take: porque no los dos?
The specific incentives for starting a slop network are the promises of increased margins via reduced production costs (don't have to pay any pesky creative types) and more rapid growth via reduced production time (you can theoretically produce an episode in about the time it takes to listen to one, perhaps less).
I explored starting an AI slop network a few years ago. The tech wasn't quite ready at the time. My motivation was far more base: watching numbers go up.
But I saw this one coming three or four years ago.
Actually, I've been listening to AI-generated brainrot music. I prefer it to some human-generated brainrot music (there's "I Hate Boys" from Christina Aguilera. Sorry if you are a fan).
Brainrot serves a specific social purpose: relieving stress, incoherently winning elections. It's a kind of drug that dulls the dangerous part of the brain while leaving the he-is-a-good-tool and she-is-blonde brain hemispheres in working order.
In fact, I do believe that if there were to be an uprising in a couple of decades against AI, and the human side were to rise victorious, the aftermath's social order would be studiously anti-AI and anti-science, but they would make a carve-out for AI brainrot (yes, I published a short fiction story with that premise, because I'm brainrot-vers).
To me, they are opposite sentiments, and my experience discussing AI with others supports this. The most pro-AI people I meet are very far removed from science, and my research colleagues are definitely more critical of AI than not.
AI is scientism: presenting science-flavoured things as a cultural marker.
I don’t believe that the current state of things represents peak-AI problems. AI is for now weak both in its capability and its impact, and also just new. Speculatively, if things go really bad, in a couple of decades there will be a huge swath of population without jobs nor high-flying education. They, perhaps rightly, will blame AI for the situation, but they’ll also, perhaps rightly, blame capital and the “snobbish elite” that is today and in the near future propping AI. That “snobbish elite” is well-paid engineers and researchers. That’s because people tend to like to have somebody to blame for their problems. But even without making it about bad guys, the heart of the thing that is pouring billions into AI is a relentless ethos of profit deriving from progress and disruption. You can’t stop AI without stabbing that heart.
The whole "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should,"
the full suite of options would include perfectly artificial scents. personaly, I am way over in the analog/organic direction, but I get the need to disconect from the "whatever this is™" that passes for a society. the question remains for AI scaling to meet the demands and desires society has always placed on indivuals
the audible exasperated noise comming from the person in line with me, seeing me pull out cash, thereby breaking there own perfect little automated world, mearly by bieng subjected to witnessing such a primitive ritual, not behind me I might add, the person leaving in front of me, is the prime example of someone who will violently reject AI and the rest when it inevitably fails to "fix" everything
https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/
(or google image search)
You could substitute the word knitting for almost any hobby, and the article would read almost the same.
It's an article about the soulless content-free world of AI podcasting, and about how AI output is about validating the emotions of the listener rather than meaningful content.
I did read the whole article and have some thoughts about it. But they are pessmistic and difficult, so I'd rather share something fun.
My on-topic thoughts are that I just spent a long weekend in good company playing music and chatting. Returning to quotidien life made me think the solution is to get as far away from computers as possible, and back to the in-person interaction that we're evolved for.
A big reason IMHO that we're susceptible to phony bullshit (whether it's knitting podcasts or broadcast propaganda) is that we're not evolved for it, and it misses many of the contextual clues present in in-person interaction for which we are evolved.
So while this post hopefully hits a chord for anyone in a creative field she embodies a particular type of person for whom slop is a genuine risk to their being. Not their job; their whole personhood. In a world where slop has chased out the humanity of things and the bullshit machines fill all content what are the chances someone like her could build a second life better than her first?
0: https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-...
I'm concerned that we've taken an amazing character like this and turned the world against her for frankly a bet against human intellectual development.
I hate so much that while I read your reply this particularly phrasing was grating to me.
There's nothing wrong with it, and I have no doubts you, whoever you are, wrote it.
What annoys me to death is that a perfectly fine language construct is tarnished to a point that a mere glance reflexively caused me to wince, and I had to actively interpret it as fine.
The root comment brings insight and value and stakes out a human position. I don’t see a need to snipe from the hedges
It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a mountain of slop. In theory, recommendation algorithms ought to surface the best stuff, but that doesn't seem to align with incentives. Sad.
I'm specifically thinking of a print magazine that was designed to make you feel like you are a smart reader of science articles, without any useful information about the actual science or technology.
I actually don’t think the article is sufficiently vehement in calling out just how brain-frying this is. And how destructive on a societal level. The razor’s edge between being too uncritical and too cynical is hella narrow.
Even if that were true (which I don’t think it is, this is a different kind of worthless content), you most definitely don’t remember it at this scale, and that’s a major point.
I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing.
I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull office work and back breaking physical labor, but not the things that are actually enjoyable: sharing with each other, entertaining each other, making art. I imagined a lively world of live performance and creation, since all subsistence work had been taken care of. Instead we might end up in the world of fifteen million merits.
It seems people don't mind letting their minds be hacked by machines that can create the form of what they find enjoyable, if not the substance. But I guess there's always been slop and the public for it. To imagine actual people wasting their limited time on Earth listening to these GPT logorrhea podcasts is truly depressing. The unchemical soma.
What are we even supposed to spend our days doing in this bright future of the AI champions'? Stop automating away the things that give people purpose, tackle real problems instead.
Lament: Oh why did we automate art?
Answer: Capitalism.
On topic, I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out. At this moment I'm leaning towards just banning this shit, but maybe there is a better way?
Unlikely to do a better job than it did with anything else.
I saw some bots on Reddit that were very odd in that if anyone asked a question in relation to something like an news article some account would respond with a non answer but sorta summarized bit of the article. If you responded “that’s not really what I asked” you got an even odder response.
This isn’t that strange as people will do that in a way… but i noted it because I saw a flurry of those accounts in Reddit and then they vanished.
I would guess that it's because the incentives and goals are different.
The point of a summary is to entice a listener to begin the podcast. So it has to offer the promise of interesting depth.
Once they've started listening, all the body of the podcast has to do is be soothing enough to get the user to keep listening until the next ad comes on. It has no need to actually keep the promise unless the listener is paying enough attention to hold it accountable.
What a great line. And you'll probably notice this technique being used by very skilled bullshitters and master manipulators: any request for rigor or scrutiny is met by something like genteel condescension. You're treated as if you've committed a breach of etiquette, and that's one of the reasons the technique is powerful -- you're likely to feel embarrassed and, following that, to back off.
This strategy also indirectly helps overworked moderators by penalizing disagreement, which in turn discourages flame wars.
Kate's critics can even say they support Kate. They just want to help her deal with her emotional overload.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
This reddit comment puts it perfectly:
"What’s it about? Frankfurt tries (successfully) to define bullshit (rather academically). In short, a bullshit artist is solely focused on persuasion and making an impression, not caring about truth. Paradoxically, bullshit can be true.
What makes it bullshit is how it is created - shoddily, hastily and without regard for fine work. A gifted liar does their thing carefully so that the truth cannot be found out. A bullshit artist just flings it out, overwhelming skepticism with sheer volume, until something sticks with the audience."
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1pidpb2/on_bullshit_...
An 1980s take on something that has taken over our 2020s digital airwaves, indeed.
I'm somewhat curious how that'll work out. Hint: I'm not.
EDIT: My bad, wrong company, it's "Inception Point AI": https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/
Touché.
> While a liar displays an underlying respect for the truth in the very act of intentionally distorting it, “the essence of bullshit”, Frankfurt writes “is not that it is false but that it is phony.” For Frankfurt, then, bullshit, is discourse from which incidental matters like truth and reality have been completely hollowed out and replaced by performance and simulation.
She would often say "but I happen to know that some the underlying information is true." The answer is the videos are phony, even when part of it happens to be true.
Put differently-- it matters so deeply that the genre itself will inevitably become an unfathomably sad parody of what it could otherwise be.
I can't seem to state exact properties but they are hollow, out-of-norm, or as the author describes it -- bullshit
I see people tiring of this brain rot, especially Gen Z, there are more offline events - music festivals, day time raves, running events, people are appreciating more things analog - LP records, cassettes, younger people getting turned off by social media.
But if I find an article that was obviously AI generated, I hate it. The podcasts I enjoy all have in common a great host personality, either funny, or very insightful, or have a particularly nice voice. I can't imagine listening to slop like that.
I'm wondering if this is a bit the same pivot as TV -> youtube, media is similar but usage is different. Rather than finding a TV channel you like, you find videos on the exact topic you need -> rather than subscribing to a pod about a subject you're interested in, you generate the content you need at a given moment. New media that comes as a replacement, but as something new. So, not in this garbage form at all.
[^1]: I gather that in the long run, this might be slightly detrimental because i have the information i need, and ONLY the information I need, not the information that would be useful in the future when adding to it.
BTW, if it's not already there, I encourage voting "Slop" as the Word of the Year.
Along with its corollary: the "Slop Factory"
This is a great article. The presence of this single emdash threw me off for a bit though!
