Generative AI is disruptive, is transformative, and is reducing friction, but the economic incentives for using it are geared far less toward supercharging human potential and much more toward producing abundant slop.

By volume alone, slop may be the most visible and successful by-product of the generative-AI era to date. It is also a hallmark of what I’ve previously described as a collective delusion around artificial intelligence—where the breathless hype and imagined future of building a godlike superintelligence and curing cancer collides with the dull... See more

This is tragic. The loss of friction deprives people of something crucial. What happens between imagination and creation is ineffable—it entails struggle, iteration, joy, and frustration, disappointment, and pride. It is the process through which we enact agency. It is how we make meaning and move through the world. To lose that, I fear, is to... See more

Research has shown that, inside some companies, workers begin to see their colleagues who use generative AI as less creative, even less trustworthy.

What Altman is describing is a world of creativity without craft.

What people such as Altman and Andreessen envision is the logical end point of technology itself—a push to eliminate cognitive resistance and bridge the gap between imagination and reality.

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his is how it feels to live

in the golden age of slop, a catchall word used to describe the spammy quality of easy-to-generate AI material. I’ve begun to think of it as the digital equivalent of an invasive species. Just as the introduction and replication of a novel plant or animal usually results in some form of ecological harm and threatens... See more

This is not a rewriting of history as much as a DDoS-ing of it—flooding the zone with so much synthetic crap that engaging with reality and humanity becomes just one of many content experiences to choose from.

A recent Pew Research Center survey finds that roughly one-third of individuals who used chatbots for news found it “difficult to determine what is true and what is not.” AI has created a genuine infrastructure of meaninglessness and disorientation.