Severin Matusek

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

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.

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.

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

On TikTok, as The Washington Post has reported, some creators are making $5,000 a month using AI tools to write scripts and animate extremely dumb viral videos where old men talk about soiling themselves.

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.

Still, a synthetic feed is theoretically much simpler—an endless scroll of dopamine-triggering engagement for users and grist for other social networks and group chats. As the Bloomberg writer and podcaster Joe Weisenthal mused on X recently, there’s a poetic coherence to this evolution: “The emergence of ‘slop’ was foretold as soon as we started... See more

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