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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28338 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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I want to revisit the comparison of AI slop with human slop, and whether AI is currently capable of writing.

I recently came across the most mind numbing and soulless writing in this series of articles: https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky . It has all the hallmarks of slop, hundreds of low effort articles, no clear theme, bored and soulless writing, etc. But guess what, it's written by a human! He was also really doing the grind, writing multiple articles per day. I also have receipts because the wayback machine shows his writing years before chatgpt existed: https://web.archive.org/web/20201015131543/https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky .

But I noticed something immediately. The writing was obviously human. It didn't have any of that uncanny valley feeling. There are no obvious falsehoods spoken like truth. No hallucinations. And even his worst articles are 1000x better than the typical AI fake news. This just reinforces my understanding:

Even the lowest dregs of the journalistic world write at a higher level than the best cutting edge AI models today.

Now I'm sure the AI bulls here will disagree. So I have 2 challenges for you all:

  1. Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.

  2. Demonstrate a technique for an AI model of your choice to reliably copywrite articles of a similar quality, over any arbitrary topic that has reputable sources available. Those articles must not have obvious AI tells, pass AI detection, and have a hallucination rate of less than 1 in 1000.

To put my money where my mouth is, I'll offer a wager of $50 for the first person to complete either of these challenges. But I think the fact that a human who is at the bottom of the journalistic world can handily do this but an AI can't should demonstrate the big gulf between human and AI that still exists.

Tangent: you're writing about AI slop so I was reminded of this Conversations with Tyler: Any Austin, on the "Hermeneutics of Video Games". Any is some kind of famous YouTube celebrity that I'd never heard of. Anyway, Tyler asked him about AI slop w.r.t. video games, and Any made this point that people shouldn't feel too outraged about encountering AI slop on authenticity grounds, because practically everyone's favorite art is inauthentic.

No one will because we can’t even tell now. The amount of times that you have conversations with people and they go, “This was . . .” Mozart’s a great example of this. I can’t get into that conversation because I don’t actually know that much, but my dad — he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things, but he was largely motivated by money. Yes, that was a big part of his motivation.

People say this when you talk about video games that get made — or music, actually, is probably the best example — “Oh, I know that was an authentic thing. That band, when they put out that album, that was an authentic piece of art,” or whatever.

Then you go and you read about the history, and it turns out that they made it under duress, and they didn’t really want to. They didn’t care about it. All of it is made up, whatever. To me, that makes it very obvious that we can’t even tell the difference between what we perceive as authentic human art versus inauthentic, so it’s very unlikely that we’re going to be very good at being able to tell the difference between AI generated art.

That's a fairly salient point. They weren't conveying some sacred part of the human spirit. They were serving up shit that sells. This isn't the definition of slop, but inauthenticity is the cousin of slop, sure.

It kind of aligns with a different semi-trolly comment I have where people whine that they wanted computers to automate housework, so they could be free to do art. Not automate art so they could spend more time on housework. It shouldn't be surprising that art is easier to automate: popular art is formulaic! Of course it's easy for robots to copy!

  1. I realize calling Mozart slop is odd, but plenty of classical musicians complain about how poppy his music was.

Your semi-trolly comment is based on the shared cultural assumptions that housework = drudgery and art = purpose. We can automate processes, but not purpose, so on the path to eliminating the drudgery of housework, we eliminate the drudgery of soulless art. But people want to do art - not corporate memphis prints of mixed families at a picnic, they want to express themselves. So even while corporations all converge on an art style specifically designed to be 'inoffensive' and mass produced, even as ai makes it trivial to 'bring your imagination to life' and ghiblify your photos, people wistfully dream of the day they can stop working and make art. IGOR beat Father of Asahd in every conceivable metric. We might not notice authenticity, but our brains do.

On a similar note, if you pick a career as an artist to make money, you should get the paint in your house tested for lead. You pick a career as an artist because you want to express yourself more than you want to make money - stupid maybe, but it's true. Sometimes you have to make money anyway though. Does that make your expression inauthentic? No, because it's still driven by purpose. And necessity is the mother of invention. Simply by choosing a life of squalor so you don't have to work 9 to 5 (what a way to make a livin! (fuck that's what I'm singing for the rest of the day now)) positions you to make authentic art. Does that mean you will make authentic art? No, you can still make slop for a paycheck, and that slop might even be popular if you put your soul into it. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Boondock Saints was slop, an attempt to cash in on the Tarantino bubble of 90s movies about hitmen. It is also earnest as fuck and people love it for that.

Artistry is at all times a battle between those who wish to express themselves and those who wish to turn that expression into money. Sometimes and in some places it leans one way, while in other times and places it leans the other. Hair metal and bands like Poison look soulless in comparison to Nirvana and Hair Metal dies, then grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes, and so on, same as it ever was (in case you don't like Dolly).

It is 100% true that Mozart wrote a song entitled "Lick me in the arse" (Leck mich im Arsch).

I like to bring that up in discussions of high culture. I no longer get invited to classy parties.

I feel like this is a far too strict definition of "authentic". Most popular art is commercial to some degree or another, artists gotta eat, even if they accrue other less tangible benefits like street cred or pussy.

What does that leave? Mostly amateur art. I don't see how why it's not possible for something to simultaneously be both a work of passion and yet selected to make at least some money.

That isn't to say that the concept of authenticity is an entirely useless concept! I think Nickelback is far less authentic than say, Tame Impala or the Arctic Monkeys. The latter, even after finding a hit formula, ended up making multiple albums that are better suited to jazz lounges and only really loved by the most diehard fans.

And then you have people who make mixtapes and distribute them for free, play in a garage band or upload to SoundCloud. Maximally authentic, most of it trash. Authenticity isn't a reliable proxy for quality, and probably anti-correlates once you account for confounders.

The idea of “authentic art isn’t made for money” comes from the early days of art when the artist had patrons. If you made art for money, you either didn’t appeal to elites enough to have a patron, or worse, were a dirty poor person. Only aristocrats and people they hired could afford to not think about money, ergo, thinking about money was a mark of poverty and poor quality.

Mozart’s a great example of this. I can’t get into that conversation because I don’t actually know that much, but my dad — he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things, but he was largely motivated by money. Yes, that was a big part of his motivation.

This is an absolutely idiotic example - Mozart constantly needed money because he lived lavishly beyond his means and spent so much time in aristocratic circles as a commoner that he was desperate to emulate them and would bankrupt himself for expensive clothes and horse carriages. His type of financial troubles are a well documented trope of the era, induced partly by more permissive social climbing between gentry and aristocracy. Since he was undoubtedly a musical genius, obviously he used his talents to make good money fast - it doesn't mean he put no artistic or musical considerations into what he composed!

Any Austin (or rather, his father) doesn't seem to understand that a court musician in the 18th Century was not receiving a pop-star salary, but would need other sources to income his expand his fortune to the point where it could even somewhat compete with an average city-dwelling aristocrat. Mozart wanted this badly - perhaps also because he saw how financially dependent his father had been on his patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, to the point where his freedom of movement was strictly dictated to him, and wanted to avoid the same fate. The best, fastest, most respectable and well paying manner for someone with Mozarts caché and skills to make money was to take musical commissions.

And guess what? Those "non-money motivated" symphonies and operas we love and cherish Mozart for - those were commissions too! Il Seraglio, the Magic Flute, Don Giovanni were all commissions, since that was how large-scale musical arrangements were made and paid for before the rise of radio and television. The musician didn't just sit around strumming his harpsichord waiting for a hit to happen - they were subjects of courtly and church patronage and composed music in return for goods and services.

So I disagree that "Mozart was largely motivated by money" - Mozart was using his incredible talents and social reputation to leverage the best possible sources of income to finance his extravagant lifestyle. It doesn't make his melodies any less charming, nor does it dilute any kind of authentic artistic process if he received payment for having written them.

My favorite example of this is from the band Queen. I've often heard people say "Freddie wrote Who Wants to Live Forever after he found out he was diagnosed with AIDS" when the actual story is far more pedestrian: Brian May wrote it after viewing an early cut of the movie Highlander.

Wait, doesn't everyone know that Who Wants To Live Forever was written specifically for Highlander? It and Princes of the Universe are movie themes.

It's like hearing that somebody thought that Flash was written independently of Flash Gordon - of course it wasn't! Queen just scored some films, for commercial reasons! The songs became popular because Queen were/are damn good musicians, and sometimes that's enough. Good art doesn't need a sob story.

People online also say that Bohemian Rhapsody is about AIDS. There are just a lot of people really into analysis of lyrics who don't do a lot of research.

Dave Grohl had a great quote about people overanalyzing Nirvana lyrics that went something like "Sometimes Kurt just made up lyrics on the spot to fit the music. I watched him do it."

There's so much nonsense in analyzing fiction / lyrics / poetry, but people are having fun. It just gets annoying when they start lecturing you about media literacy.

@DradisPing @OliveTapenade @ChickenOverlord

They are confusing those songs with The Show Must Go On which the band really did write while Freddie Mercury was dying and is very much about that.

Yeah, I've come to realize that most of the art that we judge to have the deepest meaning and most heartfelt creation is just people working for a paycheck, under a deadline, and with no particular intent on making a masterpiece, indeed no way of knowing if anyone would even care about it after they released it.

Then, when one of these works of arts hits mainstream success, the narrative of its creation is amended to make it seem as though the sole motivation for its creation was the artists' outpouring of their soul and they dug deep into their well of angst and it was a work of pure creative oubrust.

Take for example the Song "Sweet Child O' Mine," by Guns N' Roses, which is undoubtedly a GREAT song on almost every level. Evocative, intensely emotional but energetic. Skill was involved in its creation, no doubt.

But how'd they compose the song and come up with such appropriate lyrics, especially the breakdown?

Almost pure fuckin' chance

During a jam session at the band's house in Sunset Strip, drummer Steven Adler and Slash were warming up and Slash began to play a "circus" melody while making faces at Adler.

LITERALLY just goofing around with each other and came up with an neat-sounding riff.

Then:

When the band recorded demos with producer Spencer Proffer, he suggested adding a breakdown at the song's end. The musicians agreed, but were not sure what to do. Listening to the demo in a loop, Rose started saying to himself, "Where do we go? Where do we go now?" and Proffer suggested that he sing that.

The iconic breakdown of the song wasn't so much the process of talented genius... it was an expression of uncertainty and some third party said "run with that."

(Side note, knowing this story makes me find this portion of the song hilarious if you pretend the band is literally asking the audience "hey guys we don't know how to end this song, any thoughts?" like a genuine question.)

How many songs are out there that have similar creation stories... but never got any popularity so nobody knows the story or would care anyway.

So much of life is just that. A confluence of random factors which we then create a retroactive narrative about to seem more meaningful ("authentic") than it really is.

That's musicians at work. Their work involves play, must involve play, because they are trying to tap into emotions through novel sound and poetry. The particular riff happened by chance, and Guns N' Roses maximized the situations where such a chance can occur, and trained to recognize such chances.

It's like Dorothea Lange's famous "Migrant Mother" photo. Lange finding that particular woman with such an expressive and sympathetic face while surrounded by young children is pure chance. But it's not like it could've happened to anyone. Lange maximized her ability to recognize the opportunity for such a photo, take it, and get it published.

Yes, I think most of success really is Talent, but dependent heavily on Motivation and Luck.

And that motivation, well, it can come from many places, both banal and esoteric or exotic. "I will go broke if I don't get this done" works.

Likewise, the 2015 song Renegades was originally written for a commercial advertising the Jeep Renegade. After I learned that, every time I heard the song on the radio, I felt I was listening to a glorified advertisement.

In fairness, I believe artists "pour their soul" into their art, to some extent, even when it's made with strict guidelines for a paycheck. Even non-art professional software, as evidenced by Easter eggs and the occasional feature that is unreasonably clever and well-implemented for no apparent reason. Ideas that come from "goofing around" aren't much different from those that come from insight, both arise from spontaneous thought. The opposite side of "people create a retroactive narrative to explain their actions", is that people's actions are influenced by their past experiences and suppressed desires, sometimes in ways they don't consciously realize.

Ha, I would have guessed it was for Apple, given all the effort Apple went to casting themselves as the brand for misunderstood geniuses and creative weirdos.

Literally using the name of the product in the song is a little on the nose.

I'm not complaining about slop because it's inauthentic. I'm complaining about it because it's bad. I'm talking about how AI is worse at writing and also more prone to falsehoods than the most lazy, and uninspired human writing out there.

More on topic of your comment, I personally like mainstream art more than the avant garde stuff. I'm pretty sure that some popular anime is going to be remembered more 100 years from now than banksy or some other crazy artist like that.

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