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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32227 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.

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.

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