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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28554 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.

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.

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