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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Well, to shift the frame a bit, does it matter? Of the people who read an article titled "Will an Egg a Day Keep the Doctor Away, or Will It Simply Raise Your Cholesterol?", how many do care about whether its contents are factual and well-sourced*, and how many just want the qualia of reading an article about something to while away their time on the mortal coil? Depending on what the product of human writers that the market actually demands is, yours might just be yet another case of writing off cars for being inadequate horses.

*and does it even make a difference if the source chain just bottoms out in some garbage p-hacked nutrition paper that will be forgotten in five years when some slop research lab decides to p-hack up a new paper on the topic? What fraction of writing anywhere is about something more than the qualia of writing and reading something like the thing it pretends to be? Perhaps straight up making up citations is just cutting out some layers of indirection in the con.

tl;dr: Rather than being more bullish on AI, I think you ought to be more bearish on humanity.

In my imo it matters whether or not people are reading fake slop articles in fake hallucination la-la-land rather than real human slop. If the reader really needs the sensation of reading something with no truth value, there are plenty of mlp fanfics out there to help satisfy the qualia.

Yes every clickbait article about a p-hacked paper about how a glass of wine a day is good/bad is bad. But at least if it goes viral it's a sort of shared experience. Something that can be debunked. And something that can be talked about. If someone tells you he just read that a glass of wine a day is good you can roll your eyes and start talking about p-hacking or experimental methodology.

If AI slop makes it up, it can't be debunked. It's harder to disprove something nakedly asserted than something eventually attributed to an unreliable source. And there's a literal infinite supply of AI slop, so there's no point.