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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28602 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.

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.

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