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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:
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.
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.
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!
I think the question of authenticity is very simple to answer. The media I was exposed to in my formative teen years was obviously very authentic and deep. Anything produced since I have turned into a cynical adult is shallow consumerist drivel.
For real, I think that there are differences in authenticity. Take video games. On the one end of the spectrum you have games like nethack or dwarf fortress, where the motivation to build the game was clearly not not get rich. On the other hand of the spectrum, you have EA ${sport_franchise} ${current_year}. Perhaps there are devs in the world whose dream job is it to publish the same soccer game every year for a decade, each time with slightly better graphics and the current (licensed) roster, and they would totally do it as a hobby (if it was not for the license fees). But it seems more likely that EA has found that enough people will spend 50 Euros (or whatever) on the latest soccer game every year and are determined to milk that cash cow for the rest of time, and the devs of FIFA are only slightly more enthusiastic about their products than the devs of SAP.
Most games fall somewhere in the middle, with the devs seeing it as a dayjob which (hopefully) pays the bills while also being more fun than writing enterprise Java.
Likewise, there is value in originality. Stardew Valley is a competently written game of its genre, but that is not its claim to fame. It's claim to fame is that it basically invented the genre.
These two measures of authenticity are of course correlated. Large gaming studios are mostly risk-averse, and the bigger the title the less risk people are willing to take. If Stardew Valley had flopped in beta, ConcernedApe would have had to find a different way to make a living. If an AAA title tanks, quite a few people (some of them with decent paychecks) might lose their job. So of course the big studios imitate the indie devs who made it big, better a 80% chance at making a decent game than a 20% chance at making a groundbreaking game.
Stardew Valley did not invent a genre. Most of its mechanics are from the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series, which started in 1996.
And even if you want to distinguish Stardew Valley from Harvest Moon by SV's combat in the mines, Rune Factory had added it into the series by 2007.
It's actually kinda interesting to think about why it worked so well. It's an improvement in nearly every way from the A-gamer productions, even the ones that avoided handheld hell, but I dunno which one I'd point to as to what actually mattered in sales.
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