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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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If Mythos was near AGI/ASI I don't think Anthropic would release it to the general public. If it's AGI then people will not be using it to make crappy 3js oneshot games on twitter, they will be using it mostly to make the next generation, with the side gig being products worth billions of dollars!

I think Fable is AGI 'in the aggregate' in that it has all the separate abilities needed to match high/peak human output. But it can't string them together quite well enough. You can't just prompt it 'write me a first rate fantasy novel' and then have it whir for 48 hours drafting and drafting and brainstorming and get 70K words output, where it's all great and would make you good money on Amazon. It'd be cliched or have plot holes even though it's legitimately quite strong as a writer. Time horizon is too short.

You can't just prompt it 'write me a first rate fantasy novel' and then have it whir for 48 hours drafting and drafting and brainstorming and get 70K words output, where it's all great and would make you good money on Amazon. It'd be cliched or have plot holes even though it's legitimately quite strong as a writer.

I saw a post a while back that made the IMHO interesting observation that while social media, which has dominated media mindshare for probably two decades now, optimizes for edgy rage bait to drive clicks, AI slop (for lack of a better word) optimizes for centrality in almost the reverse fashion. If AI dominates the market equivalently, one could imagine that the modal culture consumed becomes anti-extremist because the models fundamentally prefer modal, not subversive, answers.

But that is a bit of vague hypothesizing, and I'm not exactly sure how it'll play out.

Eh... that's not really how it ends up if you push the thing hard. Conceptually, you'd expect it to reduce to averages or centrality, but in practice even minor weird decisions early in a prompt can drive an LLM to extremes pretty quickly.

This prompt isn't at all original or complicated, but this story (cw:30k words AI slop) isn't central-mode. It has a lot of other problems! The prose has one setting and it's 11, the foreshadowing is less subtle than a hammer, and the narrative sets up some really interest ideas about collaboration over dominance in an elemental magic system and then segues into a marvel movie at the end. Some of those are downstream of the prompts, since I was attempting to match phailyoor's test and do minimal editorial direction, but a lot of them are more general.

And the other side of things is that as it gets cheaper to produce something, visibility of that content is going to need something more than production. So long as something on the outside edges is available, it's going to collect attention just by nature of being differentiable, whether or not it's even better.

I don't think that's going to go quite the same as sort-by-controversial, but it's got a lot of potential for weird.