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Pre-AI slop was actually good - and AI ruined it
I've seen many claims that "Slop existed before AI" and that means AI isn't destroying the internet. I believe that is absolutely false. The OG slop was actually good, and now it's gone.
Let's define exactly what we're talking about. The slop is web content created by marketing teams, at the absolute lowest cost possible, in order to improve search engine ranking. Let's look at a specific example: when looking up a term mentioned in another post I came across slop created by the same company and same marketing team, but years apart. Let's see if you can tell which slop is worthless garbage ruined by AI, and which is slop that despite being slop may actually be slightly useful.
link
link
Both of these articles were created with the exact same intention: to enhance search engine ranking at the lowest cost possible. Yet one of them makes the internet a better place, and the other one ruins it. I might even contend that when a human is tasked with writing worthless fluff, that human can't help but to try to insert some nuggets of truth into that fluff. It's simply human nature. AI has no such compulsion.
This guy is full of crap
Red book cd is the closest we're ever going to get to perfect undistorted audio in the mainstream. Streaming is a slight step down unless you use a meme audiophile service like tidal. 99% of listeners can't tell the difference in a blind test.
What?
8bit is perfectly in control. 8bit synth is basically an instument and artists make the music on it that they can.
True, though generally made as an artistic choice rather than unavoidable.
Singers have to practice and learn techniques to make these sounds
You're just proving his point. All of these used to be, at some point in time, seen as technical limitations worthy of contempt. Now they're deliberate artistic choices.
Early CD compression has a unique sound, which is what many a 2000s nostalgia pieces are now trying to recreate, go play Night-Runners: Prologue for a good example.
The jitteriness of digital video is so common an aesthetic you may not even notice it anymore, mainly because we don't associate video with digital video tape which is what created all those artifacts and motivated the continued existence of film for some, but half of modern horror relies on it. And even purely digital artifacts have had this phenomenon. You can look at this year's Ghost in the Shell for lots of proeminent examples. It pays big homage to pixel sorting and other databending techniques which only exist to recreate and magnify the quirks of digital media.
8bit music used to be seen as ridiculous and antiquated when we finally managed to have decent sounding music on the SNES. And now you don't even consider it as "wrong" or "poor", it's just another genre of music, with its own nobility. QED.
No. There is no such thing as cd compression. Cds do not have distortion period. He is full of shit.
Brian Eno is full of shit about music production. Well, golly gosh.
Other revelations:
Escoffier was full of shit about cookery, he couldn't boil an egg.
Newton was full of shit about physics, he had no idea what planet he was living on.
Pasteur was full of shit about microbiology, dude didn't even wipe the cow dung off his milk bottles.
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Be pendantic about bitrate if you want, dynamic range compression is a thing, the loudness wars did happen and Californication sounded like shit on CD at the time, and so did much of the output from 1995 to 2002 in a way that was noticeable enough to create a style.
We can argue about the technicalities of how that happened, audiophile forums probably have terabytes of flamewars about the specifics at this point. But that's all besides the general point about how people perceive media over time.
I think Eno was talking about reader distortions anyways. Which are also a staple of eerie sound design now.
In other words, Audio CDs did not use audio data compression (the techniques used to make things like MP3 files smaller, at the expense of making the audio sound slightly distorted), but did often use dynamic range compression (an audio editing technique used to make the volume of a song more consistent, by making quiet sounds louder and/or making loud sounds quieter).
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