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Notes -
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.
Looping in @phailyoor
I've seen this quoted a lot, and I think I'm the only one who's actually read the source material. It's a fairly boring diary he kept in 1995 that mostly consists of stuff like what he had for dinner, how fascinated he is by Photoshop, and emails about politics with Stewart Brand quoted in their entirety. When this little musing appears in mid-December it comes off less like anything quote-worthy and more like a half-baked shower thought. If he'd meant anything profound by it he could have expanded the idea for the section of essays which comprises the much more interesting section of the book, but he didn't. If you want to nitpick, it's unlikely that the things he was referring to are the things everyone thinks he's referring to, and when he's unambiguously referring to something, he's wrong in the sense that it doesn't really make his point. To take each item:
CD Distortion: When CDs first came out DAC technology wasn't mature yet, at least at the consumer level, and a lot of early CD players sounded bad. The problem was more or less corrected by 1985, but there were a lot of analog purists out there looking to crap on digital technology who would cite this as proof of digital inferiority long after anyone knew what they were talking about. To my knowledge, there is no aesthetic that uses the "harsh digital sound" of the first CD players for artistic purposes. The Loudness Wars weren't really a thing in 1995; they'd technically started, but were limited to a few albums, and weren't even that bad. CDs were louder overall than they had been a few years prior, but this was because technological advances meant that engineers were no longer guessing where 0db was.
The Jitteriness of Digital Video: One of the entries in the book has his musings about the contemporary ubiquity of interactive CD-ROMs. In case you don't remember, having video like this was a novelty, and a 750MB CD could only hold so much of it, so it was heavily compressed and blotchy. And, yes, this could make things look jittery. This survived well into the streaming video era, and as such never really went away. There is plenty of crappy low-bitrate content on YouTube, and no one is watching it if a better version exists, let alone seeking it out. It doesn't impart any nostalgia.
The Crap Sound of 8-Bit: An effete 47-year-old Brit wasn't referencing the sound of an NES. Remember, in the mid-1990s storage space and processing power were expensive, and consumer digital recording was in its infancy. Prior to the release of the Sound Blaster 16 in 1992, all PC audio was 8-bit, and a lot of consumer digital recorders were using 8-bit ADCs well into the 1990s and even early 2000s. In and of itself, 8-bit doesn't sound that much worse than 16-bit, just a higher noise floor comparable to a professional-grade cassette tape. But if you were recording in 8-bit, the rest of your equipment probably wasn't that great. A professional musician and producer like Eno would have associated 8-bit with home studio demos that weren't intended for public release. I am unaware of anyone trying to sound like this today for aesthetic reasons.
The distorted guitar and blues singer: These are certainly used today for aesthetic reasons. In fact, nobody ever stopped using them for aesthetic reasons. Eno's quote implies that rock bands would have stopped using distortion once higher-quality amplifiers became available, and that blues musicians would have sounded more professional once the music sold well enough to justify paying better singers, and that these would have only come back at some later date when people discovered the "rawness" or whatever of the early recordings. This isn't the case. These were aesthetic choices from the beginning.
Grainy film and bleached-out black and white: As above; I don't know that there was ever a time when photographers didn't use film grain and overexposure as a conscious artistic choice. These were always more present in home photography than in professional photography, and they are almost always more about use of consumer-grade film and not knowing how to measure exposure than of any technological limitation of the medium. Hell, for a long time Kodachrome was the consumer film of choice, and that's pretty much the opposite of grainy. The only inherently grainy consumer film I can think of is Instamatic, which can be nostalgic but was also only used on really cheap cameras (I had a Ninja Turtles camera as a kid that shot Insta).
But my overall point stands: It's not worth exploring too deeply because it's a throwaway quote that was never meant to be taken seriously.
Excellent post, very informative
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