> I think we are OK as long as normal humans prefer to create real news rather than fake news, and create innovative art rather than cliched art.
So we're not OK.
I think I need to state my assumptions/beliefs here more explicitly.
First of all, "AI slop" is just the newest iteration on human-produced slop, which we're already drowning in. Not because people prefer to create slop, but because they're paid to do it, because most content is created by marketers and advertisers to sell you shit, and they don't want it to be better than strictly necessary for purpose.
It's the same with fake news, really. Fake news isn't new. Almost all news is fake news; what we call "fake news" is a particular flavor of bullshit that got popular as it got easier for random humans to publish stories competing with established media operations.
In both cases, AI is exacerbating the problem, but it did not create it - we were already drowning in slop.
Which leads me to related point:
> Anyway, "the AI slop will win" is based on a similar misconception, that total creative output will not increase.
It will. But don't forget Sturgeon's law - "ninety percent of everything is crap"[0]. Again, for the past couple decades, we've been drowning in "creative output". It's not a new problem, it's just increasingly noticeable in the past years, because the Web makes it very easy for everyone to create more "creative output" (most of which is, again, advertising), and it finally started overwhelming our ability to filter out the crap and curate the gems.
Adding AI to the mix means more output, which per Sturgeon's law, means disproportionately more crap. That's not AI's fault, that's ours; it's still the same problem we had before.
So we're not OK.
I think I need to state my assumptions/beliefs here more explicitly.
First of all, "AI slop" is just the newest iteration on human-produced slop, which we're already drowning in. Not because people prefer to create slop, but because they're paid to do it, because most content is created by marketers and advertisers to sell you shit, and they don't want it to be better than strictly necessary for purpose.
It's the same with fake news, really. Fake news isn't new. Almost all news is fake news; what we call "fake news" is a particular flavor of bullshit that got popular as it got easier for random humans to publish stories competing with established media operations.
In both cases, AI is exacerbating the problem, but it did not create it - we were already drowning in slop.
Which leads me to related point:
> Anyway, "the AI slop will win" is based on a similar misconception, that total creative output will not increase.
It will. But don't forget Sturgeon's law - "ninety percent of everything is crap"[0]. Again, for the past couple decades, we've been drowning in "creative output". It's not a new problem, it's just increasingly noticeable in the past years, because the Web makes it very easy for everyone to create more "creative output" (most of which is, again, advertising), and it finally started overwhelming our ability to filter out the crap and curate the gems.
Adding AI to the mix means more output, which per Sturgeon's law, means disproportionately more crap. That's not AI's fault, that's ours; it's still the same problem we had before.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law