A Needed Protest Against “AI Slop” and AI “Word Vomit”
God bless our Center for Science and Culture colleague Peter Biles for a harsh yet at the same time soulful takedown of “AI slop” and artificial intelligence-generated “word vomit.” At Mind Matters News, Peter notes:
“The phrase ‘AI slop’ is circling the headlines daily at this point and is becoming almost a cliché given how much it’s used. But it’s a good way to encapsulate the reality.”
“For some odd but perseverant reason, so many leaders feel it necessary to incorporate AI into their businesses, apparently because it is so ‘innovative,’ and anything innovative and new needs to be embraced. This is a prevailing philosophy among the techno-optimistic. Never mind AI makes mistake, doesn’t understand its own word vomit, and threatens the hard-earned livelihood of real writers everywhere.”
“The easy ability to generate nonsense on command means foregoing the possibility of any meaningful artistic or cultural renaissance.”
“[Ted] Gioia…mentions how real photographs are starting to resemble AI slop. These soulless data-churning machines are spitting out nonsense so pervasively that they’re beginning to shape the way we actually see the world.”
“I recently attended a creative writing festival hosted by the local university where some seventy poets and fiction writers read their work aloud to live audiences. It was a rich time of literature and newfound friendships. And best of all, the work we heard from was written by and for other people.”
East of Java
Sometimes AI errors are amusing. One of my kids in high school tried using ChatGPT to put together a résumé for a summer position and it decided unaccountably to credit him with being “proficient in Javanese,” as in the language of the Indonesian island of Java. (I believe Krakatoa is east of there.) That will be a family in-joke for years to come.
Peter is right that the aesthetics of AI will never match that of humans, nor will the experience of interacting with AI ever do so. There’s a recognizable feel to AI “writing” and a look to AI “art.” They will not age well. There’s no soul in it and there never could be, no matter how sophisticated the algorithm.
Microsoft’s “Copilot”
The other day, I was horrified to listen to a long and very dumb and credulous interview on NPR with the guy behind Microsoft’s “Copilot,” which is supposed to be your AI best friend, life coach, and personal assistant all in one. I would pay not to get anywhere near such a thing.
Two email correspondents recently suggested to me using AI here at the Center for Science and Culture. One thought it could generate podcasts, replacing human podcasters, and he did not see that at all as a nightmare scenario. The other thought it could generate articles and books. I have seen the results of that, and word vomit is exactly the right phrase for it. My inner response was God forbid, and over my dead body.
It’s all another lesson in human exceptionalism, as I trust most of us will come to realize before long about our mindless machines. I believe we will wake up from the AI delusion someday.
I take the opportunity here, by the way, to note that the idea that life, with its biological information, is not a machine is the theme of my upcoming book about the thought of evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome. It will be out on April 28 and can be pre-ordered now.
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