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Jim Esch's avatar

"Ghoulishness and greed" indeed. Thank you for this sane and sobering gaze at AI slop content. I want to believe that we will get sick and tired and offended and ultimately reject it, but I'm not optimistic. Welcome to zombieland.

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Brian Alcorn's avatar

It’s all sounding a bit like Orwell’s “versificator”, isn’t it? Panem et circenses. At first I was ambivalent. I didn’t want to seem like an out of touch Luddite. In recent months, though, I’ve become extremely wary of the sheer volume of slop coming from many and varied sources. I’ve eliminated 90% of my social media presence and am reading more thought provoking literature from (I hope) deep thinking humans who haven’t been fully caught up in the tsunami of marketing propaganda.

It at least seems that most of what is prominently displayed and peddled is low effort, low quality content-for-profit. If the profiting was a by-product of actually growing and improving humanity, I’d have no problem with it. I’d cheer it on.

Alas, instead, my amateur observations have led me to conclude that nearly every wildly popular algorithm is instead playing to humanity’s base urges and encouraging a backward regression in civility, deep thought, altruism, and human progress.

I’m not all doom and gloom, though. I perceive an opportunity for those who recognize and choose not to be prostituted for financial gain, or at least avoid it to every reasonable degree. To borrow from the Matrix, I think I just took the red pill. “Welcome to Wonderland.”

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