michael-dean-k/

Good voice is writing that's unchained from a single register. This is why default AI sounds so robotic: even if you prompt it with the precise style you want, it applies the same approach to every single sentence to make a monotonous caricature. No matter what it is, it’s numbingly uniform.

I find that if a writer gets caught in any register (only hilarious, only referencing Aristotle, only confessing terrible things, every sentence is a metaphor), it becomes annoying and unbelievable. We probably all have our default register. I get annoyed when I catch myself stuck in an analytical register. People don’t act like this IRL. People are 75-sided and context dependent.

As a writer skirts over different objects of focus, the tone should alternate between opposite modes: certainty and doubt, anger and love, approachability and authority, active voice and passive voice. There’s obviously no single tone that’s better than any other, but adaptive tone is better (=more organic) than drone tone. 

Organic voice is, I think, one of the halmarks of the essay. While other genres are locked into specific registers (research papers are certain, neutral, and authoritative, with terrible passive constructions to capture every nuance), essays are exciting because they capture the multitudes of expression.

You don’t have a phone problem, you are just poisoning yourself. I'm tired of people lamenting over phones, smartphones, screens—it's not the glass! I want to make a case why smartphones are essential for flourishing in our modern life. The real problem is with “inbound feeds,” and that’s not just social media, but email inboxes and task lists. By installing software with infinite refresh, the possibility of novelty consumes you. I say this all out loud to my wife, as the guy next to me is absorbed in a sloptunnel on TikTok, and it’s 50/50 if he heard me.

On X there is a photo there is about Molly, a reporter, talking to Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir. The comments are debating if either of their outfits are appropriate, before someone says, “Grok, interpret this,” and now there’s a video of them embracing and making out. More videos show up in the comments: them playing Twister, them dancing, them Kung Fu fighting, Molly turning into a rocket and busting through the ceiling. There’s one of Alex Karp wielding a rare Japanese sword; that one was real though. There aren’t watermarks, so you can’t tell. We are basically already in the age where anything can be remixed with AI without effort.

"While great artworks can be produced in isolation, art movements — which organize disparate works into coherent scenes and sensibilities — are what contribute to a feeling of progress. If we assume that innovation can be measured by new artistic movements, and those movements are facilitated by a critical culture, then a weakened critical ecosystem will lead to the “blank space” that W. David Marx describes, where art and culture feel stagnant." —Celine Nguyen, Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

I like this definition: "a movement is about organizing disparate works into a coherent scheme, scene, sensibility." It means literary movements are just on the other side of ambitious curation projects. This resonates with me more than the forward-looking battle cries, with pleas like, “we need to start a literary revolution!” I mean, maybe that helps some people, but even if it did, they wouldn’t be legible until someone retroactively made sense of them. So basically, the challenge is having a tight feedback loop where critics and curators are able to make sense of, assemble, and mythologize the immediate past. Scene-making is retroactive.

Throughout history, I think it’s relied on self-elected individuals to do this work; that will always be important, and I’m excited to step into this role (starting with this year’s $10k essay prize). But as we enter a future with delirious volume: included human art, human slop, machine slop, and machine art, I wonder if it will be the scope of things to consider will grow way beyond the scope of what humans can handle. This might be an example of how we need to use algorithms for good. Our current “discovery” algorithms are based on popularity and interest, more optimized to alter user behavior than to curate a contemporary canon. 

Our challenge, or at least the challenge I’m excited about, is to program algorithms that can process inhuman volume, while having a reliable signal on humanity (quality, perspective, theme, etc.).

"The Death of the Corporate Job" went viral on Substack: 3.3k likes in a few days (eventually went up to 20k, I think). I am pretty sure this was AI-generated. I don’t feel like posting about it though. It’s clear to me that this is a kid in his 20s, building an AI tool for career discovery; he sees this essay as marketing. It will probably bring him a lot of customers. He might possibly help a lot people. I’m sure he believes in his mission.

What irks me is that the essay has been instrumentalized. There are fake I’s with vague personal details. Intellectually, it’s a ripoff of Bullshit Jobs. There’s no structural clarity, and it loops through the same points multiple times. No tension. Flat voice. Awkward repetition. I understand why the writer did this, but I’m more concerned about the state of readers, because this piece’s popularity is really a reflection of mass readers.

It shows that most people care about the topic, and barely notice or care about how it’s written. What thye care about is having their pain validated. To go viral, write about mainstream pain. So if this is what the masses want, shouldn’t we not care about composition and just write psychology-targeted think pieces? I mean, if you want to just build an audience at the expenses of your own satisfaction, then yes, possibility. But the quality of your thinking, and the friction to derive something original and independent, gives you something more than fleeting popularity, it actually shapes your lens for the longterm, and you earn something that is transferrable outside of narrow social status games.

San Francisco, where billboards of slop promote slop promotions,

impossible benefits from machine intelligences;

San Francisco, where the Dead reborn in golden Park,

to dance with perpetual stank

face to nitrous balloons and tie dye,

until Mickey Hart plays cosmic harp,

with shamanic visuals to drunk men,

pointing and chanting his name;

San Francisco, where half the cars are driven by ghosts,

and sometimes catch fire at night;

San Francisco, where the powerful have,

their souls caught in their throats,

from crackled-out platitudes and slogans.

San Francisco, where that Transamerican pencil pyramid is,

a backdrop for cinema-quality technology trailers,

signaling their city is the city of new religion.

Tommi Pedruzzi, poolside in a black tank, generating niche-targeted slop for KDP eBooks, making $323 a day, and gracious enough to teach you how to be a leech of the AI revolution.

This is mean, and I don’t know anything about this guy, and maybe he’s fine, but my reaction is as strong as it is because his values are so antithetical to mine. It reduces publishing words to: (1) having AI select your niche, (2) having AI write your outline and book with trite prompts, (3) tricking consumers who think a title will fix their life, and probably won’t even notice it’s slop. It glorifies money and market hacking, and sees the whole project of writing as an instrument.

What’s sad to me is he’s made $3M by age 27, and instead of using his relative financial freedom to unlock cognitive freedom and originality, he is still promoting his own brand of slopjockery. Either he’s lying or infected, and I hope he’s lying.

(Further reading: Inside the Amazon Slop King's $3M Hustle)

#5 in science recently went viral for sharing that #2 in technology plagiarized her a year ago (right after #2 just went 10k-like viral, again). Substack is freaking. Plagiarism is obviously bad, and I think everyone is shocked to learn that #2 got away with blatant copy-paste work, but I want to focus on the nature of what was plagiarized along with why platforms reward cheap writing.

If someone else can put their name on your writing and almost get away with it, it means you haven’t written something only can you write. The plagiarized post was digital cultural journalism: mostly facts and studies, with only a few “I” mentions that are too vague to be anchored to any specific writer. Obviously it hurts to see your hard work get celebrated under someone else’s name—I’d be pissed too— but research is becoming hyper-commoditized. You have to assume it will be coincidentally/accidentally/purposefully refactored by hucksters, bots parrots, friends, and rivals. If #5 had integrated her research with singular, relevant moments of her life, it would be hard—if not impossible—to rip off. Personal experience is the last moat.

This situation feels like a predictable consequence of engagement-based competition. Among us are people willing to sacrifice craft for clout, at various tiers of insanity. I’ve been noticing high-volume accounts in the Top 10 with obviously AI-generated notes and essays. I wonder who actually reads/likes this stuff, until I look in the comments and realize it’s, likely, all bots. Is Substack status that easily hackable? I guess this is a growth hack that brings you an algorithmic edge in getting discovered by humans, so you can eventually replace the slop with your own writing?

As extrinsic games get increasingly weird, the status of winning them will get decreasingly valuable, I think. If #2 is a slopjockey, I don’t care to reach #1 because the whole game is now polluted (I’m actually a fan of leaderboards, but they need to be merit-based and unhackable). I just don’t know if platforms care to systematically fix this, because status-hackers create volume and speed that make a platform look vibrant to an undiscerning eye/investor.

Over enough time, I think misaligned platforms and those who hack them will eventually lose. The internally-driven writers have to put up with a lot of noise and chaos, but since they aren’t anchored in hacks, they’re less likely to have their means of validation suddenly disappear. It’s OK to be a tortoise in hell.

Slop has its use cases in graphic design. In architecture school, as I designed boards and portfolio’s, I’d often copy and paste non-sense just to see how text worked as a visual element:

“This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder.”

So slop can function as advanced “Lorem Epsom” placeholder text. It’s not quite right, but it’s passable and might even convince some people who don’t know that you intend to go back and write it yourself.

Instant filler text helps you realize the constraints of text too. You’ll see something is 4x too long, and that sets your frame for when you show up and spend energy to write it yourself.

Same is true for lyrics. I often mumble non-sense to find the melody.

The r/aivideo subreddit is a good way to keep up with the progress of AI video, but often there’s just a post titled “Girlz” (NSFW) like this one that fuse modeling, softcore porn, horror, fantasy, surrealism, etc. It has 31 animations in 59 seconds. It’s always interesting to compress visuals into words, so here’s an attempt to describe each clip in a phrase at the speed of watching:

“Darth Vader with tits. Lingerie fangs. Lingerie giant. Devil with legs. Cemetery corpse. Batman with tits. Half cyborg. A fishtank inside a heel. Super boobs. Alien with snake hair. Elf thong. All red. 400’ tall. Cat ears. VR helmet. Angel in the clouds. Snakes. Times Square slut. Tie die. Lollipop. The girl from the Ring. Cyberpunk. Fangs 2. Brittney Spears school girl as lizard. Walking on water. Evil elf. A Victorian princess eating a heart. Jellyfish hat. Tiger hugger. A frog with tits. All chrome. A Greek statue.”

Studio Ghibli—that's the meme, the vibe of the day.

Interesting how the thing that can go viral suddenly captures and permanently shapes everyone’s imagination. Out of all the possibilities, most people’s experimentation are now influenced in this one odd direction. What else is possible? It’s a weird moment, a race/competition for creative usage. There is stuff capable in 4o image generation that’s undiscovered by anyone.

4o can render a glass of wine to the brim. Another go-to example of the doubter has been eradicated.

To be clear, I’m (somewhat) a fan of the show. The premise is original/timely (and lends to some memorable scenes/situations), the acting is good, and the set/cinematography should maybe win something. But towards the end of S2 I noticed myself thinking several times, “this feels written by AI.”

Slop doesn’t mean “low quality.” Severance is extremely high-quality in some dimensions, so we need to get specific. Slop, literally, is the food farmers feed pigs; it’s a random assembly of leftovers. So slop is work that is arbitrarily assembled in a context where quality doesn’t really matter. If you’re invested in the premise, and are already paying $9.99 per month for Apple TV, then whether the writing is great, good, or bad, it doesn’t really matter, you still watch. I did. Vibes and star power only earn so much goodwill and patience though; if the form is hollow, the viewers will eventually buckle in frustration.

A few different qualities emerge from AI slop—amnesia, hallucinations, disorientation—all of which are hallmark features of the show. (Minor spoilers ahead).

Severance is a mystery that opens loops with no regards for ever closing them. Every episode opens 3-5 loops, but then they’re quickly forgotten, as if it’s written by a transformer with limited bandwidth. The show violates the principle of “Chekov’s Gun” (if you plant a gun on stage, someone has to get shot). Over two seasons they’ve placed dozens of “guns” and have barely used any. It’s as if an LLM was prompted, “add suspenseful cliffhangers aligned with the high concept,” and now it’s carelessly barreling into the unknown at 400 WPM.

A good mystery will resolve minor loops to help open major ones. In Severance, both major and minor loops are ignored. Mark’s “integration” (the fusion of his innie and outie) is critical to the premise; it was a key theme all season, but it played zero role in the finale. Instead, the plot is steered by cinematic porn and the bizarre. One episode we stumble into a room with baby goats. One episode we wake up in a forrest without ever learning why. In S2E10 recap, the show’s creator said, effectively, “We needed another Lumon-sanctioned celebration, and we didn’t want to do the waffle party again, and somebody suggested, ‘what if we bring in a marching band?’” It’s like they’re prompting an endless cascade of irrelevant hallucinations. “No, crazier!”

The result is 60 minute episodes of slow-paced hi-fi disorientation. I guess it’s properly meta: the viewers are as confused as the characters. But for 20 hours? Right idea, wrong execution.Once the vibe wears off, you realize a Severance episode is 50-90% bloat. There is sometimes only 5 minutes of meaningful development per episode, surrounded by spooky moments, stunning imagery, dream sequences, and staring contests. I’m not saying the show should be fast-paced or linear. It should be slow and surreal, but it should also be strategically fusing together the different elements within the premise. Instead, it maxes out on art vibes. Each episode’s plot feels like it’s constructed by an LLM that can’t quite distinguish content from style, and so it just randomly arranges material that fits the aesthetic.

Could be pushing it here, but Severance might be the peak example of high-production streaming slop, and a preview of the future of AI entertainment: a user prompts a clever premise, they’re augmented with stunning visuals/vibes, but nothing is coherently composed. Maybe I’m just angry from the finale, but I think the writing is unforgivable, especially given the potential, and especially since it costs $20 million to produce an episode that is mostly shot in all-white rooms.

One of the key places you find slop is in product demos for emerging AI apps. These things shill writing features without having even the slightest grasp or care about writing. It’s like they’re assuming viewers won’t even read the examples:

Check out this example what was used for an “Improve writing” button. The original said:

“Through collaborative efforts, we aim to create an exceptional work of conversation."

It changed it to:

“Collaboratively, our intention is to craft an outstanding conversation, where I bring forth notable viewpoints.”

One thumbnail said “no editing skills or experience needed,” as if skills and experience were just nuisances, not worthwhile things to pursue.

Now, a Summarize button changed “new branding must focus on our core values and mission” to “new branding should reflect our core values and mission.”

This thread has 20k likes.

9 of the 12 comments: “Great,” “Love this,” “Good list,” “Great,” “Awesome share,” “Great list,” “Great share,” “This is great.” Two more promoted a product, another started with “Most don’t know that…” There was one at the bottom marked as “Probable spam” that says “That’s Awesome.”

You can’t know if the commenters are real. Who even knows if the poster is real? Are these his own bots commenting to boost the algorithm? Are the demo videos AI-generated?

There's a foolishness in embracing slop-poetry over real poetry. Yeah, you can ask 100 casual Americans who haven’t put any time into reading or understanding poetry, and they’ll all prefer LLM outputs because they have a tendency for explicit clarity, but maybe it’s worth having some opaque mediums. When it comes to essays, I think accessibility is important. But poetry is supposed to be cryptic and mysterious. It’s a feature that it haunts you and reveals itself to you over decades. For every thousand who balk at it, it finds one person to completely infiltrate. I’d be curious to see this same study among poetry readers.

"Blockchain bunkers in the psychotic AI swamp of the open Internet”

Death of the open Internet (4 phases)

1. slop, ambiguity, more confusion
2. more than 50% is fake; trust flip
3. disturbing distortions (schemes, attacks)
4. a victim, phished, money, humiliated

This could lead people deplatforming themselves. It could be dangerous to have any Internet presence (text, video, social graph). The open Internet could turn into that unsafe darkweb we feared in the 90s. When infinite is leveraged, all the good doesn’t matter, because evil also scales. And so a few bad imaginations without guardrails creates a psychotic social virus. This is already starting to happen (ie: those two kids who generated porn of all the girls in the school). Imagine Facebook, Twitter, YouTube all getting destroyed.

The solution here is identity verification. We already have KYC (know your customer) for financial institutions, and the same might happen for media. There might be new social media sites where you can only post if you’re verified as a human. I think this is more defensive than “watermarks.” If there’s a pollution leak, it’ll be linked back to you and you’ll be banned. So this idea of needing a government ID to use the Internet might actually be necessary. The question is, can we do this without being dystopian/totalitarian? Perhaps the only way to execute this and protect privacy is to use a blockchain. It would create a method to verify citizenship without their details being exposed.