Beyond the Garden of Slop

Will the human spirit stay afloat in an ocean of generic slop?

I recently listened to a clip of journalist Whitney Webb discussing the implications of AI for human creativity. I found it fascinating because, in an age when Tech Bros are cool and getting a pass from many on the right, Webb offered a cold splash of realism in the face of what they’re pushing forward with. Of course, the discourse surrounding Artificial Intelligence usually descends into doomsday scenarios of Terminators or supercomputers seizing control of critical systems, often through an inversion of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics that hold that, to save humans, machines have to remove agency from them.

Less frequently discussed, perhaps because it isn’t as sexy, is the effect the mundane time-saving data-scraping AI will have on the human soul. Naturally, this assumes that humans have souls of one sort or another in the presence of Artificial Intelligence questions. After all, aren’t we all simply biological systems? Webb points to the introduction of calculators into schools in the 1980s as a primitive version of AI, or rather, a labour-saving device that, from a purely utilitarian perspective, makes eminent sense. However, the outcome of the calculator was that children swiftly became mathematically inept, and their ability to use their own minds, or even a piece of paper and pencil, was drastically reduced. It is a matter of “use it or lose it”.

If we accept that the introduction of calculators reduced children’s ability to perform basic maths, then surely the effect of introducing time and labour-saving AI into every facet of life should be questioned at a higher level than mere efficiency outcomes. Likewise, now that everyone types more than they use handwriting, is that even a problem? Does it matter that, in a generation, nobody will be able to use a fountain pen to write a letter? Or use an encyclopaedia? What does a civilisation look like when even the most basic tasks are outsourced to Artificial Intelligence?

The question, “Why not do it the easy way?” is hurtling towards everyone who creates anything, leaving many people nervous and hesitant. It is coming for podcasters, bloggers, novelists, painters, filmmakers, musicians, researchers, historians… almost all pursuits that require time to create something worthwhile. For example, George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones has already been completed 10,000 times by now, not formally, and not by humans.

Obviously, there is a general discourse around these issues; for example, if AI can produce a new version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, with even better music and cinematography, and can do so in two minutes, questions arise as to whether it even is better, or is it simply the case that most people won’t mind? What we can be sure about, however, is that there will be a dearth of new film directors willing to lay on sand dunes in a desert overnight, waiting for the sun to rise. Moreover, the onus would be placed upon the filmmaker to explain why he insists on doing something “the old way” when financial incentives, time constraints, and safety concerns weigh down the project in the case of a Middle Eastern desert.

On a personal note, I happen to enjoy writing and have been blogging for eleven years. I like the video-editing process far less and streaming even less than that. I also have a larger fictional project that I work on sometimes, which currently runs to 60,000 words. Alas, if it ever graces the printing press, the market for fiction could very well be annihilated by the overwhelming amount of AI-generated “content” and total saturation of the literary scene.

We Will Deep-Fake It For You Wholesale

Such content is already being unflatteringly referred to as “slop”. Slop is generic, unfulfilling, massified, and results only from a process to maximise outcomes rather than expressing something from within a creator. As my friend Dave Green recently pointed out, we are in the age of slop. The movies are slop, the music is slop, the books are slop, the politics are slop, and soon, AI will ensure the slop tsunami overwhelms everything.

Slop is an amorphous mass that oozes outwards. It lacks boundaries or containment and does not respect difference, meaning, or coherence. Artificial Intelligence is the ultimate slop force-multiplier because it can regurgitate previously created forms, even its own.

The “Yookay” represents a slop country because its identity has been pulped down and reduced to a generic, non-descript pastiche of its former self. It is a story of the same decaying sameness replicating itself from Carlisle to Canterbury.

The creation of the Yookay was a technocratic process. There were inputs and desired outcomes, and there is a debate about whether the desired outcomes were purely malicious or incompetent. The Yookay is to the British Isles what the prompt “Show me a romantic painting in the style of Caspar David Friedrich, Harry Potter on a mountain” is to creating AI art. Let us assume the Yookay came into existence because the Government was desperate to boost the GDP by inflating the population. To facilitate that, they needed to create a soul-crushing surveillance state.

The antithesis to free-form slop is borders, barriers, constraints, and limitations.

David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is a majestic film about a man who discovers he cannot transcend the boundaries and limits placed upon him. Yet, Lean faced constraints and hard stops in creating the film relative to what can be done today, and it is in this space that both the artist and individual can thrive and find meaning.  

Organic Borders

It is common for people discussing entropy to use gardening metaphors. The gardener inhabits a Sisyphian role of driving back slugs and weeds; victory is fleeting, and a new wave of unwanted chaos appears in the garden again within days.

As I write this, I look at my window ledges crammed full of seedlings as I attempt to get ahead of the seasons and have peas, potatoes, and beans to plant as soon as the risk of frost has gone. I have no reason to do this from the outcomes perspective. Last year, I planted six broad bean plants, and when all was said and done, the crop would have fit into a pint pot. Many people who grow vegetables enjoy framing their pastime in terms of self-sufficiency, and while this is not impossible, this is somewhat of a justifying rationale. Spending months investing time and energy in what will, in my case at least, result in relatively modest harvests is not very easy to explain from a purely utilitarian perspective because vegetables, despite the best efforts of the British Government, are not that expensive.

One must consciously avoid taking the easy path, which is against the current zeitgeist. Like Elon Musk, who justified his trip to Mars so humanity could be spread like a virus, many people who grow vegetables explain it by “preparing” or by saying that the produce is healthier than that in supermarkets (which is probably true). The argument that the soul is nourished is common but often comes with a rationalistic caveat.

The same can be said of the few people remaining who insist on writing letters by hand, brewing beer, going bird-watching, or fishing. The world where all such pleasures exist without an easier option to attain the outcome no longer exists, and so it falls upon the individual to embark on a quiet rebellion of exerting their own agency over the entropic forces of ease, efficiency, and the resultant slop.

The fact that there still exists today people who choose freely to rebel against the “Age of Quantity” in their various modest ways gives me some hope for the future. It means that, within the ocean of generic automated trash, there will always exist pockets and islands of authenticity and “the Real”.

I recently caught myself on a geopolitical binge-watch. I listened to podcasts and streams, analyzing geopolitical trends from every wing of the political field until I gave myself a splitting headache. Then, I switched off all the devices and read a beautiful old hardback of Edgar Allan Poe’s collected stories and poems for a few hours. I read Poe knowing that, unlike consuming geopolitical content, I would not have a “take” on it beyond my own enjoyment, and that was sufficient to justify reading it.

Moreover, Poe’s sublimely beautiful prose, peppered with symbolic allusions and layers, was written by hand, with a quill or primitive pen. Today, the idea of writing a book or story by hand seems astonishingly archaic and redundant. Yet, even with spellcheckers, keyboards, and automated saving, nobody is writing as well as Edgar Allan Poe. Artificial Intelligence could reproduce it, of course, but would anyone read it? Thus, like David Lean, we find once again that art with meaning results from constraints and limits being placed upon the creator, not an infinite expanse of possibilities that descends into an amorphous flat meridian.

Britain's Bonfire of Authenticity

It could be argued that the Neoliberal massification of everything that preceded the AI-driven slop epoch was a foreshadowing. After all, the Yookay is not a result of AI, but of managerial mass and scale, spreadsheet approaches to “Human Capital”, and the abolition of barriers, borders, and particularism. Neoliberalism allowed us to commodify ourselves with consumer-driven identities tailored to our whims. Social media algorithms compound this individuation even further by serving precisely what we like in infinite confirmation feedback. The AI girlfriend is an emotional crutch and the logical continuation of the “For You” tab on Xitter, YouTube home page, and personalised ads.

But where can meaning and authenticity be mined within this miasma?

A trend I’ve noticed in the gardening world is the rise in popularity of artisan and bourgeois shops, which proudly display organic produce and products of all kinds. Strictly speaking, there’s not a great deal that can be bought in these shops (usually attached to a farm) that cannot be purchased in a B&Q; it’s just that they feel further removed from a Chinese sweatshop. What they do confer, however, is a degree of status.

This is why, in the end, I’m not entirely pessimistic about the prospect of AI reducing all humans to dead-souled automata. A world of digitally generated, slop violin music will naturally create an incentive for people to be able to play live for a crowd, and attending a live performance will become a sign of high status. Similarly, sitting in a studio while a portrait artist depicts you in charcoal will differentiate the individual from the masses, albeit at an extortionate cost.

These trends were already apparent within Neoliberalism. As noted above, Artificial Intelligence is but a force-multiplier for the age of mass and scale, driving toward its conclusion.

Yet, thinking back once again on Edgar Allan Poe, striving away with his quill by candlelight, perhaps he is not merely part of an incomprehensibly sophisticated past but also the future, not because of formal rebellion but because it is life-affirming.