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AI Slop and Whatever
Oct. 7th, 2025 04:42 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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This video from YouTube Science Explainer channel Kurzgesagt says a lot of the things I would say about “AI” in this moment, namely: At first it seemed cool, but then it quickly became apparent that the version of it presented to consumers as a creative tool was both deeply flawed and also based on the theft of work from literally millions of creators (including myself!). The bullshit it is generating is now quickly eating the Internet, to the detriment of the actual creative people who make their livelihoods there and also to the detriment of, you know, truth and facts.
In the video, the folks at Kurzgesagt outline how they will and won’t use “AI” — basically not for writing or factchecking, but occasionally for things like automating animation processes and other such backend stuff. I think this is reasonable — and indeed, if one is using creative tools more involved than a pen and a piece of paper, “AI” is damn near unavoidable these days, even allowing for the fact that “AI” is mostly a marketing phrase for a bunch of different processes and tools which in a different era would have been called “machine learning” or “neural networks” or something else now horribly unsexy.
This is also how I’m approaching my writing here on Whatever. Every word you see here is written by an actual live human, usually either me or Athena, but also the individual authors of the Big Idea posts. Good, bad or indifferent, it came out of someone’s skull, and not out of a prompt field. I do this because a) I care about the quality of the posts you see here, and also b) as Athena and I are both actually decent writers with substantial experience, it’s easier just to write things ourselves than to prompt an “AI” to do it and then spend twice as much time editing for facts and tone. That’s right! “AI” doesn’t make our writing job easier! Quite the opposite in fact!
(Also: I don’t use generative AI to create images here — there are a few from years ago, before it became clear to me the generators were trained on copyrighted images, and I stopped when it was made clear this was done without creator consent — so images are almost all photographed/created by me (or Athena) directly, are non-AI-generated stock images I have a license for (or are Creative Commons or in public domain), or are publicity photos/images which are given out for promotional purposes. I do often tweak them with photo editing tools, primarily Photoshop. But none of the images comes out of a prompt.)
I think there’s a long conversation to be had about at what point the use of software means that something is less about the human creation and more about the machine generation, where someone scratching words onto paper with a fountain pen is on one end of that line, and someone dropping a short prompt into an LLM is on the other, and I strongly suspect that point is a technological moving target, and is probably not on a single axis. That said, for Whatever, I’m pretty satisfied that what we do here is significantly human-forward. The Internet may yet be inundated with “AI” slop, but Whatever is and will remain a small island of human activity.
— JS
