The Slop Bubble

I think I've made my general opinion of Generative AI pretty clear. I refuse to touch it with the proverbial forty-foot barge pole. The real problem I have with it is that the damn stuff is getting everywhere. I have seen advertising for shovelware games that is one hundred percent Generative AI nonsense. The fact that it's getting better at looking real is not the plus that the Techbros think it is.

It just means that the rest of us have to work harder to keep that rubbish out of our lives.

As for the aforementioned slop advertising... I'm not truly prone to investing my time in shovelware in the first place. Especially not shovelware that has advertising that can't decide what the firkin game looks like. I see you, Survival Tiles and I see your shitty, shitty attempts to lure me in with what some techbro thinks is cool.

The good news is that Generative AI people can't tell that their Generative AI products actually suck. The people who know the difference are willing to take the time to tell, and we can.

Meanwhile, some writing competitions are letting Generative AI entries in because "everyone is using it." No, my sweet Poflo. Everyone entering that competition will be using it and all the genuine writers will be avoiding that contest like the plague. The whole competition will be a farce and your judges might quit out of frustration from seeing fifty near-identical stories that may or may not include the ChatGPT responses.

I'm anticipating some schadenfreude on that count.

Calling it now. The PETA ruling for non-human-made images is also going to hold for non-human-made writing, so any Techbro who wins is going to have exactly twenty-four hours of crowing before they learn that they can't profit from the movie deal. Or they can't even get the movie deal. Or even publish. Because publishers refuse to touch AI Slop.

Make no mistake, AI does have its uses. The oft-touted translation earbuds seem to be a good idea. If only they weren't being offered on Temu. That gives the whole thing sus vibes IMHO. Anything from Temu is automatically a rip-off these days. The enshittification is very, very real.

There might be a more reliable set that's worth it elsewhere. But the point is that AI translation can do a good job at enhancing communication in real time. Which has equal opportunities for opening doors or slamming them in people's faces.

All that said, Generative AI is still a billion-dollar solution for problems that don't exist. The aforementioned earbuds from Temu aren't selling for that much, and there's many other alternatives for translation through other means, so it's not that great for a return on investment. An investment which has stolen tons of other people's intellectual property, filled the atmosphere with tons of greenhouse gasses, and used megaliters of potable water that could be very useful for keeping people alive.

In less than a handful of years, perhaps, the Techbros will be forced to finally admit that Generative AI was a very complicated fraud. Their hindsight will be 20-20.

Skeptics like me said the same things about NFT's and MemeCoins, and the same thing is and has been happening with both of those.

Someday, this bubble will pop, too. I just hope that civilisation can recover from the damage it's wrought.