The Age of Slop
Warning: contains existential risk.
A Manifesto About Manifestos
Some paid search engine needed to publish a manifesto, stating their "philosophy" in the current slopocalypse we are living in:
Generative AI is a hot topic, but the technology still has flaws. [...] AI will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.
Read that again. Let it sit.
They needed a philosophy degree to explain why their results are real. In my times(tm), claims such as these would have been dismissed as the stuff of science-fiction fever dreams.
We have reached the part of history where companies need manifestos to say "we didn't do what Big Tech is doing."
This Is Fine
So what does "normal" look like now?
Google telling users to put glue in their pizzas or citing satirical articles as fact in their AI reviews. Made search worse on purpose just to funnel you into those slop reviews, which require more queries, which in turn generates more revenue due to the increased traffic. Degradation as innovation, in pure enshittifying fashion.
Satya Nadella getting desperate his bank accounts aren't being filled fast enough and so he wants you to stop using the term "slop", the result? People calling his company "Microslop". Gotta love the Streisand effect.
AI tech bros promising AGI or gods-in-a-box from the comfort of your own desk. Or claiming how your life is going to be automated away by the next release of ChatGPT or Claude for the last five years.
Meanwhile my AI still can't even hello world apps properly without me intervening manually. Some revolution.
Big Tech and VC daddies pouring literal trillions into semiconductor industries and LLM tech, and getting ever diminishing returns from it. Marc Andreessen is starting to sweat through his Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Not looking so hot now, it seems.
AI CEOs like Rauch and Altman meeting with Netanyahu to profit off weaponizing AI, offering fascinating features like AI-assisted targeting, surveillance and kamikaze drones. Killing kids in Gaza or blowing up Palestinian hospitals never felt so effortless now.
AI datacenters consuming GPU supply at a scale that makes retail users an afterthought, driving prices through the roof and forcing an ever-increasing shift to HaaS.
No, not the F1 team (although last year they were pretty sloppy, too), but rather "hardware-as-a-service" — or, more plainly, having to rent the compute you used to own.
Some Revolution
I am a developer by trade, and my day work involves getting close and personal with this stuff. And even I think this slop phenomenon is getting out of hand. Seems I am not alone - but that is where the similarities end for me.
Some see a revolution. I see a bubble. This smells a lot like 1999, cranked up to 2x. And we all know how that ends. NVIDIA tripling valuation almost overnight on anticipated GPU demand — supply promised to AI labs that does not even exist — is one of the clearest signs. Finance influencers keep telling you to invest in tech stocks, in a full bullish market. Anyone with a sense of technical analysis knows that no graph goes up forever.
AI tech bros keep promising AGI by the next release. Meanwhile my Claude is still struggling to compile my personal text-based game project. Supposedly by this time frame we should have already gotten cancer cures. Worker robots. Programming automated away completely. But they keep using the "used car salesman" card - telling you it's coming next release, while still asking you to open your wallet in the meantime to charge you for those sweet, sweet tokens.
At the rate this is going, we either go back to VS Code IntelliSense stone-age, learn to run inference locally because cloud networks will go bust, or the AI arms race ends up with some form of Skynet putting us all to sleep by releasing the hypnodrones, and colonizing Mars without humans, just slop machines.
And what will those slop machines create?
Yep, you guessed it, more slop. It's just in their natu- ahem, training data.
Guess I'll keep those low-level skills sharp and still ask everything with "please" to my future overlords so they have a use for me before the harvesting comes…