slop in the form of poetry
Slop - 'liquid or wet food waste, especially when it is fed to animals' (Cambridge Dictionary, '25).
I stumbled across an article on my daily, nay, hourly trounce through the playground that is 'X' (fka Twitter), one that shook me to a core that hasn't been worked out in what is probably months. Put it simply - people prefer slop.
slop?
The term, first attributed to AI image outputs of the DALLE-1 model in 2022, described the original psychedelic dreams of the machines we now fill our lives with. Further popularized in the mainstream by British programmer Simon Willison in 2024.
You know it when you see it. It could be in the form of an American veteran, whose hands don't look quite right and whose stump of a leg is too smooth for your liking. Maybe it's a man, darker in complexion, helping a woman, lighter in complexion, reminding you that we should never judge a book by its cover. Or a picture of 'shrimp Jesus' (this one is surprisingly common, I promise). These nursery rhymes repeat, over and over, filling the newsfeed, diluting our content. A more academic term for this particular phenomenon is 'synthetic media' (note that this relates more so to disinformation- I argue all 'slop' is disinformative, for what other point of any content is to influence another to feel- can one rightfully suggest feeling without authentic experience?).
The uncanny valley, once reserved for Bethesda games and the severely underrated 2005 film 'Hoodwinked' is now a daily occurrence. This phenomenon, an unsettling or eerie feeling we feel towards encountering entities that are not quite right, propagated on a large scale on every social media network we use. One wonders what the mental load for that is. What happens when our brains, wired to recognize human faces, no longer knows what a human face looks like? Or worse, those brains do- and just don't care?
poetry
The piece in question, published in the prestigious 'Nature' journal by Brian Porter & Edouard Machery, is very straight forward with its title.
'AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably'.
Before we go any further, please re-read that title. This is not a case of p-hacking (I looked over the data); this is a randomized sample. Two takeaways from this article.
One - nobody can tell who wrote what.
Two - nobody cares.
humanity by a machine
On the focus of accuracy, humans are observed to have a lower than chance (46.6%) accuracy at determining the authorship of a poem. Observed agreement within the sample is poor, suggesting the difficulty of the task led to random answers (worrying in itself), but don't breathe out yet. Jakesch & Hancock suggest in their piece 'Human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawed' that, well, human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawed. Thanks guys. Participants are far more likely to guess AI-generated poems are written by humans than human ones are- the five 'least' human poems were written by poets of the blood and tears and melancholic feeling variety.
I want to ask you to try this quiz. 10 questions; try to get them all right. Feel free to use your own score for the following calculations. I will round the number in Jakesch & Hancock's piece (51.7%) to an even 50/50 chance. How many posts do I see a day? Let's suppose I scroll X for an hour. During that hour (extrapolated from a 5 min sample) I will see ~600 posts. ~800 including replies. How much of that is real? I leave it up to you, if it even matters.
i care, i promise
You don't. Or maybe you do. Congratulations if so. The beauty of this world we live in is attention is inherently meritocratic- barring no outside compensatory pressures (being paid to watch a video), the basis of attention is formed through a simple formula.
Is [THIS] better than [THAT].
Porter, B., Machery, E. AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably. Sci Rep 14, 26133 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-76900-1
This picture (of a chart) is worth a thousand words. The human average rating (percent of those who said overall quality is extremely, moderately, or slightly good) is 50%. Tell them it's human, its automatically ~18% better. The average AI poem scores ~78% - dropping down to 76% when they are told it's an AI. Tell them it's made by a human and we jump to 86%.
I should remind you that this is poetry.
Poetry is subjective. Poetry is gross. Poetry is sticky, weird, winding, annoying, beautiful, foul, hard. The study notes, and I would be remiss to remind you, that these are non experts, and the simple poetry may be easier to understand and digest. Further, the complexity of Chaucer (all-time name, by the way) and the like may be misinterpreted as incoherence from the cold lifeless hands of AI. Ponder that for a second.
We now inhabit a world where simple things are made by humans. Complexity is for the machines.
The original study (and I hope you have read it by now) holds no bars. And I quote;
'AI-generated images have become indistinguishable from reality. AI-generated paintings are judged to be human-created artworks at higher rates than actual human-created paintings; AI-generated faces are judged to be real human faces at higher rate than actual photos of human faces and AI-generated humor is just as funny as human-generated jokes.'
They back up their statements- find the reproduced paragraph below the abstract and read for yourself, if inclined.
okay... and?
I never much cared for landing ships. This serves as but a primer, a rough idea on where I see the future of the online experience. Nor is it a manifesto- thinking out loud, and in public, is the best way to think. We now live in a world where the already toxic wells of online discourse are flavored by the slop of generative artificial intelligence. Political speech, entertainment, philosophy. Poetry, faces, humor. Art. Nobody knows who made it. Nobody cares.
Andrew Yang, of 2020 presidential election fame, popularized in current modern society the 'freedom dividend''. He suggests on his (still live) campaign website that devoid of any need to work, with an adequate and stable safety blanket, Americans would 'educate themselves, start businesses, be more creative... and have a real stake in the future'. I wish I shared his optimism. In a world where society consistently rates AI generated content as superior to the 'organic' variety, creativity and its outputs may become little more than trinkets; a painting that you hide in a closet but never gift as a present, a spoon you carved that soup trickles through. If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If a creation is never shared, it only serves an internal purpose.
Perhaps capitalism is to blame, the incessant need for more engagement at the hands of the almighty dollar. I am amenable to these proclamations. Perhaps, however, it's not all about money. For we are all plugged in, drinking from the waterfalls of social homepages. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, anesthetized by pleasure, while Wallace wrote of an ultra-addictive for of content which consumes everything around it. While 'Shrimp Jesus' gets his engagement, bringing in dollars, one must wonder if we are robbing Peter to pay Paul? Even disregarding the job impacts on graphic designers who were once creating these images (Goldman Sachs predicts a 26% decline in graphic design roles- I believe this is severely undercounted and has already hit that mark).
We (i use 'we' for humanity in general) are faced with a conundrum, as artists, creatives, or humans. Good art has never exactly been fairly valued- Van Gogh died broke, Mr. Show was cancelled, Bon Iver's new work flops. We are now faced with the idea that good art isn't what people want. Okay, no worries. I will just make a pop album. Yet how can we compete with a machine that churns out formulaic entry after formulaic entry, in the voice of sought after creatives, a million times faster and cheaper than we ever can? Furthermore, how can we reconcile the fact that our fellow humans prefer it?
I have no answers, yet at least. I have no way to square the circle, and perhaps I never will. I instead intend to write into the void, to think aloud, to fight the future with the very thing that allowed us to create and use these tools.
Opposable thumbs.
ike.
ps. thoughts? reach me at ikes.thoughts@gmail.com
