If most people’s “latent” taste was as good as they thought it was, we wouldn’t have so much “AI slop” - AI generations that are so-labeled precisely because the act of publishing them demonstrates significantly below-average taste.
IME, most users of the term “AI slop” use it for all (identified) uses of AI because they believe that use of AI is itself inherently an indication of poor taste and low effort that invalidates the work independently of what quality the work would have viewed independently of the mode of creation.
There are definitely people who accept AI use generally who try to make “AI slop” a distinction within the universe of AI creation rather than a label for the entire universe of AI creation, but that seems to be a minority use of the term.
I'm not sure "most" people have taste (assuming taste isn't subjective).
I don't think AI slop is indicative of taste. A lot of work doesn't care about taste at all. And AI slop is problematic in that it churns out an awful lot of output that people don't really care to review.
I’d frame taste as a combination of both. People mindfully interacting with a domain will develop nuanced aesthetic preference within it, and while preference is subjective, there’s still plenty that can be agreed upon or respected. Much like morality and relativism.
Obliviousness and uncaring will have similar failure modes, all the more so if both lead to rubber-stamping AI outputs to vague prompts.
You can make that claim for the general case that genAI capabilities will plateau or fishy financing in the sector will cause trouble at some point, but not for the specific talking heads that haven't constrained themselves to that sort of "broad future trajectory" prediction.
FTA:
> Note that I didn't attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI's products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year.” January 2026 claim that "[models are] basically the same as they were a year ago. They have the same efficacy". Zitron has not only made forward-looking statements that AI capabilities will not improve, he's also consistently made backwards-looking statements that capabilities have not improved which, while obviously false at the time, seem to play well to his base (along with his other false statements). If you connect all his statements together, it's implied that AI had the same capabilities in January 2026 as they did in December 2023 (and if you connect later statements, it's actually implied that capabilities in August 2026 are the same as in December 2023, though to be fair to Zitron he frequently contradicts himself and has also admitted to limited improvement at times).
Yes. I was specifically referring to Zitron's circular-financing complaints. I can't defend his separate claims that AI just isn't that useful. If he were involved in the tech industry, he'd know how preposterous those claims are.
By your own market argument, increasing oil supply depresses prices and boosts usage. And NA oil isn't particularly clean or environmentally-friendly - the benefits of local production are primarily political, with a side of cheaper gas, which again, is not fighting climate change with market forces.
And Tesla is not the only game in town for electrification, and it's been like that for years already. Tesla's EU sales plummeted while overall EV share rose quickly during the peak of the 2025 "boycott". Someone who was going to buy a Tesla but got turned off by the Musk-Trump coalition just bought an electric/hybrid from someone else - there is no movement to buy gas cars just to spite Musk (unlike, say, the "roll coal" crowd).
Pragmatism is better than adversarialism, sure, but when it comes to the environment the locus of adversarialism is more lopsided than you're trying to make out.
Picking over the theoretical maintainability of one-off tools and toys that were generated in minutes by what will soon be an outdated model, feels very...missing the forest for the trees, when it comes to speculating about the future impact of this stuff.
It’s the internet. Whenever there’s a new category of accusation/put-down, there’s soon a thousandfold more “drive-by yahoos” throwing it around without actually understanding it, and definitely not caring about false positives or accuracy/precision in general; the appeal appears to be in the very act of flinging shit, and any pretense will do. Monkey behavior.
Quite the opposite - the fact that the default assumption of "what you (will) engage with" is a radioactive dumpster fire that you need to fastidiously Mute / Block / Not Interested / Less Like This / Not Relevant through to eventually "train" the algorithm to give you a consistent window into "really isn't as bad X" - that's proof that the default/average content and experience is every bit as bad as people make it out to be.
And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).
Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".
More that the “discourse” around anything “AI” is just another culture war at this point - dominated by facile taking points that are shallow, ill-considered, uninformed-and-uninformative, and re-re-recycled into worthless pulp by their respective tribal bubble.
And if someone’s first response to this comment is to try to peg which “side” I’m calling an idiot as if that’s the most important bit of info to dictate their response - that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
reply