I’ve been slowly reading my copy of “The Internet Phone Book” and I recently read an essay in it by Elan Ullendorff called “The New Turing Test”.
Elan argues that what matters in a work isn’t the tools used to make it, but the “expressiveness” of the work itself (was it made “from someone, for someone, in a particular context”):
If something feels robotic or generic, it is those very qualities that make the work problematic, not the tools used.
This point reminded me that there was slop before AI came on the scene.
A lot of blogging was considered a primal form of slop when the internet first appeared: content of inferior substance, generated in quantities much vaster than heretofore considered possible.
And the truth is, perhaps a lot of the content in blogosphere was “slop”.
But it wasn’t slop because of the tools that made it — like Movable Type or Wordpress or Blogger.
It was slop because it lacked thought, care, and intention — the “expressiveness” Elan argues for.
You don’t need AI to produce slop because slop isn’t made by AI. It’s made by humans — AI is just the popular tool of choice for making it right now.
Slop existed long before LLMs came onto the scene.
It will doubtless exist long after too.