Are We Reaching Peak Slop Soon?

AI-generated content relates to human art like industry fast-food to a real cooked meal

This weekend, I listened to a recorded livestream conversation between prominent Substacker Ted Gioia and entertainment journalist Richard Rushfield of The Ankler.

Something Ted said in this interview resonated deeply with me.

Talking about the spread of AI slop, he made a striking comparison between culture and food. I’m paraphrasing from memory here.

Back in the days, when Ted was still a kid, microwavable TV dinners and frozen pizzas were all the rage. Fast food felt incredibly convenient.

Fast forward a few decades, and nobody wants that stuff anymore. Natural, healthy food is now all the rage. People are spending fortunes on farmers markets.

TV dinners and frozen pizzas still exist, and they have a place in people’s diet, but they’re far from the most desirable option. Rarely would someone admit to eating that stuff all the time. It’s a fallback option – good enough for days when we just have no time or no energy to cook a real meal.

Ted’s prediction is that quite soon it will be the same with digital slop.

Right now, generative AI still feels like the shiny new thing, at least from the viewpoint of corporations, and it’s seemingly taking over the cultural sphere. The internet is where culture takes place today – and it’s rapidly turning into a huge heap of slop.

Whether it’s Google, YouTube, Amazon, Instagram, Spotify or Tik Tok – they’re all flooded with cheap AI-generated content optimized for algorithmically curated platforms. The platforms don’t seem to mind; some of them even actively incentivize the creation and spread of this type of content. Why? Because it promises short-term “engagement”.

That development might last for a little while longer. It might even become more intense, but the tide will be turning.

Soon enough, Ted hypothesizes, many will notice how shallow and lifeless our cultural diet is becoming. The novelty factor will be gone, and it will become increasingly clear that the “art” forced upon us by tech companies through generative AI and algorithms is failing to meet our true desires and expectations. They just hit us with some quick dopamine instead – but that rush will be gone soon.

What will happen in the long run is that people will start craving human art and curation again – anything that feels like it has actual human emotions and experience embedded into it.

AI and algorithms will enshittify most parts of the free internet, so real art and curation will become the desirable option, at least for sophisticated consumers – and they will be willing to pay for it, just to escape slop hell.

A place for slop will remain – as a cheap option for quick consumption, like fast food, trash TV or light romance novels in earlier times. But it will be frowned upon in certain social circles.

The difference is that this time, it won’t take decades for people to get sick of the new technology. Everything accelerates – including these cycles. Ted correctly notes that people are sick of AI and algorithms already. They hate that stuff with a passion. They don’t want it in their lives.

Still, corporations keep trying to force their great inventions onto us all. It’s just too profitable and convenient. They can almost effortlessly make money and install frictionless surveillance in one go. They will not give up on this opportunity easily.

But the more they are trying to shove that stuff down our throats, the stronger the countermovement will become.

I’m not saying these technologies will just disappear over night, like those delusional people that deemed the internet “a passing fad” in the 1990s.

AI and algorithms are here to stay – they do make some people’s lives easier, and there are certain areas where they can be actually helpful. Content might be one of those areas, but culture isn’t.

A market for slop will remain – because there’s a cohort of consumers with extremely low expectations. Those people exist now too. They spend their days watching TV, eating junk food, listening to hit songs mixed with ads and shuffling through Tik Tok. They’re out there – you see them every day.

And if we’re honest, many of us might swipe through reels for an hour or two when we’re exhausted from work too, just like we might eat a frozen pizza every once in a while. But we also read actual books and go to concerts. We cook real meals with healthy, natural ingredients most of the time. We pay to stream films and listen to music without ads. And we don’t see slop as a substitute for the real thing.

This is all part of a wider backlash. People are starting to turn away from streaming services. They cancel their Spotify and Apple Music accounts and look for smaller, more high quality services with human editorial sections, like Qobuz or Tidal. They go back to collecting physical media like vinyl records, CDs, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-Rays. They’re rediscovering the allure of paper books. They’re making zines again.

The same goes for social media. Many of my friends still have their accounts, but they rarely post anything, and it doesn’t mean much to them anymore. Teenagers wish it wouldn’t have been invented in the first place, and they turn towards private group chats instead. American schools have started banning phones, but the cool kids are voluntarily turning away from them anyway.

Tech companies and their accomplices in the political sphere will do anything to fight back in the name of “progress”. It will be interesting to witness how this battle pans out.

One thing is clear to me: Real culture, made by humans, will not disappear. We’ve been making art for thousands of years. Outsourcing that stuff doesn’t work.

As we’re slowly approaching peak slop, people are starting to notice what they’re actually missing.

In just a few years, we’ll hopefully look back on this time like we’re now looking back on the days when everyone was raving about frozen food and TV dinners.