“slop” as the new “nonplace” maxread.substack.com/p/what-is-sl...

the curse of streaming media: "the ability to cheaply deliver content is matched by its inability to produce anything new" www.unemployednegativity.com/2025/12/livi...

pursuing the dream of a life lived as pure "data creation," with the ultimate goal of being completely manipulatable by the data processors who have a plan for your life

one of the dumbest things I've ever read www.wired.com/story/people...

these findings suggest that people should always understand that interacting with chatbots is like talking to an advertisement, not talking to some supergenius

this reminds me of theories about advertising, and how much we seem to want to believe that we are intrinsically hard to persuade and have something like "firm, established beliefs" when the evidence usually suggests otherwise www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/05/1...

when something that seems to belong to you (a device, your identity etc.) can be modified remotely at will by outside forces, you're always already expropriated

any device that is "always connected" is either working against us or forcing us to work unpaid for someone else

it's almost as if the purpose of such devices is to incapacitate you and make you dependent

i.e. how algorithmically sorted social media already works

this gets at the question of whether one can close-read a generated text or image; the contingencies in them indicate something about the training data, but there seems to be nothing aesthetic in it www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

feel like an ethnography of the people who get paid by the piece to "rank" LLM outputs would also explain a lot about the kind of prose the models are optimized to generate maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-wr...

not clear if the loneliness becomes visible to the chatbot user, though it certainly becomes visible to tech companies, who have incentive to perpetuate it datasociety.net/points/all-t...

also think this fantasy of mastery expresses itself as an opportunity for total surrender, to expect nothing from yourself

OK so this concept of 'interpassivity', which this author dates to the 90s, is exactly what Attali wrote about in 1977's NOISE as "repetition", or stockpiling hordes of use-time that you never actually use mail.cyberneticforests.com/from-interac...

interesting that Flusser invented gooning

I wrote something about generative music and reading Vilém Flusser robhorning.substack.com/p/the-songs-...

seeing LLMs as "ideology that can pretend to be a person" helps make it clear what "talking to chatbots" accomplishes: Althusserian "interpellation"

this seems right, and always makes me wonder what the "suckers" get out of being on "sucker lists," why they enjoy being on them. Is it just some combination of masochism and getting paid attention to? Confirmation bias as a service? maxread.substack.com/p/prediction...

regardless of what else they convey in a specific image, image generators offer images that tell those people who want to hear it that "effort/craft is a sham and a waste of time"

seems like one of the main use cases for genAI is to eliminate the joy that other people take in thinking and actually doing things www.thecut.com/article/woul...

Sora 2 is not being “misused” when people use it to produce racist, transphobic, misogynistic, & otherwise vile images—it exists to make it easier to put these images out into the world. Calling it a “misuse” is a grave misunderstanding of what these companies are up to, & lets OpenAI off the hook.

However, the problem with these images is not just their genericness. It's the deeply populist idea that politics can be reduced to its immediately visible effects: politics is not judged by how it affects people's concrete daily lives, but rather by its aesthetics—by what image it produces 4/

hope that is the actual cover

analysis of political AI slop as "generated déjà vu" slavoj.substack.com/p/welcome-to...

but the existence of text and video generators will also fortify those modes of social verification that don't amount to "it's acceptable for me to believe everything I see and read" www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/o...

when any person's face can be pasted into any face-shaped hole, it doesn't make things feel "personalized"; rather it negates the idea that there is anything personal about a face

steal your face right off your head

or you could say the entire station has been made into one big ad for this photographer news.artnet.com/art-world/hu...

«Video generators allow people to experience ideas or beliefs as content without their having to invest their imagination into making them real, into ‹really› believing in them and coming to terms with the implications of their beliefs.» @robhorning.bsky.social on Sora Slop Feeds

that users could prefer a generated simulation to actual old clips for nostalgia purposes clarifies how nostalgia is about consuming "decontextualization" in itself — nostalgia negates history under the auspices of longing for it

"new conspiracism" doesn't explain anything but is a means for isolated individuals to experience "social validation" on demand, in the absence of a verifiable public — a way to intensify the gratification of parasociality www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...

“infinite video” means not infinite entertainment but infinite boredom; the death drive incarnate

the idea that some videos are intrinsically interesting to watch (regardless of whether they have any reference to events or things in themselves, any kind of auratic appeal) feels like it can't survive generative models, which makes all forms of mere seeing trivial

this from Yves Citton's Mythocracy is maybe useful for thinking about Sora 2 and other slop feeds: Generated video constitutes an "imaginary of power" that gives consumers pictures of how they've been trained to believe things are "supposed to be"

wonder if the ease and rapidity with which "AI" can generate right-wing fantasy images and propaganda makes them more convincing for their consumers — as though one shouldn't have to use their own imagination to manifest the bigotry they insist on www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

LLMs mean that no one has to write anything they don't care about, but they also mean that "writing anything" will get equated with "not caring" for most people. (If you really cared, you would video yourself talking about it on your phone.)

not bad advice, but presumes that most people read and write to experience "charm, surprise, and strangeness" when the opposite may be the case www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

What does it mean to "optimize" for this condition — to train users to enjoy it? Why is it most profitable for companies to train us in wanting to pay attention as a way of avoiding rather than seeking meaning? www.noemamag.com/the-last-day...

seems indicative of how stagnant the ideas behind "AI" are that Baudrillard could write a critique of them in 1995 (The Perfect Crime) and none of it seems dated

And how does the machine know your intent, you might ask? Well by constant surveillance. Just kidding, the machine does not “know” your fucking “intent.”

algorithmic recommendation tries to make it impossible for us to escape our own predictability; continued interaction with these sorts of surveillance systems changes our relationship to our own capability to want things—makes it alien, fully externalized www.theguardian.com/media/2025/a...

about the commodification of "participation", making "communal vibe" into a set of signs and formal tropes so that listeners can enjoy "participation" by merely consuming and recognizing signs (as with most fashion trends)

seems like a distinction without a difference www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...

AI companies want us to think their products are like "The Entertainment" from Infinite Jest, capable of chatting us into terminal inertia nymag.com/intelligence...

what does "slop" (as a general phenomenon) serve as an advertisement for? it seems to impress on people not that "AI" is smart but that is "stupid" in all the ways already familiar from marketing

Great new entry into the annals of slop theory from @kneelingbus.bsky.social (for those still ok with reading ss links): kneelingbus.substack.com/p/slop-as-a-way-of-life Inspired me to note down my current working theory on the genesis of the slop era:

Did I once again smuggle post-structuralist theory into my internet jokes newsletter? 👁️🫦👁️ www.todayintabs.com/p/we-need-to...

9% seems really low actually www.teenvogue.com/story/teens-...