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-...

reminds me of people on livestreams who do whatever the commenters demand

"What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself." (from Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil)

from Baudrillard's "In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities" — similar stakes in culture moving from "posting" to "AI": the model speaks in place of "the masses"

"posting" could seem like it was a way for users to experience or express agency, but at the same time "participation" is typically an attempt to advertise one's conformity, normality

perhaps tech companies no longer coerce people to post publicly because overall surveillance has improved www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

and at the same time, prompters get to be the master manipulators, goading the answers they want out of the "truthbot" and seeming to change what is true about the world

the "content" of reading and writing become the processes themselves: they become deliberate exercises to expand attention spans in the face of technologies designed to shorten them kevinmunger.substack.com/p/attention-...

"vibes" against AI make human capabilities into some mystical inexplicable magic, doomed to be undermined when inevitably the "vibes" no longer can tell what is "real" and what is "AI"

Consumer subjectivity is, at its heart, a mimetic process of desire that cloaks its actualization as one of unique, individual choice when, in fact, its end goal is to manufacture governable copies of the ideal capitalist subject. AI Chatbots turn mimetic desire into a frictionless experience.

Trusting another person is hard; you have to earn their trust in return—trusting a machine or a brand is one-sided and a form of delusion, a belief that it mirrors back effortlessly your desire to trust and be trusted

LLMs aren't subjects, but large socio-technical apparatuses, similar to factories, bureaucracies, or corporations, and our critique should not begin by comparing ourselves to them, but by asking what position they impose on us: How do these apparatuses model and interpellate subjectivity? 2/

the theory of "interpassivity" perhaps helps answer this question; despising the morons in the commercial allow you to use AI without despising yourself www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/m...

very eager to read this

I'm going to be honest here, I think AI is going to do so much damage to the usable internet that even after it's inevitably crashes out, it's going to take years to disentangle from every space it's polluted, like digital asbestos it's gonna be time consuming effort and likely expensive venture.