this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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In my experience, there are a lot of places very content to do a pretty bad job of stuff if it's low effort on the part of the person collecting the surplus labour value, and is making money.
The greatest deprogramming I've had through corporate experience is that capitalist myth that competition forces companies to try and make a better product.
Maybe in the odd case it does. But, for the most part, capitalism is pretty happy to just race to the bottom. A 2% worse product that costs 5% less to manufac6that I can sell for the original price? THAT is what every company is trying to do. Make a better product? Get the fuck outta here.
There is a market, for AI slop... because it's just a special case of a preexisting major market of "slop". We already had shovelware. Low effort high volume content creators. Telemarketers with accents so think you have to wonder if the costs saved by offshoring those workers could possibly recoup the reduced sales rates. It's all just slop. AI can absolutely disrupt the Slop Market. And it is.
But, as the other commenter pointed out... it's a tens-of-billions global industry, and AI is being invested in as if its a trillions global industry.
They need to make AI better, or make the slop industry larger. They won't meaningfully do the first, but can make some headroom on the second. Either way, not nearly enough for profitability.
Right now my money is on industry to repurpose barely used datacenter hardware which will become available for pennies on the dollar back to consumer-usable hardware.
Although I agree that there will always be produced "content" that is worse than other, I don't think there's any cause to compare human labour to "AI" slop. People can be stuck in jobs they don't care about, most often because of unreasonable work conditions or wages.
"AI" produces slop because that's what it is made for. That's its dire success criteria, making something that's statistically just above but not quite terrible quality. Manufacturers and employers prefer that over human labour performing similarly, i.e. quiet quitting. Because so far "AI" doesn't have workers' rights. Or higher aspirations.
And I cannot agree with your point about "telemarketers with accents" as a marker of low quality. That phrasing is a whole thicket of weeds that I'm not wading into.
I'm actually not saying anything is "better" than anything else. I'm saying there is a distinct industrial strategy that involves maximizing engagements primarily through volume of attempts at the minimal cost. It's very much a bimodal reality, clustered around trying to maximize completions against a constrained set of touches, or merely maximizing touches. I didn't mention it earlier, but "scams" also fit this profile. And I'm just calling it all slop. It's the cheapest thing that you can feed the pigs that'll eat anything anyways. Maximize channel saturation at the absolute lowest cost possible, the message itself being largely irrelevant.
AI excels at that specific task. You can agree or disagree all you want but studies trying to establish "is anyone actually seeing material profit gains out of AI", are seeing this exact pattern. People trying to use the slop machine to do anything besides making slop aren't having a great time. People who's business model is slop are doing great.