the people taking the "is it AI" test are also positioned to act as though context and purpose don't matter to writing's "quality" and that it is ok to make evaluations from a position of ignorance (most polls also do this)
AI writing is optimized to seem "good" to people who could care less about the context or the larger point the writing is supposed to serve
maxread.substack.com/p/what-do-wh...
that promise is never fulfilled, and consuming "personalized" content (including chatbot "friendship") just makes the emptiness emptier, more isolating
I tend to think even "content" depends on some shared social interest in the material it conveys, but slop can seem predicated on eliminating that — it promises you can consume and enjoy it in isolation like "digital drugs"
this claims that there is no theoretical limit to the demand for hyper-personalized content; but the actual demand for actual content is dictated by social relations (desiring the desire of the other, etc.) arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06060
Wild honey pie
Anything medicine or botanic, no matter how obscure, is accepted but “inanition” and “ontic” have no being
What I feel when this gets denied as a word
AI slop is a potent strategy of warfare in spreading disinfo and sowing doubt. Quickly produced at scale, AI slop drowns out human-made content and goes viral as spammers detect and exploit weaknesses in algorithms.
at some point athletes throwing games will be fully rehabilitated as offering a form of insider knowledge to help the world predict who's not cheating www.tank.tv/magazine/iss...
"personalization" is manipulation 1234kyle5678.substack.com/p/enter-the-...
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/t...
but this attitude toward productivity necessarily becomes increasingly abstract, where one is "productive" for the sake of being productive (and not without any intention in mind, just like the LLMs), as if that weren't the apotheosis of alienation
that is how capitalists relate to the labor they hire, so it makes sense of an aspiration perhaps if you want to become an labor exploiter rather than a maker of things
you too can become a crypto-stakhanovite who becomes "more productive" by subtracting more of oneself from intellectual processes, and instead claiming a kind of vicarious relation to work: "I watched this work happen, so I in fact did it"
being unable to conceive of any other goals than maximizing one's "personal productivity" must be a terrible way to go through life
From this article about how “AI” puts people off who don’t see having their skills replaced as “convenient” www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/t...
“And yet” should be changed to “because”—people can see that they will use these tools to the detriment of their own relationships
evergreen lesson of automation: it's not a way of eliminating bottlenecks but of inventing new and more resistant ones backofmind.substack.com/p/finally-we...
The most depressing AI pieces are always going to be the thoughtful, nuanced, open-minded considerations by respected writers who are transparently responding to the publicity incentive created by editors whose owners want this kind of content
article sugsests that algorithmic feeds are (1) optimized for how much "falsity" users prefer, inculcating the sense that no truths are universally shared and (2) are designed to maintain perpetual conflict among users to reinforce affect over the emergence of common ground, which is unprofitable
a.k.a. truth and falsity in their ultramoral sense
carrier-bag.net/vectofascism...
GenAI is a key activator in the Anti-Vice Popular Front: its output & industry also tell you the rules are over. The increasing volume of synthetic content contributes to the broken windows theory of the information landscape: "the more your environment is vandalised, the less care you take of it."
an essay I wrote last year about AI "companions" www.emptysetmag.com/articles/lon...
It’s a category mistake nobody really talks about: most AI companies are not trying to sell creative tools, they are trying to sell content streams.
👇🏻
some of her other aliases
also wonder if her LLM wears sunglasses at night
Why would anyone buy an AI-written romance novel when you can just prompt the chatbots yourself and "write" your own? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/b...
though I doubt "AI" will be replaced widely with "probabilistic automation" it probably should be. (I awkwardly try to put "AI" in quotes when I use it but often have given in to anthropomophizing usage)
also seems like a good guide to what writing about AI not to take so seriously; shows who is either not thinking carefully enough about the topic or is deliberately writing obfuscatory hype
