Rob Horning

users should in fact smell the glove over and over again, just not continuously

Andrea Vallone, safety research lead at OpenAI, said that the company optimizes ChatGPT for retention not engagement. She said the company wants users to return to the tool regularly but not to use it for hours on end.

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

maybe there is something cumulative about the Eliza effect; maybe the pleasure bound up with suspending disbelief intensifies as it is prolonged

Everything from chatbots’ personification to their recurring issues with engagement-boosting sycophancy suggests that entertainment, not just utility, is what keeps a lot of users around. As a communications strategy, nudges project ambivalence about excessive platform use and raise the possibility that users may be misusing products. As a bit of marketing, they’re likewise helpful: Our product is so compelling we have to tell our users to take a break. Nudges are perhaps best understood, though, as attempts to demarcate liability. They imply concern for users’ well-being and offer tools to help them manage it. But they also make it clear that, should these new products drive you sort of insane, that’s ultimately your problem, not theirs. You were warned! Or at least you were nudged.

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...

"meaning" is a kind of friction in circulation, a source of anxiety. In the pursuit of circulation for its own sake, informational speed for its own sake, noise and signal become inverted. Nothing flows better than pure noise; "slop" makes a kind of content out of content's degradation into noise

or: slop functions like a kind of "phatic expression" for the condition where the "social" has been subtracted from social media — it indicates an open connection not between people but between a person and a content management system

One has but to consider the phenomenon of fashion, which has never been satisfactorily explained. Fashion is the despair of sociology and aesthetics: a prodigious contagion of forms in which chain reactions struggle for supremacy over the logic of distinctions. The pleasure of fashion is undeniably cultural in origin, but does it not stem even more clearly from a flaring, unmediated consensus generated by the interplay of signs? Moreover, fashions fade away like epidemics once they have ravaged the imagination, once the virus has run its course. The price to be paid in terms of waste is always exorbitant, yet everyone consents. The marvellous in our societies resides in this ultra-rapid circulation of signs at a surface level (as opposed to the ultra-slow circulation of meanings). We love being contaminated by this process, and not having to think about it. This is a viral onslaught as noxious as the plague, yet no moral sociology, no philosophical reason, will ever extirpate it. Fashion is an irreducible phenomenon because it partakes of a crazy, viral, mediationless form of communication which operates so fast for the sole reason that it never passes via the mediation of meaning.

slop then reminds people that content can flow forever, without "meaning" — which may be the appeal, as Baudrillard argues here, about fashion: it is "irresistible" because it circulates specifically as the absence of "meaning," just trends as "trends"

The subtext is that slop is being dumped on us against our will—that it’s something that happens to us—but that lets us off the hook far too easily. Most of the slop we see is still made and distributed by real people, often with no AI assistance. If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment its only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves.

kneelingbus.substack.com/p/slop-as-a-... the sense that "slop" is a kind of place-holder that holds open space in feeds, or supplies continual confirmation that the spiggot is open even if nothing "meaningful" is flowing through it

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

Slopsogenesis • what we call 'platforms' have evolved and can now more accurately described as 'containers' (flat plane --> deep hole)  • platform - a flat space or playing field where different and dissimilar parties + products can come to interoperoperate and vend, purchase, offer services etc • container - a void or hole where content can be dumped and out of which content can be consumed. slop for the piggies, etc. the container produces the necessity for content. • once the platform (flat) becomes a container (hole) *it must be filled*. Also, i think this is applicable to non-digital things and spaces as well?. eg grocery store - what was initially designed as a platform for vending becomes understood as a space to be filled with product (and sound).

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:

We Need To Talk About Sloppers The best ever death metal bot out of Denton

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

chatbots are unequivocally "easier to talk to" but impossible to "talk with"

Among teens who do use AI, 30% list entertainment and curiosity as the driving factor and 9% say it’s easier to talk to AI chat bots than other people.

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

the algorithmic populated home screen as "interpassive media" that watches and enjoys the shows for me

Instead everything is experienced as an ongoing series of reactions to a “desire to consume content” that is uninterruptible

Constant exposure to algorithmic feeds makes it feel unusual and almost transgressive to conceive a desire that isn’t prompted or anticipated by the content delivery system

Being constantly immersed in algorithmic media offers unremitting approval for conformity and for following orders; and continual discouragement from taking any initiative that is not pre-formatted

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

If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power. If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it - to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them peopl

"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)

Unnoticed One of the few advantages of being as chronically disorganized as I am is that I can keep coming to the same “insights” that I had before but write about them as though they are new.

I even had this thought about not having new thoguhts before robhorning.substack.com/p/unnoticed

(helps explain why I never reread my own writing, which dooms me to self-redundancy)

(always surprised and dismayed to find so much consistency in my "thoughts," and to realize that what seems like a new breakthrough to me now is usually some conclusion I already drew years ago. Sad that I am not capable of building to any new ideas)

A delightful intuitive companion A few weeks ago, the Verge reported on a startup making a device called the Rabbit R1, which is supposed to be “an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you.” I’m not especially interested in t...

forgot I wrote about this before: that "interpassivity" stops the true exodus of the masses from the media that control them robhorning.substack.com/p/a-delightf...

though I would not describe this as "a form of refusal by overacceptance" as Baudrillard describes the "silence of the masses"; chatbots better understood as a means of recuperating that silence and nullifying it as the potential form of resistance Baudrillard posited

About the media you can sustain two opposing hypotheses: they are the strategy of power, which finds in them the means of mystifying the masses and of imposing its own truth. Or else they are the strategic territory of the ruse of the masses, who exercise in them their concrete power of the refusal of truth, of the denial of reality. Now the media are nothing else than a marvellous instrument for destablizing the real and the true, all historical or political truth (there is thus no possible political strategy of the media: it is a contradiction in terms). And the addiction that we have for the media, the impossibility of doing without them, is a deep result of this phenomenon: it is not a result of a desire for culture, communication, and information, but of this perversion of truth and falsehood, of this destruction of meaning in the operation of the medium. The desire for a show, the desire for simulation, which is at the same time a desire for dissimulation. This is a vital reaction. It is a spontaneous, total resistance to the ultimatum of historical and political reason.

from "The Implosion of the Social in Media" on the addictive nature of chatbots

That the silent majority (or the masses) is an imaginary referent does not mean they don't ex ist. It means that their representation is no longer possible. The masses are no longer a referent because they no longer belong to the order of representation. They don't express them~elves, they are surveyed. They don't reflect upon themselves, they are tested. The referendum (and the media are a constant referendum of directed questions and answers) has been substituted for the political referent. Now polls, tests, the referendum, media are devices which no longer belong to a dimension of representations, but to one of simulation. They no longer have a referent in view, but a model.

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"

the LLMs' simulated intentionality is sort of the opposite of inscrutable; maybe they can't simulate not knowing what they are trying to say

nostalgia for the "naive poster" who doesn't really know how to post professionally or tactically, who performs "self-expression for its own sake" for an audience that can't imagine or afford that anymore