The Rise of the Slopists

“The Rise of the Slopists”

There is a new movement among us, I call them “The Slopists”.

You’ll recognise them by their battle cry:

“AI SLOP!”

An AI-generated image appears on LinkedIn?

“Slop!”

Someone uses AI to make a video?

“Slop!”

An illustration has six fingers?

“SEE! I TOLD YOU. SLOP!”

The Slopist is deeply concerned about the cultural consequences of a slightly shiny-looking AI image.

Curiously, though, they can sit through three hours of superheroes (case in point see the new Spiderman!) fighting computer-generated aliens in computer-generated cities while driving computer-generated cars and think:

“Great visual effects.”

No slop detected.

However, there’s a more serious reason I find Slopism interesting, because while we’re having increasingly furious arguments about whether somebody used AI to create a picture of a businessman standing on a mountain, AI is quietly becoming embedded in recruitment, education, healthcare, finance, policing, defence, management and government.

And those conversations are rather more important. Who is accountable when an AI system makes a consequential recommendation?

Who owns the data (see my TEDx “Who is paying for your attention).

Whose values are embedded in the models?

Who gets excluded?

Who benefits economically?

What happens when a handful of companies control extraordinarily powerful systems?

What should be regulated, and by whom?

Those are AI ethics questions and they’re considerably harder than spotting an extra finger.

To be clear, there is plenty of AI-generated rubbish.

There is also plenty of human-generated rubbish.

LinkedIn had conclusively demonstrated that long before ChatGPT arrived.

My concern is that shouting “AI slop” can become a substitute for thinking seriously about AI. We end up debating the aesthetics of the technology while largely ignoring the architecture of power growing around it.

You don’t have to love AI and you absolutely should question it but perhaps we need to become a little less obsessed with whether something looks like AI….

…and considerably more interested in what AI is actually doing.

Welcome to “The Rise of the Slopists.”

I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot from them.

#scottspeaks #messymiddle