This is not a rewriting of history as much as a DDoS-ing of it—flooding the zone with so much synthetic crap that engaging with reality and humanity becomes just one of many content experiences to choose from.
This is quite an apt description and I like it -- but I'd point out that the DDOS began a good while before LLMs turned it to 11. The Internet itself gave every joker with a keyboard the ability to broadcast their thoughts to the world (as I am doing now), and it turns out that most of what humans have to say is...uninteresting. This hasn't stopped a huge percentage of the population falling prey to the idea that they too can be a internet niche micro-celebrity.
But, then again, there are also a lot of thoughtful people out there and sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between a thought that is foreign to your mind, but very much worth the time spent on it, and a thought that is just kinda vapid.
Back to slop, though:
Spend enough time online, and you will see that not only is this cheaply rendered synthetic content everywhere; it is quietly shaping culture. It’s become a way that marketers advertise, that politicians produce propaganda. It’s changing how people communicate with one another. Our brains are being sous-vided in machine-made engagement bait like poor Pikachu until they’re tender and succulent enough to fall apart on contact. Here’s a representative experience on the modern internet: Out of the blue a few weeks ago, my great-aunt sent me and a few of her friends an Instagram Reel of two dogs seated like humans at a table, taping a podcast. Nobody responded. A few days later, her friend replied with a video of a kitten dressed as a middle-aged woman, standing on a kitchen counter and talking like a toddler. Again, no reaction. I could only wonder what else was in their feeds.
You know, ancient cave paintings end up as the butt of a lot of jokes, and no doubt old ladies passing around suped-up cat videos is already a cliche, but most of us here subscribe to the Austrian way of looking at things and it's not like the cave paintings have some intrinsic value which is missing from slop. They are both something to look at that some people apparently found interesting.
Imagine a social network in which, instead of third-party links or incendiary political posts, the atomic unit of content is not text at all but a universal language of eminently consumable short-form video, to be remixed and traded back and forth between users who are soft-brain scrolling from the toilet.
While humans have been using memes probably for as long as we've been communicating with each other, there's no doubt that the internet changed the meme-game: passing around little images of a set form or variations on a movie still feels a lot like ideograms to me. Why shouldn't this be a high-speed evolution of human communication?
Sure, there's lots of people content to scroll. But there are also lots of people wielding AI slop with intention and perhaps even sophistication. I don't mean the over-used "cambrian explosion of creativity because now everybody's a filmmaker" stuff, but rather that the slop itself is already fusing with our alphabet. While I don't expect the hand-wringing about slop to stop anytime soon, I'm also feeling more and more confident that slop is becoming a language and, unlike Mr Charlie Warzel, I'm not sure that's not a bad thing. He can keep using his dictionary.
<bulb>Though maybe we can develop something that does prompt reverse engineering. So you feed a little app some slop then it shows you what the prompt was. Could be useful, because I'd then be feeding people's prompts into a database and profile them over time through how they talk to their bot.</bulb>what were the most successful newly launched apps in 2025?