Enjoy the slop while you still can
More and more when I go to watch something on YouTube, I’m seeing AI slop dominate the feed and the search results. Same goes for Facebook whenever I’m on there. TikTok, too. The internet is awash with AI-generated material — not just video but text, too. All across the board. Estimates vary, but there’s a lot out there. And companies like Google and Facebook want to push this stuff on us. It feels like they’re prioritizing it in their feeds.
To understand what we’re all dealing with and how the AI sausage is made, I entered the slop mines — to try to make my own AI documentary. I fed a prompt into ChatGPT, which produced a script. I then fed parts of the script into two different AI content platforms, ElevenLabs and Descript. And then cut it all together the old-fashioned way, splicing real-life footage into the film when I ran out of credits and didn’t want to fork over hundreds of dollars. This thing below cost me about $40 to make, with a lot of that money probably flowing to Google and OpenAI.
While making this documentary, what struck me was the hyper-centralization that this kind of thing is bringing to our world. Only a few companies on the planet have the power and resources to consume and process the vast amounts of data necessary for these video machine learning models to work. The two platforms that I used — ElevenLabs and Descript — both use Google and OpenAI, two of the biggest AI monopolies operating today. ElevenLabs and Descript simply put a UI that lets you interact with Google and OpenAI.
Another thing I thought was that for a mega-technopoly like Google, AI slop is doubly profitable: Creators pay Google for the computing time it takes to generate these videos (and it is very expensive), and then they post these videos on YouTube, once again funneling money to Google through its advertising monopoly. What’s to stop Google from employing teams of its own AI slop creators? They can set up various branded channels that pump out slop videos and seem independent and have the company boost them in the feed to juice their numbers…and have all the ad revenue flow right back to Google. Ultimately, you can cut people right out of the process, just automate the whole thing with AI agents that constantly scan for what the online trends are right now and generate videos based on that. There are lots of AI slop entrepreneurs running channels to try and milk YouTube while they can, and there is no doubt they’re trying to automate the process, too. But why should Google share with them? It has everything it needs to do it in-house. The generative tech is theirs. The video platforms are theirs. The vast surveillance apparatus system that identifies all the trends in real time is theirs. CUT EVERYONE ELSE OUT! WE’RE NOT RUNNING A CHARITY HERE! FUCKING PARASITES!
So yeah, more and more, we’re entering a closed-loop system, where everything circulates among a handful of megacorps and platforms, and where no one (except these dominant monopolies) is needed anymore. Still, they do need us to watch — they need some potential consumer to potentially click on an ad and buy something, theoretically at least. That’s the Vampire Valley component here: they need us…they need our life energy. But it’s funny, too. All this high technology: All this innovation. All this effort. All this massive resource-eating that’s killing our world…And it still runs on simple junk consumerism. Companies vying to convince you to buy things that will end up in a landfill in three months to five years. And what happens when no one can buy anything because these same hyper-efficiencizing corps have cut most people out of the economic loop completely? Then the whole thing breaks down, obviously. But then what? Extermination of surplus populations? Mass revolt? Revolutions? Probably all of the above… Yes, we’re cursed to live in interesting times…and blessed, too. Because this AI tech is pushing the capitalist-industrial system to its breaking point. It had to happen at some point, and we’re living in it now.
Anyway…enjoy the slop out there while you still have some spending power and are still needed! Happy New Year!
—Yasha
PS: I’m still begging people for money to fund my internet doc series, Vampire Valley. So give if you are able.
PPS: We’re doing an event this Sunday in SF about all this and more. Come out if you are here. It is free! INTERNET JUNKIE ANONYMOUS!
PPPS: This is a great book, if you’re new to the Luddism thing. We’re all Luddites now, even most don’t realize it yet.
Nice work, love the narrator's yokelly lilt. Could be Unca Jesse's brother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvfS3iXfHsI
Luddite or not, everyone deeply considering all this inevitably arrives at the "what happens when no one can buy anything" destination. To me feels like Blomkamp's Elysium is the most likely portrait of what this is gonna look like, although maybe Idiocracy just continues increasing its predictive power and the outcome is something incomprehensibly way more stupid. It's a tough call.