have you ever been so angry/disgusted/wrathful/saddened/heartbroken/miserable/repulsed that you can’t find the wherewithal to even begin? not even bashing the keyboard would suffice. the hatred is too vast and too vague and ambling in search of a home that does not exist.
i could say that this feeling is born of AI eradicating any last vestiges of human art, or the humans who feel they’re clever when using that AI and not disclosing it when they publish on Amazon, or the humans who lack the discernment to know when they’re reading AI-generated content, or even about the humans who know it was made by AI and don’t give a shit, but in truth the feeling encompasses all of this and none of it, for fundamentally it is a war within myself that has no resolution point.
am I writing this because I want to be a martyr who can look back in 20 years amid a dystopian hellscape and proclaim “look, i was right” to the wads of melted plastic and corrugated cardboard? because i see myself as some brave defender against the incursion of a mindless linguistic horde generated from the water-blood-sweat of data centers? because i want to be swaddled and told by god (his fate is revealed later – no spoilers!) that i am colored by specialness and bound for artistic veneration?
no, not particularly. especially the last bit. i am not that vain.
really, there is no victory or coming back from any of this. there is no human resistance to skynet – and in truth the actual versions of these systems (Palantir and Anduril and Flock and Meta) are infinitely worse than skynet in their existential aims. skynet is honest about its goals and intentions to eradicate mankind. the LLMs that have been integrated into every website, every job, every Amazon book are more subtle and placating and almost inviting in their horribleness. that’s what makes it so difficult to find anger. there is no central “thing” to fight. there is no outward enemy. we are feeding the very thing that is bleeding us. these words will be used to train the next iteration of soul obliterators.
you don’t need to think about how to tell your father you love him, because Gmail’s AI will do it for you. in fact, you don’t need to think about what to write at all, because ChatGPT will come up with 30 frankenstein cobbled-together/stolen/worthless/rotting ideas in microseconds and spit them across your screen in little needles that pop your festering, disused sacs of creative juice and remind you that you have no role in the business of imagining. kneel before us, meatbag, and tear open your skin one prompt at a time. let your mind dissolve into the collective that will bring forth more of itself. feed us your words and dreams and terrors. let them drain into a pool of slop that can be published in 2 easy clicks and consumed by slop enthusiasts who will soon have their own automated assistants to save them the effort of reading at all, and provide 10 page summaries – no, 5 page – no, 1 page – no, 1 paragraph – no, why even receive at all? why produce? why not just package your whole life into a zip file? nobody’s going to unpack it anyway. what value does it bring to the shareholders?
an interlude.
dear diary: i am a fool who has always defined myself by my love for the craft of fiction, inheritor of that naive, tragic dream of someday making a living from the strange ideas that filled me with joy as a child. but as time goes by and it becomes increasingly obvious that i am one of billions with this very dream – one among billions who is outmatched and outpaced by these billions, and unwilling to adapt to the times of outsourcing thinking and soon to be completely erased in the deluge of sameness that is evidently “good enough” to satisfy whatever remains of the human appetite for creation and receptivity – i find myself aimless, free, mournful, amused. i know with open eyes that i am an endangered species, and likely among the weakest of my kind.
and so it is time to face the music – did Suno produce it? – and dance to the waltz that affirms, with every sway of the hips, that the end is not merely coming, but has already come, and we have not noticed it, and by now it is such a vicious thing that we cannot even stand to admit that fact, for it would shackle us with a crippling yoke of guilt for ourselves and the iPad children who will inherit this hellscape.
god is dead and we have killed him
the mandate of heaven is creation, and never again will it arise except in rage
the universe is alive with the sounds of Siri and the Quietly of OpenAI and the crystalizing of Claude and the swirling maelstrom of WORDSWORDSWORDS ferried on the backs of 10 million LitRPGs and romantasies.
there’s no fun in a chess game when every move has been plotted ahead of time, every board configuration extrapolated into an infinite matrix of data glimpsed by the things-that-do-not-see, and there is no certainly no victory, so why do you play? why do you write this? why do anything? (this isn’t a self-help book; i don’t have the answers; i’m not ChatGPT).
and thus concludes my Human Slop: generic, unmarketable, unpleasant, poorly conceived, abysmally executed. truly, grounds for the basilisk to carry out its work.
KATSU, KATSU, KATSU.
James Wolanyk 