That’s my sense too. I wonder where the new foca are starting to form, as far as where people will look to serve the purposes that this slop’s infiltrating. What the inevitable alternatives to the New Inevitable start to look like.

At the risk of dorm-room philosophizing: My instincts are all situated in the past, and I don’t know whether that’s my failure of imagination or whether it’s where everybody else is ending up too.

Do the new information-gathering Schelling points look like the past—trust in specific individual thinkers, words’ age as a signal of their reliability, private-first discussions, web of trust, known-human-edited corpora, apprenticeship, personal practice and experience?

Is there instead no meaningful replacement, and the future looks like people’s “real” lives shrinking back to human scale? Does our Tower of Babel just collapse for a while with no real replacement in sight? Was it all much more illusory than it felt all along, and the slop is just forcing us to see that more clearly?

Did the Cronkite-era-television—>cable transition feel this way to people before us?

> AI slop is self-limiting. The new game-theoretic equilibrium is that nobody trusts anything they read online, at which point it will no longer be profitable to put AI slop out there because nobody will read it.

AI slop, unfortunately, is just starting.

It is true that nobody trusts anything online... esp the Big Media and the backlash against it in the last decade+ or so. But that's exactly where AI slop is coming in. Note the crazier and crazier conspiracy theories that are taking hold all around, and not just in the MAGA-verse. And there's plenty of takers for AI slop - both consumers of it, and producers of it.

And there's plenty of profit all around. (see crypto, NFTs, and all manners of grifting)

So no, I dont think "nobody will read it". It's more like "everybody's reading it"

But I do agree on the denouement... it's destroying the internet and society along with it