Slop and Dreams
I'm scared of living in a world of slop. Of a world without thought. I can already feel this slop sloshing against the walls of my increasingly barren brain. Nuanced concepts, summarised. Critical thinking, going. Fresh ideas, generated. And now? Your thumbs can drift over to reels and without blinking, you're consuming these 10-second-long, data-centre melting, child's brain mushing, regression to the mean inducing slop videos generated by OpenAI's latest contribution to human flourishing—Sora 2.
Don't get me wrong, as a tech nerd, the underlying maths is fascinating. It must be unbelievably gratifying to sit in your silicon valley polycule, dreaming in tensor calculus, coding in PyTorch on £500k/year, with access to unlimited resources and just push the boundaries of what's possible with ML.
But at what cost? What's the business model here? Where's the value add? And who does it effect?
These generative tools can be fantastic personal assistants. Their excellent coding tools. LLM-based agents are automating away dull admin. There are productivity gains, efficiency improvements and value add, in some use-cases. And, hey maybe I'm a skeptic. Who knows, maybe in 10 years, we'll live in a world without apps, where every smartphone interaction is interfaced by LLM agents. But these models are fundamentally probabilistic, next-token guessing, hallucination guaranteed word vomiters. Can monetisation match the hype? Really? And further, ever since OAI shed it's benevolent credentials and went private, they've followed the classic VC-backed formulae: start cheap to lure people in and dominate market share, but then what?
We've been here before.
In what's been affectionately deemed "the Enshittification of the Internet", when central bank interest rates jumped back up from zero and the glory days of free debt ended, 'institutional investors' started clamouring for a return, pushing FAANG to drive their services into the ground in the pursuit of profit. Do you remember when Amazon was actually cheap? Now, Bezos' captive market charges the same as the high street. So screw big tech, I'll just shop local! Oh wait, it doesn't exist.... Triple 30 second unskippable ads on YouTube. AI-generated music on Spotify, clawing away from smaller artists already pitiful streaming income. Ads on Netflix (even though you pay!!!). Uber gutting local taxi companies with VC-cheap rides. Scrolling past pages of sponsorship on Google before you get the result you wanted. X descending into right-wing armageddon. The internet is not what it used to be.
If OAI is forced to similarly return the value promised to VC, I do worry what this means. Via your prompting, these valley-tech nerds have access to your wildest hopes and dreams, you at your darkest moments, you at your most creative or mundane. Copilot are already floating the idea of serving you ads via their chatbot based on your context. What does this mean for trust and transparency, if the first place you look for information—your default AI summary—is subtly stuffed full of ads?
In these lonely and divided times, even love can't escape the chopping block of corporate capture. An LLM can make a perfect partner — you can whisper your deepest darkest secrets to them in the depths of the night without a mess of dirty plates and stinky socks. And why stop at chat? For the low price of sucking all of the groundwater out of local ecosystems and belching CO2 into the atmosphere in an urgent period of climate breakdown, you can fry some GPUs and generate your perfect disturbed sexual fantasy. The erotica industry is worth billions a year—what a depressing interpretation of AI-value add.
Sora and this scary world we're moving into feels like the logical endpoint of extreme individualism. It's the apex of this contradictory phenomenon: our online world has connected the world like we could never have imagined—instantaneous video calls across the world, practicing languages live on Omegle from your bedroom, clips of Mongolian throat-singers on YouTube—we're never been so technologically advanced, so tightly networked, yet simultaneously, so atomised and lonely.
And as a chief enabler of this online world, it's only right that Amazon personifies this individualisation in their working practice. Bezos makes his workers wear little trackers, to spot which colleagues are off on break together, possibly discussing their precarious working conditions. Once potential friendship is detected, their shifts are automatically desynchronised. This algorithmically removes the preconditions for workers recognising their collective bargaining power. These systems enforce atomisation. We really have moved a long way from the techno-optimism of the early 2000s. These technologies promised connection, but their implementation divides.
Sure, it's scary. But fundamentally, technology itself is a neutral force. It's who controls the technology that matters. And it doesn't have to be this way. Social media, LLMs... these are transformative technologies that—taking a long-term view—are just getting out of the womb. And as our benevolent tech overlords have built their oligopoly, they've bestowed humanity with these wonderful gifts. Github, Flutter, HuggingFace — there's this wonderful open-source treasure trove of possibility. The foundations for a different future are here. We don't have to accept our overlord's value-less, attention-enveloping, eyeball-mining platforms. We can build back institutions that genuinely care — creating with the public, for the public, now. There's a world to win.