I am humbled by the reply to last week’s blog post. Thank you to everyone who responded publicly and privately to me. Writing that post was an ordeal. Do you know how you have a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other one? I could feel my little devil guy picking up and putting down my fingers on the keys as I was typing my GDC write-up. When I was done, it felt like I needed to lie down in my bed, staring at the ceiling and slowly smoke a cigarette, like in the movies, or the nineties. It was good for me.
By Friday, the humility was gone. It was replaced with full-blown panic. How the hell do I follow up to that post? I drank the whole potion. I ate all the magic beans. Everyone expecting the rainbow-belching unicorn to leap from my fingertips is going to be disappointed, perhaps angry when they realize there will be no cash money refunds.
That being said, I have never had so many people laughing at my “old man yells at cloud” schtick. This is a better joke than my track record as Amazon’s worst Affiliate Marketer. That one is a shout-out to my OG readers. IYKYK. I will stop narrating through the fourth wall now. It is weird and uncomfortable, like when you are alone in a movie theater and the only other person to enter the theater comes and sits right next to you.
Without further distraction, let’s get to work, shall we?
Content people are at war. If you have any friends in entertainment or friends who like entertainment, they are all busy selling hats, saying “Make Content Great Again.” They hate the AI, even though AI is right in the middle of the word entertainment. ENTERT-AI-NMENT, in case you missed it.
I am equal parts transgressor and peacekeeper in this war. I bought the hat and scribbled “You are absolutely right!” underneath it and laughed far too long at my own joke. Maybe peacekeeper is too strong, but I do sit down and watch this all unfold while occasionally taking a free shot at someone busily drawing a picture in the middle of the warzone, mumbling “I am making art.” I need the experience points, you know, whether they were fighting back or not. I still have to level up at the end of the day.
So the war on AI is happening. People are canceling each other, and their projects, and rescinding awards, and probably getting uninvited from Christmas parties. If you love this hacky AI bullshit, you must be a monster. Sure, you kiss your kids good night at the end of the day, but that’s fake. If your daughter knew your opinions on AI, she would scream at you until you went away until her new parents arrived with ethically sourced artisanal opinions.
That is not how it actually works, so don’t get excited.
I spend as much time battling people in the digital streets of the internet as I do watching the ebb and flow of opinions and ideas, as each group of deeply entrenched borderline sociopaths tries to convert their opponents. This week, I observed a new tactic, and I am here to develop my mouthfeel for it before I bring it out onto the internet. And by the internet, I do not mean Reddit. All the bosses in Reddit have red skulls instead of numbers on their nameplates. I have to generate about sixteen metric tonnes more LinkedIn tears before I have enough levels to go in there and avoid getting one-shotted.
This week, I have observed the rise of the human slop counterargument. I lay no claim to this phenomenon. I am like that recently deceased ape-observer Jane Goodall, watching internet dwellers in the mist and documenting it for science purposes.
The argument here is one of those Aikido moves, where you take the energy of the attacker and use it against them. Yes, I had to Google that. The idea here is that you can essentially dismiss the people who point at everything and go “slop, slop, slop” like some kind of broken record player as being incapable of making good content… Whether it is books, movies, games, or anything creative. They are merely lashing out at the world because, on their best day, their outputs are mediocre and would not survive the gauntlet of customer review. To put it bluntly, almost everything is already slop, and there are very few things that are quality creations of any kind, anywhere.
I buy into this. We had the tulip-bulb crisis way before we had Italian brainrot. And while Italian brainrot is one of the S-tier slop productions, it is now being heralded as the new punk rock.
Half to three-quarters of you are gone by now. Some of you have come by to see what the second act is to “angry man screams about GDC,” and this is not as good as the first act. We wandered into the heart of AIAIO! country, and you didn’t spend your money on that.
For anyone who wants off the conveyor belt, just extend your hand. Privately tell me which group of people you feel most safe with, and I will point you in their general direction.
I am going to pause for one sentence to let some people get redirected to the comforting sands where they can stick their heads.
For those of us who enjoy the violence of ideas in the pursuit of glory, I am glad you are still here. And that is what this is.
The threat of AI slop is not in some diminished quality of experience. We already have games getting shut down three weeks after launch. Many books don’t make the top ten list (all but ten? Hello math?). Movies are shown to empty theaters and get shuffled off to on-demand, while still watchable on the big screen. I call this “Tuesday.”
What I don’t understand is that if this already happens, what is everyone’s fucking problem? There was a coffee cup in a Game of Thrones set long before some celebrity shot you all three of their middle fingers in contempt without SAG’s permission. Is it the sheer volume of what is coming that has you disturbed, or the fact that your own human-generated content will only aspire to fifty percent on the slop-o-meter and get buried by someone who can prompt more than four times an hour?
These are tough questions, and I am not sorry.
If you can sit down and figure out exactly what it is that is bothering you, it will help you move past it. There is stuff happening in the world today that is very much “coming in 2027” in my head. GDC showed me a silent minority of LLM caretakers who are approaching other galaxies at near lightspeed. Some of them are even doing this from the comfort of their car, with voice-assisted tools.
I am not expecting to convince anyone of anything with this rant. Half of this is a self-aware overreaction to my fifteen minutes of fame. What I am hoping for is that one Grumpy The Dwarf on the subject of AI decides to soften to Skeptic The… uh… Smurf… long enough and far enough that they stand something up in production that catches fire. I do not literally mean catches fire, that would be bad. I mean, it gets its moment in the sun and generates a pile of money and fame.
I feel good believing that I helped nudge them in that direction just a smidge, to see that everything human-made was already on a spectrum of slop, and so why not just go ahead and ship something with AI tools anyway? It will only get you to where you were already going faster.
If I can do that once, for one person, then I can rest satisfied knowing that I have done my part.
