Resist slop world

If everything and everyone else is empty and nihilistic, it's a blue ocean to provide real heart, meaning and personality

I previously wrote on how AI is already making people less creative. And how writing is thinking, meaning you’re voluntarily lobotomizing yourself if you stop doing that in favor of letting machines handle this task for you. Moreover, it’s not only nihilistic to give up these decidedly human affairs, but you end up in an empty, meaningless state of existence if you decide to live this way and cede control to the machines. You become indistinguishable from cattle, like the Eloi in The Time Machine.

Related, I recently came across the following chart from Plotset. There’s no way it’s perfectly accurate, but it absolutely makes sense directionally, and the story is clear.

It’s that our society is demoralized and degenerate, and most people take the path of least resistance without really asking too many questions. Maybe that’s just human nature.

The vast majority of people will never admit to outsourcing their intellectual life and creative work to AI tools. Only a select few are moronic enough to openly brag about it. But for sure around half of the people you talk to and companies you interact with have no taste or aesthetic, and so are happy to just give (IMO) human creative tasks to machines. Many without even realizing why that might not be a great idea. Around half the country is physically obese and at least this many are spiritually obese as well (I’m honestly convinced these are connected, how could they not be). That’s just the world we live in.

Most of what is created online at this juncture is not a passion project or by humans who give a shit. It’s by someone ticking boxes to simply get a story or “piece of content” out the door. This is another reason for the end of the inbound marketing era: what you find online organically, if you can find it at all, is increasingly of low value.

My industry of marketing is mostly complicit in this so I wouldn’t expect many companies to reverse course (although I have encouraged them to). Sadly, we live in a world of optimizers, not auteurs. No one ever talks about tradeoffs. Or things like diminishing returns on automation (where we’re killing ourselves to make things that are already pretty efficient a bit faster, and the last few % isn’t even worth it).

But I would say it’s an increasingly large opportunity as everyone “slopifies” their life, company and brand to pause and consider what you’re doing. This is an impossible treadmill to keep up with, or even win at all. You are free to not get on, or step off at any point. Remember, you don’t always have to publish. You can slow down and provide real meaning instead, it’s probably the only real moat any of us have. Stop doing more to do more and remember the only thing no one can copy is you, when you decide to authentically show up. The machines can’t capture your impossibly unique depth and complexity, they can only provide a poor facsimile.

And note, I do think these tools might provide some use. But only for people who actually learn to do something well without them first, or for people with high quality standards. Both groups aren’t very large, unfortunately. I’ll do another post sometime on where AI actually does make sense, because I still don’t think people understand. They just post Rick Rubin memes without really understanding the man.

One other warning here: I took a few years off personal writing when I went to work at Google and was in big company land. Anyway it took a decent amount of time to regain this muscle, and this was before modern AI tools were widespread. If you don’t exercise a skill, it absolutely will start to atrophy. If you stop lifting, you’ll become weak, too. And that’s a really sad state of affairs, to end up helpless without some kind of automated machine assistance. I don’t personally wish to be alive tethered to machines either, just pull the plug at that point.