Nearly all new technologies go through a "slop" era. You see this in the industrial revolution itself - there was nearly a 100 year gap between the introduction of low quality coke fired pig iron and the introduction of the Bessemer process. That was 100 years of low-quality, gimmicky metal.
The same thing happened with the printing press. Railroads. Tractors. Electricity. Digital music. Etc. The pattern is always there. We've had, what, 2 years so far? If you're not impressed it's because you have no perspective on how long things take.
In a way, a lot of technology IS slop. Diesel locomotives have not surpassed the power or complexity of steam trains. They are just so much cheaper to build and operate that you can run 4 of them for less than the cost of a single steam engine. The whole point of innovation is doing more with less - if you focus on the "less" part everything looks an awful lot like slop.
If anything - I would argue that we are finally exiting the "slop" era of computing. If you look at the heart of what the "AI revolution" is, it's that we have finally solved the problem of natural language processing. Computers are now starting to work the way that they were supposed to work 40 years ago!
I think about this all the time. Someday my grandchild will ask me one day why we built such advanced thinking machines but still had to use our hands to physically build their thoughts with code.
PR's that people are so tired of slogging through they give up entirely.
Writing that people close down the second they realize it's LLM generated.
Music that's intolerable.
Videos that look ridiculous.
Memes for teenagers.
What a tremendous use of resources and clearly a sustainable business model destined for nearly infinite profit, I'm only surprised that OpenAI has stepped away from their IPO.
Edit: How could I forget the scam calls, emails, txts, and the rest! Much like Crypto long after generative AI is a curiosity for most, it'll be an essential part of the ecosystem of wire fraud.
Nearly all new technologies go through a "slop" era. You see this in the industrial revolution itself - there was nearly a 100 year gap between the introduction of low quality coke fired pig iron and the introduction of the Bessemer process. That was 100 years of low-quality, gimmicky metal.
The same thing happened with the printing press. Railroads. Tractors. Electricity. Digital music. Etc. The pattern is always there. We've had, what, 2 years so far? If you're not impressed it's because you have no perspective on how long things take.
In a way, a lot of technology IS slop. Diesel locomotives have not surpassed the power or complexity of steam trains. They are just so much cheaper to build and operate that you can run 4 of them for less than the cost of a single steam engine. The whole point of innovation is doing more with less - if you focus on the "less" part everything looks an awful lot like slop.
If anything - I would argue that we are finally exiting the "slop" era of computing. If you look at the heart of what the "AI revolution" is, it's that we have finally solved the problem of natural language processing. Computers are now starting to work the way that they were supposed to work 40 years ago!
I think about this all the time. Someday my grandchild will ask me one day why we built such advanced thinking machines but still had to use our hands to physically build their thoughts with code.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/opinion/ai-software-codin...
This is more or less the story of generative AI.
PR's that people are so tired of slogging through they give up entirely.
Writing that people close down the second they realize it's LLM generated.
Music that's intolerable.
Videos that look ridiculous.
Memes for teenagers.
What a tremendous use of resources and clearly a sustainable business model destined for nearly infinite profit, I'm only surprised that OpenAI has stepped away from their IPO.
Edit: How could I forget the scam calls, emails, txts, and the rest! Much like Crypto long after generative AI is a curiosity for most, it'll be an essential part of the ecosystem of wire fraud.