No, Satya, I will not stop calling it slop

I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with the technology industry. When I first jumped on the internet back in the late 90s, it was a wild west. I grew up talking to people online from many different countrie, and started feeling like the world was becoming smaller. I’d routinely get banned on the old PHP forums for my shitposting, but usually I’d just get labelled a troll and left alone. Back then it was no big deal getting banned, you could just change to another forum since they were a dime a dozen. Nobody would tell you anything about their personal life, nor would they ask anything of yours. It was a place where you could be something else entirely without judgement from others.

Fast forward to today, and everything is a walled garden demanding your real identity. The idea of an online persona is just… Dead. I used to run a different personality on every single forum I’d frequent, now things are centralised on places like Reddit, Facebook and Tiktok that demand all sorts of personal data to use.

I thought we were already plumbing the depths of derangement with curated content algorithms, but then ChatGPT dropped. Millenial writing was already terrible (I can’t stand the writing in games like Borderlands or any of the endless reboots of movie franchises I used to like), but it’s become even worse now they can just use an LLM to generate one of the stupid post-ironic rants the hacks in Hollywood seem to love. Google deliberately broke their search algorithm, and now it performs even worse just vomiting slop onto my innocent screen.

And it’s endless. I just assume if I see a new creator that nothing they do is genuine. The recycling of old ideas that had already had their time (everything I hear playing at the gym is another completely uninspired cover), the faux-inspirational posts I see with a soulless AI generated image attached to try and stop me scrolling. It’s the kind of exhausting that sleep won’t fix.

So when Satya came out and said “we should stop calling it slop”, I seethed. My computer parts have tripled and even quadrupled in price, and I’m expected to be thankful for stupid AI cat videos and 5 mins of ’thought’ to highlight a trailing space in my markdown. No.

I will continue to call it slop.

I will call people who rely on it heavily sloperators.

I will laugh react executives shilling shitty ChatGPT wrappers whenever I see them on my LinkedIn timeline, maybe even make fun of them on their own posts.

I’m so sick of the endless degeneration of everyones’ mind. It’s almost seems deliberate, “delegate all thinking to AI, derive your political opinions from whatever slop we serve you and treat it like a sports team! You don’t need to do that stinky thinking anymore! AI is a perfect substitute for real human contact!”

Absolutely deranged activity. It’s the death of creativity.