We are still at a point where people will ask, 'Is this AI generated?'. That is because we are not noticing that the race has been won by the machines. The internet hasn't been human for a while and thinking it is is a shame.
What are the unit economics of AI slop?
We seem to be entering a new world. Probably entered it a while ago where the cost of producing an image with AI is a fraction of the cost of taking a picture. As in, it seems that the amount of generated content has completely overtaken the possible amount of human-generated content. And this is just true for everything: code, music, graphics, pictures, text, prose, poetry, think pieces, and the list goes on to everything that can be reproduced the other side of the computer screen. The liminal space in which we encounter ourselves today, the space in which you can consume the internet and you know a few people that you've been following since before 2021 when ChatGPT came out, and you can guarantee with some reasonable assumption that they are not AI generated, this moment is narrowing. And more and more, we're entering into a new moment where the AI-generated content is going to be the default state of everything that you consume through a screen.
Of course, people have been talking about the dead internet theory for a while, and I am talking about that in some sense. That's simply the idea that the internet is for bots by bots and humans are just spectators. And we have our own corners in which we were able to assume that we were interacting with other humans. Reddit is a good example of that, besides the fact that it is a platform for political manipulation now and there have always been bots and content farms that targeted that platform to sway opinions. There was a somewhat reasonable assumption that you could go there to interact with a human. We are done with that, that was the world in 2023, it's 2026 now. That's in the past.
The new world has come and now let's do some very simple math. A human can produce text at an average of 40 wpm, but let's say that we will triple that for a competitive speed of 120wpm. That takes 10 mins for a 1200 word essay (something which gets completely undermined if you care about thinking through what and how you want to say it). I'm at 400 words now and it's certainly taken me more than 10 minutes even if i'm a fast typer. We can call H to be the human time to produce coherence in thought and produce writing at the fastest human speed possible. If the goal is coherence, AI has achieved coherence in writing. Let's call the speed of AI to produce coherent output A.
A = MH
Where M is the multiplier. Again the only relevant metric is coherent and passable as plausible human output. If that's the standard then the multiplier of text output is in orders of magnitude. So let's say that we're at M=10. Then that means that it would take 3.5 years to produce the same amount of all the human generated content in the internet. This is not a hard determination, just an exercise in the increasing futility of maintaining the illusion that the content that exists on the other side of your screen was made by human.
Duh, we know this
I am assuming the two or three readers of this blog are smart, and this is not new or particularly hard to figure out. However, I do see smart people in my life ask the question is this AI?. Yes, we're in the new world where the answer is assumed yes and that question is the baseline. If AI can generate in 3 years the entire content of the internet, it can parallelize the generation of content, we need to change our priors. Yes, it's AI generated, prove it's human.
Now we can safely extrapolate to the entirety of generated content. Video is crossing the chasm and possibly the last holdout. Images are there, you can assume AI. Look at nano banana 2, z-image-turbo. The simple point I'm trying to make is that human production has not a single chance in competing with gen-ai tools at producing content. It is not just probable, it is overwhelmingly the case that in just a few years, the human contribution to new writing, new images, new social posts, or anything behind a screen will be minute compared to the gorging rivers of slop coming our way, resistance is futile.
So What
That's a good question, I don't know what is like to live in a a world where you can't assume that everything you see is created by a human. I also don't know what it's like to live in a world where our ability to predict the future is gone in any useful sense except maybe for a year into the future. These are in all intents and purposes, new questions. This is just me formalizing my thinking around this issue. I think the inevitable outcome of this is that the interest in generated media of any kind, textual, image, video, etc will loose the interest of people. The supply will so much outweigh the demand that what's left will be a few classics (which I imagine will be even harder to create in an abundance of slop) and a category like B movies for everything else that will not even be interesting ironically.
I suppose that this might be a hopeful extrapolation, however my intuition tells me that the arts that we've given less attention will be interesting again. Theatre, live music, jazz, ballet and other very physical art forms that are consumed person to person will become more interesting, and things behind a screen will become less so. It feels inevitable when you have to wade through not just the tiktokification of every person, rather that tendency but sloppified to the extreme.