AI slop will save us from human slop

Everyone is worried about "AI slop" ruining us, but I'm here to tell you that AI will save us from human slop.

Meta just released their "Vibes" app, a TikTok-like feed inside their Meta AI app. Let's start with the name "Vibes". "Vibes" is modern slang for not really based on any kind of fundamentals. While I avoid things that are vibes-based, you gotta hand it to Meta that it's an extremely candid name for this thing.

Some people worry this portends a world where boomers and then young people start to believe in a world that doesn't exist. A world such as this one:

This video is merely an inexpensive alternative to superhero movies, where the heroes and villains inhabit a world where superpowers are so abundant that anything can happen at any moment. The possibility for anything happening at any moment is the antithesis to drama. Just watch the last Superman movie, where Lois Lane does journalism while flying an alien spacecraft:

The canonical Batman and Spider-Man stories are good because the superheroes have the same physical limitations as humans (Batman) or a small set of powers (Spider-Man). Good science fiction (think Asimov) is about creating a world that is different but nevertheless highly constrained.

One view is that TikTok, Reels and Instagram are the Batman and Spiderman films: They're not realistic portrayals of the human experience, but at least they're constrained by our physical reality. By contrast, AI slop knows no bounds, and it's dangerous for people to believe in that kind of stuff.

But let's remember that we already lament how much those apps are infecting people's brains. Because extremes play on those platforms, we don't have a world of Batman and Spiderman-like diversion so much as we have a world where people view the world as if it's Gotham City or Spiderman's NYC. If the worry about AI is deep fakes, it's obviously worth worrying about shallow fakes: Shot-on-iPhone simulacra of reality that people take too seriously.

I, for one, welcome the AI slop. Like Marvel movies, it's far more honest about how fake it is.