The anti creative problem, and subsequent decline in creativity, is being made worse because of AI slop. Here’s a quick look at what you need to know.
What is AI slop?
AI companies scrape (copy) massive amounts of web content to train their models. The problem is, that content increasingly includes AI-generated text, rather than human material. In short, AI is now copying itself! This creates a feedback loop where AI trains on AI output. Over time AI models are losing the diversity and authenticity of the human creativity, which their models desperately need. The quality of AI output is currently degrading into what we now call AI slop, instead of improving as it had done previously.
How the anti creative problem is worsened by slop
Let’s quickly recall what the anti creative problem is: The homogenization of original thought, caused by the pervasive distribution of prescriptive and iterative ‘creativity advice’, resulting in a decrease of novel output.
Today, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of videos, social media posts, newsletters, articles and blog posts will be built using AI slop. A hefty subset of AI slop is aimed at artists and the those in the creative industries. What’s feeding the anti creative problem is that some of this incorrect, misleading content is convincing. Especially for those just discovering how to improve their creative thinking skills.
And worryingly, other slop content is on popular sites and endorsed at the highest level.
Yesterday, a reader sent me an article, which was around 80% written by AI… on a website that’s publicly endorsed by a Google Vice President!
Somebody simply gave that content a very light copyedit, unaware their AI content was slop! So, they’ve tried to humanize slop. It reads like crap, yet was published! This is happening more and more, as the quality of AI content (and answers) is getting progressively worse, not better. But many people will end up taking its bad advice, which they assumed they could trust, as it’s from a powerfully endorsed website.
It doesn’t stop there, with that one AI article. That article spreads in different ways, on different formats and get’s seen by a very wide audience.
Popular sites like that are targets for creative thinking content creators. They turn those posts into different forms of content. Videos, social media posts, YouTube shorts, Instagram/Facebook reels, TikToks, etc., which are then seen by more people. This further increases the pervasive distribution of prescriptive and iterative ‘creativity advice’, which I mentioned at the start.
How to avoid anti creative content & slop
I’ve already created 4, common sense, highly-effective ways you can successfully protect yourself from anti creative content. I’ve also found 2 articles that give helpful insights into the AI slop problem, which you may find useful. This is from Science.org: Resisting AI slop. And this one is from The Conversation: What is AI slop?
I hope you find this useful.
Photo by julien Tromeur