Only you can prevent the death of culture

The best thing about the internet, according to me at least, is that it enables communication between people everywhere. You and your friends can talk to each other. Your government can talk to you, you can talk back to your government, strangers from the other corner of the world can communicate their lives, their values, and their experiences with you and those in your neighbourhood.

However, one of the side effects of getting blown away by the magical abilities of the internet is that we sometimes forget the content of the communication. Sure, we can tell people anything we want, but what is it that we are saying to them? Sure, information packets can travel as fast as light all over the world, but what do those packets contain? To paraphrase Arthur Conan Doyle, it doesn’t matter how fast you are going if you don’t know where you are going.

So where exactly are we going?

If you have scrolled any social media feed in the past year, you can’t be a stranger to AI-generated slop. These are a firehose of generative-AI images (no I will not call it art) with absolutely no meaning being thrust before the brainrot generation, burying them in mostly meaningless “content”. The information superhighway has been overrun by slop.

And in case you are in the mood for some nationalistic pride, you may be happy to know that a lot of it is coming from India. There are entire YouTube channels teaching young people “how to make money with AI content”. Much of this content goes straight to Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, but increasingly, Google tools such as YouTube have also become home to them.

Social media was anyway not known for discretion and restraint in the pre-AI days. It has always been the place where you post a lot of content in hopes that something will click and then you double down on what works. With AI, this content flywheel is only turning faster, making it convenient for hustle bros to sell virality and easy money.

AI-generated slop is flooding libraries now and even scientific journals are not immune to it. Jason Koebler of 404 Media recently called it a “brute-force attack against the algorithms that control what we see on social media“, I would go so far as to say this is an assault on culture itself.

Only yesterday, I found out about an AI tool that calls your old parents for you if you can’t be bothered to do it, and we already have AI girlfriends and boyfriends. If this is not a hideous defacement of human relationships, I don’t know what is.

The ecosystem of content creation has long been defined by people changing themselves to suit the algorithm. In doing so, a lot of good quality human intelligence and creativity has been diluted and poured into a never-ending stream of colourless, authorless generic slop. But despite this, the human element never completely died. Imaginative renderings of life and lived experience have periodically bloomed in this desolation of mediocrity.

Now, for the first time, we have a machine running that feeds on mediocrity and regurgitates mediocrity. It does so in vast quantities and fills our timelines so completely that it will drown out whatever little humanity might blossom there.

The solution is to value humanity. Find people who are doing human work, raising human issues, using their natural talents to create natural art that deals with reality and those who reside in it. Then support them, not only with your money and your encouragement, but with your time. Take time away from the AI-fuelled feed and give it to human artists and authors.

And most importantly, make things yourself. Take a photo, write an essay, sing a song in your own voice and post it somewhere other than the social feed that is repeatedly telling you that you’re nothing but a pair of eyeballs.