Filling out my remarks here, my suspicion is that the class dynamics of AI will become increasingly pronounced and apparent. The term ‘slop’, which many use to characterize AI, is already suggestive here: ‘slop’ is uniform, unhealthy, insubstantial, unappetizing food, designed for swift mass delivery to and consumption by groups for whose particular members one holds no meaningful regard and with whom one desires no sustained interactions. ‘Slop’ is typically served to animals, to prisoners, and to other institutionalized persons, to groups that are entirely dependent, to those who have no other choice or alternative, and to those who have appetite but no taste. ‘Slop’ has much less value when there are realistic alternatives on the menu, or a menu in the first place.

My suspicion is that AI and AI-like content will become pervasive in popular culture, with little to stop it, and that it will drive out most quality human content. Increasingly, entertainment produced for (and by) the general public will be largely AI-produced. Video and TV will be largely AI-produced. Music will be largely AI-produced. Adverts will be largely AI-produced. Art will be largely AI-produced. Most of the text people encounter and produce will be AI-produced. Because of its derivative character, even the human creations upstream of AI will feel debased by AI’s constant semi-digested regurgitations of them.

Increasingly, services delivered to the general public will be AI, with AI taking the place of and simulating what were once human interactions. Value will be drained out at every step. We will find ourselves living in the uncanny valley and most people will not register the significance of the disaster. It is already well underway, of course, and most do not care.

The quiddity of the world will be sapped as the artifice, the replication, the disembodied, the virtual, the spectacle, and the simulation take the place of the real and then remake it in their image. Most people, having been raised on slop, will have little sense of its unhealthiness.

AI will overwhelm the public education system, infecting every aspect of the learning process, demoralizing students and teachers. It will break talent pipelines. It will hasten a general move to a post-literate culture as people are denied the opportunity to gain a taste for something more substantial.

Meanwhile, human excellence and non-AI material will increasingly register as higher class, exclusive to those who still are capable of forming excellence in their children, of maintaining realms that screen out AI, and of affording something other than slop. The use of AI will increasingly become an indicator of the section of society to which something is being targeted. If you use AI in your products, people will register them as low-class.

In such a context, something akin to the Arts and Crafts Movement is needed, a movement that maintains and pursues excellence in the face of the plummeting of standards for the sake of mass output, while seeking to make beautiful, good, human, and humanizing creations available to everyone. Those who largely resist the move towards AI, yet do not retreat into elite enclaves, seeking rather to spread human creations to all, can really make a difference.