All the worrying and complaining over AI slop tells me that AI has sharpened everyone's critical distrust of propaganda. Healthy development, no? Slop is a kind of veil of Maya. Beneath the magic, there's a reality of the aggregate human texts, and beneath that veil is a selective aggregate of humanity, the ones whose words have found themselves on the internet.
It's been immensely entertaining to watch YouTube AI-generated documentaries quickly improve its game of mimicry. Only a couple of years ago, a documentary on ancient Romans might pair a mention of a synod with an AI-generated painting of a corporate board room with an assembly of suits around the table, an embarrassing overfit of literal specificity. Where'd the togas go? Decades ago, when fears of the singularity were first bandied about, I thought, you know, the singularity is gonna be a laugh riot. One of my few accurate predictions.
Now I see that the AI history documentaries have settled on a consistent ancient Western world style and look: bearded, robust, wearing great-looking tunics and animal skin armor for the barbarians, apparently drawn from children's books from the 60's and 70's on ancient civilizations. The voice-overs have also settled onto standard-American-distrustful-voice for economics documentaries, an authoritative-but-harmless David Attenborough speech pattern for ancient history, and imitations of other YouTubers for science and urban planning and such. It puzzles me that Addison Anderson's angular and edgey vocal fry which was used for nearly every science voice-over prior to ChatGPT, isn't the model for anything. Did he copyright his voice and drove himself out of the arena? I miss that voice, although it's even more surprising that the unparalleled soft sonic gentility, staid and noble phrasing, pacing and arc of David Ogden Stiers hasn't been revived anywhere even though that phrasing, pacing and arc couldn't be simpler -- perfect for an algorithm. AI has no taste.
And no guts either. Why not an AI Cathleen Turner voice or for science, Julia Belluz? I miss them too. AI's training bias towards frequency is revealingly sexist -- obviously not revealing AI, it's revealing our own frequency norms and expectations.
Initiallly, I found these AI voices annoying, since it was obvious that the voice didn't reflect the written content, which was no doubt also AI-generated, mimicking an aggregate of scholarly writing, not an aggregate of voice-over actors' writing. Initialy. Now, I'm entertained by the effort of imagining how the aggregate scholar would sound reading their aggregate text. It's a delightful mental exercise, teasing apart the AI sound from the AI words and intuitively retro-engineering to the innumerable real humans that the AI is drawing from. This shifting from the artificial voice to the human aggregation is a source of amusement and fascination and engagement.
This effort to imagine the voice of the writer never occurred to me when listening, prior to 2022, to Addison Anderson. I knew Mr. Anderson didn't write the text, but I didn't try to imagine past his voice to the possible author. Now, listening to AI, I do. Distrust has led to a digital game.
I wonder whether that effort of imagination will be the new norm. Radio lovers often say they find the word-only mode allows them to free their imagination. Maybe the word "slop" is loading our bias. Why not call it "AI's veil of Maya".
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