George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

https://www.openculture.com/2026/04/how-george-orwell-predicted-the-rise-of-ai-slop.html

by doener • 3 months ago

84 26 3 months ago

openculture.com

johnea• 3 months ago

and a steady stream of pacifying media

Seems like he also predicted internet brain damage...

windowshopping2• 3 months ago

It's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Roald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.

darkerside• 3 months ago

Roald

windowshopping2• 3 months ago

Autocorrect error

Noumenon72• 3 months ago

“There are many other little refinements too, Mr Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

“Where?”

“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-theg...

chistev• 3 months ago

I just read this. Thanks for bringing it up.

thrance• 3 months ago

Fitting how the author felt compelled to use Gemini to generate an ugly banner for their blog post. An image completely devoid of meaning, that adds nothing to the article except a few kilobytes: slop under any definition.

refulgentis• 3 months ago

I'm old enough to feel "get off my lawn" about this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" - heard this about TV, internet, iPhone in my lifetime.

It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consumption.

slipknotfan• 3 months ago

"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers."

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

hresvelgr• 3 months ago

a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984"

Every damaging invention in isolation isn't a big deal. The big deal is setting precedent and the accumulation.

not puerile consumption.

I agree, it's more akin to seeing how much sawdust one can put in a rice crispy before someone notices. No one wants to eat sawdust, nor is there a mindless desire to.

mercer• 3 months ago

A lifetime is not that long though, and I'd argue that TV was the start of a chapter that internet, iphones, etc. are just ever-increasingly addictive and immediate iterations on.

I'm not saying that we didn't have anything like that before tv, or that specific individuals or groups throughout history might not have had something similar, but I do feel TV, and especially its audio-visual nature, really changed something in a way that, say, the printing press never quite did.

EDIT: and to add, my feeling on how many people seem to use LLM's is that in a way it's extra insidious because it's /tailored/, often 'puerile' interaction.

tracerbulletx• 3 months ago

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Dune

"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger." - God Emperor of Dune

mrexcess2• 3 months ago

Hard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.

mmcromp• 3 months ago

I'll believe it when I see it

stvltvs• 3 months ago

We could have undone wage slavery a long time ago if automation of work was a sufficient condition.

yongjik• 3 months ago

That's great, but I think Herbert had a vision of this incredible galaxy teeming with truthsayers, human computers, and space travel, and just needed a convenient excuse to explain away the total lack of computing devices.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 3 months ago

It was a convenient choice because its so obviously a foreseeable problem with thinking machines. see 'torment nexus'

jbaber• 3 months ago

They didn't mention my favorite part, the name. "Prolefeed" I've been waiting for someone to pick up the word so people would get more self-conscious about consuming it.

curio_Pol_curio• 3 months ago

"I read a self-help book. It's really good. Everything works out if you'd just follow the rules."

https://youtu.be/KOiDWGs4JE4?t=28s

wHNston

raincole• 3 months ago

I'd like to share the most prophetical quote I've read about generative AI:

Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and crosschecking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only, the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next!

-- Galley Slave, a short story by Isaac Asimov, 1942

sebmellen• 3 months ago

Incredibly to see the kind of prophecy Asimov had.

mvcosta91• 3 months ago

The Wikipedia one always get me. He was like Nostradamus for nerds.

bicepjai• 3 months ago

Inspired to come up with these original ideas

dcre• 3 months ago

He wasn’t predicting slop; he was describing mass culture, which already existed when he was writing.

George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

Related Stories