Knitting bullshit

https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/knitting-bullshit/

by ColinEberhardt • 3 months ago

489 188 3 months ago

Why does this site want to access apps and services on my local network?

On topic, I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out. At this moment I'm leaning towards just banning this shit, but maybe there is a better way?

potatototoo99• 3 months ago

We can already see the market in action. Increasingly people are more hostile to online content and influencers, except for the few people they follow, just like everyone was already defensive against unsolicited email. Authenticity will become valuable in a sea of slop, and making high budget productions (think Mr Beast) will be worth nothing since it can be easily faked and hard to distinguish.

AlecSchueler• 3 months ago

I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out

Unlikely to do a better job than it did with anything else.

dsign2• 3 months ago

TL;DR: there are brainrot farms with help from AI.

But I saw this one coming three or four years ago.

Actually, I've been listening to AI-generated brainrot music. I prefer it to some human-generated brainrot music (there's "I Hate Boys" from Christina Aguilera. Sorry if you are a fan).

Brainrot serves a specific social purpose: relieving stress, incoherently winning elections. It's a kind of drug that dulls the dangerous part of the brain while leaving the he-is-a-good-tool and she-is-blonde brain hemispheres in working order.

In fact, I do believe that if there were to be an uprising in a couple of decades against AI, and the human side were to rise victorious, the aftermath's social order would be studiously anti-AI and anti-science, but they would make a carve-out for AI brainrot (yes, I published a short fiction story with that premise, because I'm brainrot-vers).

tovej• 3 months ago

Are you serious when you connect anti-AI sentiment to anti-science sentiment?

To me, they are opposite sentiments, and my experience discussing AI with others supports this. The most pro-AI people I meet are very far removed from science, and my research colleagues are definitely more critical of AI than not.

pjc504• 3 months ago

AI's tendency to emit unsourced, untrue statements with authority is about the most unscientific thing you can get.

AI is scientism: presenting science-flavoured things as a cultural marker.

dsign2• 3 months ago

Are you serious when you connect anti-AI sentiment to anti-science sentiment?

I don’t believe that the current state of things represents peak-AI problems. AI is for now weak both in its capability and its impact, and also just new. Speculatively, if things go really bad, in a couple of decades there will be a huge swath of population without jobs nor high-flying education. They, perhaps rightly, will blame AI for the situation, but they’ll also, perhaps rightly, blame capital and the “snobbish elite” that is today and in the near future propping AI. That “snobbish elite” is well-paid engineers and researchers. That’s because people tend to like to have somebody to blame for their problems. But even without making it about bad guys, the heart of the thing that is pouring billions into AI is a relentless ethos of profit deriving from progress and disruption. You can’t stop AI without stabbing that heart.

FrustratedMonky3• 3 months ago

I think he is making the point that scientist built the AI.

The whole "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should,"

metalman• 3 months ago

ummmm, WOW!, hey that clicks your brainrot/drug description is good. making a choice for zero human content and therfore interaction.

the full suite of options would include perfectly artificial scents. personaly, I am way over in the analog/organic direction, but I get the need to disconect from the "whatever this is™" that passes for a society. the question remains for AI scaling to meet the demands and desires society has always placed on indivuals

the audible exasperated noise comming from the person in line with me, seeing me pull out cash, thereby breaking there own perfect little automated world, mearly by bieng subjected to witnessing such a primitive ritual, not behind me I might add, the person leaving in front of me, is the prime example of someone who will violently reject AI and the rest when it inevitably fails to "fix" everything

quibono• 3 months ago

Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?

psychoslave• 3 months ago

No, but to misinform people you have two main strategies: limiting through tailored scarcity and dilute in extra-generic overabundance. Don’t get it wrong: both can be combined and even can sometime overlap.

It doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Equally saturating all channels, metrics and indicator is enough to create hindrance so preventing relevant information to spread in meaningful time.

Attention is all you need, so distraction is all that will be given.

ikr678• 3 months ago

Also, fracturing audiences to infinity.

mjd• 3 months ago

Or maybe Ms. McHealy was simply lying.

ryukoposting• 3 months ago

By McHealy's logic, we ought not be concerned about that. After all, it's low-stakes content.

api2• 3 months ago

I listened to a podcast a while back (human authored I'm pretty sure) about low-quality gutter level streamer content and how popular it is, speaking of personalities like asmongold and a vast number of even worse imitators.

This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LARPing as one) telling you about their boogers and then being racist and then playing video games for 6 hours.

But it's wildly popular. Millions of people stream this kind of shit for hours every day.

There's a lot of people out there who just want to numb their brains, and there seems to be no floor. You can just keep making it dumber. The stuff people stream (and doom scroll) on the Internet makes 1980s daytime soaps look like high art from a lost golden age.

So it's not at all surprising that millions of people listen to low-quality un-curated AI slop podcasts.

I actually unsubbed from the podcast I heard. Meta discussion of crap like this isn't much better than the content itself. Keep driving. Do not look at the car accident.

I had kind of an epiphany like that in the last year. The Information Age means information is free. It costs $0 and is produced to infinity. That means you are not missing anything. Your attention is actually 100% yours, and if you choose to ignore the car wreck that's fine. There are infinity car wrecks. There are infinity everything. Keep driving.

alphawhisky2• 3 months ago

One of the real costs of the end game attention economy is that when your "car" crashes, noone is going to stop to help. When the market you engage in gets swallowed up, everyone will buy the swill that outcompetes you on perceived surface level value. Communities get fractured. Organizations that used to be community pillars (church) become self serving. All these things create a positive feedback loop of intellectual degradation.

bluGill2• 3 months ago

The problem is I want to live in the "correct information age" - that qualifier is hard to find. I suspect that correct will cost money. Unfortunately I don't know how to pay for it. Many of the major publishers are also using AI with questionable fact checking. Where I most need correct information is my local small town news, and there isn't even a newspaper anymore. (there is the nearby big city newspaper, but they don't cover my local issues well)

compiler-guy• 3 months ago

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

--H. L. Mencken (or at least attributed so.)

tyg13• 3 months ago

The vast majority of people tuning into those kinds of slop streams are not really active listeners. It's more akin to turning on the radio while you work/clean/perform some other task that doesn't require strict focus or attention, with the added benefit that you can personally interact with the streamer (chat) when you have attention to spare. But I'd wager most viewers never directly interact or even pay much active attention to the stream at all.

I wouldn't be surprised if the same dynamic is playing out with these AI slop podcasts.

FrustratedMonky3• 3 months ago

Other bots?

Dead Internet Theory.

AI produced, AI downloaded. No humans in the loop.

pc862• 3 months ago

There was one of those "memes" a few years ago that is just a screenshot of someone's Twitter post that was essentially:

"My wife is a teacher, she used AI to help create an assignment, all the kids used AI to complete it, and now she's using AI to grade it. Nobody learned anything, nobody really did anything. What's happening?"

jrmg• 3 months ago

My podcast app downloads way more podcast episodes than I actually listen to.

chromacity• 3 months ago

HN sends tens of thousands of views to AI-farmed articles about why AI is good or why AI is bad. These articles get upvoted to the front page literally every day. They don't say anything interesting, but many of us just like having our existing beliefs recited back to us.

So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down.

There is a huge market for content that makes you feel smart without requiring thinking and makes you busy without requiring work. I'm not not saying it's inherently bad. I'm listening to music on my daily commute and it's the same thing: just enjoyable filler so that you can do something other than getting angry at other drivers. The internet just weaponized the formula, and now AI is the equivalent of nuclear weapons I guess.

surgical_fire6• 3 months ago

How is a listen to a podcast counted?

If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen?

Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.

Zarathustra30• 3 months ago

I occasionally put on a (human-made) podcast for the word-sounds rather than the content. I can imagine others do the same without caring whether it is human-made.

justzisguyuknow• 3 months ago

If the sonic quality of a human voice is what you're seeking, then I imagine a generated voice will still be less appealing, no?

charles_f2• 3 months ago

It's reminding me of twitter. I occasionally open it, half of the content I see is AI garbage (and by that I mean, poor quality AI generated stuff that is obviously AI), and 95% of the replies are bots responses, which aren't even AI based (most of the time not it's garbage, unrelated text)

bulubulu• 3 months ago

They have 4k podcasts releasing 3k+ episodes per week, so that's ~250 listening per episode. That's an achievable number with organic traffic.

https://www.inceptionpoint.ai

frereubu• 3 months ago

I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.

nilirl• 3 months ago

I'm afraid it'll lead to a weird music-ification of content.

Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition.

AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention.

Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.

siddboots• 3 months ago

For a long time I thought that the AdSense business model was ultimately doomed because I assumed that people hate ads as much as I do. It turns out I was just wrong about what most people are willing to put up with.

latexr4• 3 months ago

I remember visiting a friend over a decade ago, and for some reason I had to use their computer for a bit. I was immediately thrown aback by all the ads everywhere and installed an ad blocker before anything else. They were very grateful, but the part that surprised me was they were annoyed by the ads but never thought to look for some way around it. It never even crossed their minds it could be done or to search for it.

pjc504• 3 months ago

It's definitely the sort of thing that Crowley from Good Omens would be working on.

latexr4• 3 months ago

At the start of Good Omens, there’s a scene where demons are sharing their recent misdeeds. A couple of them are sharing “classic” demon stuff like killing and possessing, but Crowley (the protagonist demon) shares more modern evil deeds, such as creating traffic jams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens

I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.

kombookcha3• 3 months ago

It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of really intense suffering.

nephihaha8• 3 months ago

I think Good Omens may have been influenced by the 1960s version of Bedazzled. In that, Peter Cook's version of the Devil spends much of his time creating petty annoyances such as scratching vinyl records and putting them back on shelves, breaking parking meters so drivers get fined, and ripping the last pages out of Agatha Christie whodunnits etc. Definitely a touch of Douglas Adams in there as well.

Lalabadie• 3 months ago

Yeah, people will reflexively filter out the slop, eventually, but they'll do it by leaving the places that have been rendered worthless by its persistent presence.

The particular type of innovator ghoul that's enabled by generative AI dreams of filling the entire internet with bullshit content. Aggregators (media and content) should be actively pushing them out for their own long-term survival, IMO.

Tade02• 3 months ago

Just like Big Tobacco moved onto greener pastures in the developing world, Big Slop is not targeting specifically us, but the billions of new internet users who connected over the past decade:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS

There's this (now old) meme called "Italian brainrot" - AI generated characters with vaguely Italian-sounding names like Bombardiro Crocodilo (note the incorrect spelling of the Italian word for crocodile).

One character stands out - Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Not only does it not sound Italian at all, that last word rang a bell.

Sahur (or Suhur) is the meal eaten before dawn during Ramadan.

After some digging I discovered this whole category originated in Indonesia. The country experienced an absolute explosion in the number of internet users in recent years and is home to internet phenomena which spread globally, but few in the west seem to realise that.

sharadov2• 3 months ago

That's how characters are named in "Steal a Brainrot" , a Roblox game.

lesuorac• 3 months ago

I really doubt it's going to die out.

I think a lot of the value in these AI Podcasts is just the self-validation of the listener. It really doesn't matter to the listener if there's nothing between Egyptian socks and Revelry because the point was to feel good not to learn.

But also because I've had a long standing pet peeve with news articles that include random ass stock footage in articles. If humans can get away with include a picture of _any_ ship when talking about a specific ship (that may have never been in the harbor the picture shows) then why does the AI need to be correct?

revolvingthrow• 3 months ago

Boomers love slop. Even when they know it’s ai (and it can be increasingly difficult to tell even for people who don’t struggle to send an email) they love it almost as much as they love political ragebait, and they love political ragebait more than their own families. My ancient grandpa is on some facebook groups and they share bottom of the barrel ai videos and images all day. If it can be consumed with zero effort, it’s great. They couldn’t care less about whether any care of effort was involved in its creation, whether it has any value whatsoever, whether it’s made up bullshit. Not a whit.

They also have money and can vote, so there will be an endless avalanche of slop being generated every single day, enough to bury organic content ten times over.

mwigdahl• 3 months ago

Eventually they will all die, and then the upcoming Gen-Z and -Alpha will save the world with their well-documented refined tastes for artisanal, purely human short-form video slop.

surgical_fire6• 3 months ago

Unfortunately, I think it is here to stay. But humans are very adaptable; I think things may play out fine.

See, I have some hobbies. You probably have yours too. The thing about hobbies, is that in many ways they are niche.

Of course, a lot of people enjoy running, but very few enjoy taking it seriously, delving into it beyond an occasional thing, to use it as an example. Replace running with any activity that may be approached as a hobby and that can be slopified.

And as any niche thing, there will be a separation of masses that consume it as slop, and those that engage with the real thing. They don't cancel each other out, just coexist as different things entirely.

rstuart4133• 3 months ago

WWE has been a successful business model for a long time now, and shows no signs of dying out.

I haven't listened to those podcasts, but from Kate's description the recipe is the same as WWE. They appeal to the senses using only bullshit. The outcome is preordained, they are selling the hype only, the reality doesn't matter.

There is clearly customer base for this sort of thing that isn't going away. Amazingly it appeals to all age groups: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jN2Jxp_o4OtLZl4HuK2jWAtmUyy...

It works so well the USA has president who sold himself to the voters using this very same model.

praptak• 3 months ago

I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion.

I'm specifically thinking of a print magazine that was designed to make you feel like you are a smart reader of science articles, without any useful information about the actual science or technology.

latexr4• 3 months ago

I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion.

Even if that were true (which I don’t think it is, this is a different kind of worthless content), you most definitely don’t remember it at this scale, and that’s a major point.

wvbdmp• 3 months ago

Yes, the article acknowledges this in the first paragraph by citing Harry Frankfurt’s „On Bullshit“ (1986). Of course bullshit (as well as even more insidious misinformation/propaganda) have always been around, but the incredible advances in its production and dissemination are worth considering. At some point, sheer quantity turns into its own quality. Indeed I would argue these issues have always been underconsidered. The article is a kind of inoculation against bullshit that every generation requires again and again. People aren’t born nearly skeptical enough, and the game keeps ever changing.

I actually don’t think the article is sufficiently vehement in calling out just how brain-frying this is. And how destructive on a societal level. The razor’s edge between being too uncritical and too cynical is hella narrow.

whilenot-dev• 3 months ago

Interestingly, Inception AI seem to have pivoted from content slop for "gardening, [...] knitting, cooking" - or "things we can afford to be wrong" - to "AI Immigration Drafting Software for Law Firms": https://www.inceptionai.co/

I'm somewhat curious how that'll work out. Hint: I'm not.

EDIT: My bad, wrong company, it's "Inception Point AI": https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/

donaldihunter• 3 months ago

There's also https://www.inceptionlabs.ai - it's not confusing at all.

augment_me11• 3 months ago

I like the blog but the premise of the blog is an engineering/epistemological perspective on the craft. The writer clearly cares more about the process, technique and history more than the feeling and validation.

It could be, that a big part of the the future of hobby's and entertainment in this way is the feeling and validation over the actual performance. Or it can be that a massive amount of people find their value in this content.

ossopite• 3 months ago

The idea that we could create a world where 'a big part of the future of hobbies and entertainment' is people listening to meaningless words made up by machines that help them feel good about themselves sounds horrifying. How could anybody feel ok about that? What would it say about the society we've built?

augment_me11• 3 months ago

It would say that society changes, and people who were not used to a new world get upset about it, as it has always been throughout the entire history of humanity.

We were used to having psychologists and doctors in person, now the most common form is to have it through apps, and the younger generation does not care, it's in fact more efficient to get a prescription that you like than to spend time going places and having in-person meetings. But older generation finds it hollowing out and horrifying.

You need to accept that society moves on, and it can look different from your perspective.

pjc504• 3 months ago

So .. I think we need to ask a deceptively simple question here, which is: is knitting real?

I'll add in an aside to this, which is not only are there fake knitting podcasts there are fake knitting and crochet patterns, which is a problem because people get a substantial way through making them only to discover that they don't work. In some cases the giveaway is that the supposed final image isn't physically possible, like the images in this article, but the fakers can use a real stolen image and just spam a pattern underneath it.

So: what is the knitting that is real? It has to be the use of your hands, needles, and yarn to produce a physical object, right?

The podcasts work towards something else. The identity of "being a knitter". This is a form of "hobby" that was already not unusual, that of discussing a thing without ever bothering to actually do it. Photographers are especially bad at this: too many lenses, not enough photographs. They've also got comprehensively run over by AI, because you can just generate the photographs now. Same for "authors".

But ultimately all these pleasant sensations aren't backed by a connection to the real. If you're going to talk about the history of knitting, shouldn't it be the real, evidenced history? As done by real (usually) women? Otherwise you're just knitting a pleasant fantasy for yourself.

The AI approach is "wireheading": the logical conclusion of all of that would be to find a means of inserting a wire in your head that provides constant pleasant sensations. Achieving happiness through a constant feed of generated images is less effective, but it's the same order of things.

(see also: authenticity in food, which could easily turn into another ten thousand words)

augment_me11• 3 months ago

I am with you until you make this assumption:

But ultimately all these pleasant sensations aren't backed by a connection to the real. If you're going to talk about the history of knitting, shouldn't it be the real, evidenced history? As done by real (usually) women? Otherwise you're just knitting a pleasant fantasy for yourself.

If the real is the feeling you get from listening to the podcast or identifying with a subculture, then that is the real for that person. Factual, grounded information is just one take. If it was not this way, we would have much less myths, religions, etc historically.

People will feel the same degree of joy and completion when the final word of the podcast is read like you feel when you finish a really complex piece of work.

ratmice4• 3 months ago

I'd also say a few things, if knitting takes a long time consider how long it takes to make a good clear pattern so that others can replicate it.

People who make patterns are already dealing with a saturated market. This includes historical/vintage patterns, which for many years patterns were primarily given away freely to incentivize yarn sales, or dominated by publishers. It wasn't until recently (internet, etsy, ravelry) when designers actually had the means to sell directly to consumers. People making an effort to produce usable patterns are now being dwarfed by AI nonsense in the speed of their output. It was already a difficult market. That everybodys images of real objects (along with AI generated ones) are being used to peddle and market patterns that will never work can be really demotivating.

One last thing is how many of the 8 people in this podcast company are actually generating slop and how many are actually just doing marketing?

ratmice4• 3 months ago

Can't wear feelings and validation...

augment_me11• 3 months ago

If you only care about the material and physical utility of the product, you can order the sweater from AliExpress for 5% of the cost and no time spent.

afandian2• 3 months ago

It's scandalous that no-one has yet posted Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon "Bullknitters".

https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/

(or google image search)

penguin_booze• 3 months ago

Related: Four Yorkshiremen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE.

xnorswap• 3 months ago

Personally I think it's scandalous that the now top comment is an off-topic reference to something tangential to the title, and nothing to do with the article, which isn't really about knitting at all, except for being the hook to which the author was pulled in to the world of AI podcasts, and consequently found their output rather lacking in content.

You could substitute the word knitting for almost any hobby, and the article would read almost the same.

It's an article about the soulless content-free world of AI podcasting, and about how AI output is about validating the emotions of the listener rather than meaningful content.

afandian2• 3 months ago

That wasn't meant to be the top comment, it was meant to be buried somewhere round the bottom!

I did read the whole article and have some thoughts about it. But they are pessmistic and difficult, so I'd rather share something fun.

My on-topic thoughts are that I just spent a long weekend in good company playing music and chatting. Returning to quotidien life made me think the solution is to get as far away from computers as possible, and back to the in-person interaction that we're evolved for.

A big reason IMHO that we're susceptible to phony bullshit (whether it's knitting podcasts or broadcast propaganda) is that we're not evolved for it, and it misses many of the contextual clues present in in-person interaction for which we are evolved.

tmountain• 3 months ago

For someone complaining about slop, I found this unreadable.

Michelangelo112• 3 months ago

one of the most pernicious things about this particular kind of bullshit is the way it casts any form of critical scrutiny as a terrible failure of sensibility.

What a great line. And you'll probably notice this technique being used by very skilled bullshitters and master manipulators: any request for rigor or scrutiny is met by something like genteel condescension. You're treated as if you've committed a breach of etiquette, and that's one of the reasons the technique is powerful -- you're likely to feel embarrassed and, following that, to back off.

nyeah2• 3 months ago

Great point. This happens on forums too. For example if Kate opposes knitting bullshit, a common strategy is to characterize Kate as 'hostile', 'overheated', 'overreacting', etc. Kate's actual argument doesn't need to be addressed. We just rule that Kate isn't posting content, she's causing conflict or experiencing an unfortunate emotional state.

This strategy also indirectly helps overworked moderators by penalizing disagreement, which in turn discourages flame wars.

Kate's critics can even say they support Kate. They just want to help her deal with her emotional overload.

roxolotl2• 3 months ago

Wow I’d never have expected Kate Davies to show up on Hacker News. I think it’s important to understand her background a bit when she talks about knitting as a matter of life and death. She was a scholar of 18th century literature before she suffered a stroke young[0]. She focused on knitting as a means of recovery and never looked back. She built a business and a community and attributes a lot of her physical and mental health to knitting.

So while this post hopefully hits a chord for anyone in a creative field she embodies a particular type of person for whom slop is a genuine risk to their being. Not their job; their whole personhood. In a world where slop has chased out the humanity of things and the bullshit machines fill all content what are the chances someone like her could build a second life better than her first?

0: https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-...

getpokedagain• 3 months ago

Wild. This kind of empowerment and long lived effort is the type of story we should be sharing.

I'm concerned that we've taken an amazing character like this and turned the world against her for frankly a bet against human intellectual development.

surgical_fire6• 3 months ago

Not their job; their whole personhood

I hate so much that while I read your reply this particularly phrasing was grating to me.

There's nothing wrong with it, and I have no doubts you, whoever you are, wrote it.

What annoys me to death is that a perfectly fine language construct is tarnished to a point that a mere glance reflexively caused me to wince, and I had to actively interpret it as fine.

bellorap• 3 months ago

Interesting, sounds like a similar experience to my reading of this reply

The root comment brings insight and value and stakes out a human position. I don’t see a need to snipe from the hedges

MITSardine• 3 months ago

Great article, thanks for sharing.

I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing.

I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull office work and back breaking physical labor, but not the things that are actually enjoyable: sharing with each other, entertaining each other, making art. I imagined a lively world of live performance and creation, since all subsistence work had been taken care of. Instead we might end up in the world of fifteen million merits.

It seems people don't mind letting their minds be hacked by machines that can create the form of what they find enjoyable, if not the substance. But I guess there's always been slop and the public for it. To imagine actual people wasting their limited time on Earth listening to these GPT logorrhea podcasts is truly depressing. The unchemical soma.

What are we even supposed to spend our days doing in this bright future of the AI champions'? Stop automating away the things that give people purpose, tackle real problems instead.

jagged-chisel• 3 months ago

The incentives are at odds. In this capitalist landscape, you create podcasts and blogs (or have them created) to attract an audience which then attracts those fat advertising dollars.

philipallstar2• 3 months ago

Ironically, these are both incredibly common, LLM-able takes:

Lament: Oh why did we automate art?

Answer: Capitalism.

tlb• 3 months ago

I like how the pictures got more and more sloporific through the essay.

It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a mountain of slop. In theory, recommendation algorithms ought to surface the best stuff, but that doesn't seem to align with incentives. Sad.

onemoresoop• 3 months ago

Or even worse, it gets fed back into the AI slop machine

Michelangelo112• 3 months ago

Yes, I noticed and appreciated the sloporific (great word!) quality, too :) I stopped midway for a sec to try and figure out an image, then eventually realized they were just getting more nonsensical on purpose.

card_zero3• 3 months ago

I feel like the alt captions for the images, although diligent and thorough, don't really capture the most important aspects.

card_zero3• 3 months ago

That got downvoted. But alt images are for inclusivity, for people who can't see the images. Only one of these says "surreal", the rest of them would lead you to believe that they are normal images. So it's performative inclusivity that actually excludes people. It would have been better to say "this AI generated image of the act of knitting is accidentally bizarre in a subtle way" as the alt text for every image.

telesilla• 3 months ago

I can absolutely recommend the book On Bullshit, it's a tiny read and makes an excellent gift. Kate's article summarizes it very well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

This reddit comment puts it perfectly:

"What’s it about? Frankfurt tries (successfully) to define bullshit (rather academically). In short, a bullshit artist is solely focused on persuasion and making an impression, not caring about truth. Paradoxically, bullshit can be true.

What makes it bullshit is how it is created - shoddily, hastily and without regard for fine work. A gifted liar does their thing carefully so that the truth cannot be found out. A bullshit artist just flings it out, overwhelming skepticism with sheer volume, until something sticks with the audience."

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1pidpb2/on_bullshit_...

An 1980s take on something that has taken over our 2020s digital airwaves, indeed.

thechao2• 3 months ago

I'm from Texas and we use bullshit & tall-telling as an entertainment art (this is my background; I do t think it's specific!). This definition of bullshit is spot on; I'm pretty proud of my ability to bullshit-for-entertainment, so AI bullshit really grinds my gears... it's so bad.

trgn• 3 months ago

it's really disheartening that so much youtube content is now AI generated.

tim3332• 3 months ago

At least they don't get many views. Not sure why the system suggests them? Maybe they could have an "AI crap" feedback button to warn others?

nephihaha8• 3 months ago

I have reported some of it to YouTube. No idea if anything will come of it. A lot of fake C.S. Lewis and Carl Jung content for some reason. It bears no resemblance to things they actually said.

ipsento606• 3 months ago

Increasingly, my reaction to AI-generated content of basically all types is simply a deep, resonant sadness.

The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb - there is an initial shock of sadness, an initial dose of loss, an initial sense of what has been taken away.

But then for months and years afterwards, the daily occurrence of some other little humdrum experience, and only at the moment of the encounter does one think, "Ah yes, this too is forever changed."

Like sounding the depths of a dark well, where every day you lower the rope a little further, but every day there is nothing to feel but a pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.

mizzao• 3 months ago

It seems like Black Mirror's "Joan is Awful" is here, but instead of a quantum computer generating personalized content, we just have an endless parade of meaningless slop.

encom2• 3 months ago

an endless parade of meaningless slop

This is, increasingly, the front page of HN. Direct slop is uncommon, but not rare. I skip any headline that mentions AI. But sometimes you get baited, you start reading, and it's about AI anyway. A few days ago there was an article about someone hacking some device, and it was just the author vibe-hacking with AI.

It is not interesting.

I have intense AI fatigue. Make a containment board for AI sloppers. It's so much worse than all the previous fads combined, like blockchains and Rust rewrites. I'm not even anti-AI, but the exposure to it is just overwhelming and unrelenting.

Tade02• 3 months ago

To me it had, in a way, the opposite effect - I started appreciating non-AI content more.

Good art has something that is difficult to reproduce if one isn't already an artist who is just using AI as a medium - it's intentionality.

Take for example Floor796[0]. Every little detail counts and while you could use AI to generate single characters or even the whole thing, you'd inevitably find details which have no reason to be there. You could then remove them manually or modify your prompt or input image so that those you know about won't appear, but AI being AI will keep sneaking in new ones.

The longer your prompt, the more intentional everything becomes, effectively making it the art piece.

[0] https://floor796.com/

santoshalper• 3 months ago

Yeah, but you have to realize we are on the losing side of this war. The armies of bullshit now have an incredible advantage that actual art can never have. At least in the past, there was some equilibrium. Bullshit was cheaper to make than art (or any other quality product), but now it has become infinitely cheaper to produce, and much more expensive for us to separate from the bullshit.

Think about this for a moment - it takes a company of 8 people to make 3000 podcast episodes a week. It would take far more than 8 people to listen to that many podcasts. How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff? What happens when it's 30,000 episodes per week? 300,000. What possible hope does art and craft have against an army that is effectively infinite.

We can hope that the cream will rise to the top, but I am not optimistic. I genuinely believe we are watching the end of art and human creativity as it is absolutely drowned is mass slop.

tl;dr - we're fucked.

harrall• 3 months ago

I don’t think it’s intentionality.

It’s style.

A lot of people regard technical measures as the signal of quality. The most realistic painting, the most expensive purse, the most technical flip on a skateboard, the most well drawn AI art.

It’s a cheap way to judge quality because you don’t have to understand what makes something good.

AI is really showing this divide.

drowntoge• 3 months ago

It feels like I will forever mourn the totally self-inflicted loss of the Internet. I feel like I will never get over it, so much so that I wish I had never experienced its (brief) moment of brilliance. I feel sorry for my younger self for thinking it was here to stay.

elmomle• 3 months ago

It was a very special time when the Internet was full of people's open, personal gardens. I feel fortunate for having experienced that because it showed me what's out there if I look, and I want to cultivate the pleasure of finding such things and sharing them with people I care about.

nyeah2• 3 months ago

It's not self-inflicted at all. Users didn't enshittify the sites we used to enjoy.

Melatonic• 3 months ago

Kagi SmallWeb still has a lot of interesting stuff like the old internet

biscuits1• 3 months ago

"The growth of AI feels . . . like losing a limb"

Indeed. Figuratively, generatively, and of course, generationally.

MarkusQ• 3 months ago

The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb

Or gaining a new, oddly misshapen and inexplicably placed limb of no apparent purpose or utility.

BobaFloutist• 3 months ago

That will randomly and unpredictably try to take over tasks from your other limbs, hijacking your somatosensory system so you can't tell when it's doing so without actively looking at what you're doing.

sambapa• 3 months ago

Have you lost a limb?

gyomu• 3 months ago

The saddest part to me was realizing that pretty much no one gives a shit.

I knew that they were plenty of careless people with no taste for truth or quality in the world, but I didn’t realize there were so many of them.

Especially so amongst my friends and family members and coworkers. Here’s someone who’s now sending AI generated messages for daily communication. Here’s someone who’s now using AI generated slop art to promote their work. Here’s someone who turns to ChatGPT for any random question they have. No regard for beauty or truth or personal expression or the quality of expert work, only hooked to the “get this done” machine.

dzink• 3 months ago

The economist in me immediately asks: Where is the financial incentive to do this? Just the same way the programmer would ask what the stack is. Some possibilities:

1) Money laundering - large content farm someone can argue makes xyz in revenue to hide an alternate source of revenue.

2) Ad fraud - leading up podcast charts or SEO results to attract clicks to sell ads. Bot farms could also be making clicks to pretend sell ads as well.

3) Attempt to dominate the niche for sale of knitting products. Or to pretend to dominate it so they can sell their the business later at a larger multiple.

4) Test the waters of a much bigger engine for doing 1-3 above in an innocuous hidden subject, before they do it with elections or some other more profitable field. Regulatory waters as well - seeing what they can get away with.

Feel free to brainstorm more incentives for making something like this.

williamdclt• 3 months ago

I don't understand your question, are you asking what's the financial incentive to AI-generate thousands of podcasts a week? Isn't it obviously the income from streams and/or ads?

Carp• 3 months ago

Did you read the article? Headcount went from 300 to 8, number of podcast per day went up and apparently listenership went up.

thechao2• 3 months ago

I think the question he's asking is this: is it an ad ouroboros, or is there some other (nefarious?) intentionality behind it?

My hot take: porque no los dos?

surgical_fire6• 3 months ago

This only works if there are people willingly listening to crap.

Perhaps there are.

ytoawwhra922• 3 months ago

Podcast network is an established and proven business model. You spend money to make episodes, you make money from ads. You make a bunch of different podcasts with a bunch of different target demos to reach a wider range of listeners and this grows your revenue and makes it more consistent. It's not complicated.

The specific incentives for starting a slop network are the promises of increased margins via reduced production costs (don't have to pay any pesky creative types) and more rapid growth via reduced production time (you can theoretically produce an episode in about the time it takes to listen to one, perhaps less).

I explored starting an AI slop network a few years ago. The tech wasn't quite ready at the time. My motivation was far more base: watching numbers go up.

alphawhisky2• 3 months ago

Their dialogue on "substituting truth and validity with a register of emotional validation" is pretty prevalent across the entirety of US culture right now. The first thing that comes to mind for me are Christian groups that do a lot of celebrating during services or events with absolutely no goodwill, volunteering, or donating at all. They're real good at making you feel righteous, but awful at actualizing it. Hate the hollowing out of traditions that used to make communities and people great.

firefoxd• 3 months ago

I didn't have the words to explain to my mother why those AI health/advice/story/etc videos she shares are harmful.

While a liar displays an underlying respect for the truth in the very act of intentionally distorting it, “the essence of bullshit”, Frankfurt writes “is not that it is false but that it is phony.” For Frankfurt, then, bullshit, is discourse from which incidental matters like truth and reality have been completely hollowed out and replaced by performance and simulation.

She would often say "but I happen to know that some the underlying information is true." The answer is the videos are phony, even when part of it happens to be true.

jameson• 3 months ago

There's something innate about AI generated contents that my instincts somehow knows these aren't creations by humans.

I can't seem to state exact properties but they are hollow, out-of-norm, or as the author describes it -- bullshit

duxup• 3 months ago

The summary but no content thing is interesting. I’ve seen it in many forms and I’m not sure why it plays out that way. Maybe the summary is tied to the prompt tightly? The rest not?

I saw some bots on Reddit that were very odd in that if anyone asked a question in relation to something like an news article some account would respond with a non answer but sorta summarized bit of the article. If you responded “that’s not really what I asked” you got an even odder response.

This isn’t that strange as people will do that in a way… but i noted it because I saw a flurry of those accounts in Reddit and then they vanished.

munificent2• 3 months ago

The summary but no content thing is interesting. I’ve seen it in many forms and I’m not sure why it plays out that way.

I would guess that it's because the incentives and goals are different.

The point of a summary is to entice a listener to begin the podcast. So it has to offer the promise of interesting depth.

Once they've started listening, all the body of the podcast has to do is be soothing enough to get the user to keep listening until the next ad comes on. It has no need to actually keep the promise unless the listener is paying enough attention to hold it accountable.

munificent2• 3 months ago

If the kind of AI slop the article talks about entertains/infuriates/depresses you and you want more, you will definitely like the "kroshay" subreddit: http://reddit.com/r/kroshay

divbzero• 3 months ago

All of the images in this post were generated by an ai in response to the simple two-word prompt “lovely knitting”

Touché.

sharadov2• 3 months ago

I think AI is the final nail in the coffin of meaningless slop that started pervading our lives after covid.

I see people tiring of this brain rot, especially Gen Z, there are more offline events - music festivals, day time raves, running events, people are appreciating more things analog - LP records, cassettes, younger people getting turned off by social media.

jancsika• 3 months ago

but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes

Put differently-- it matters so deeply that the genre itself will inevitably become an unfathomably sad parody of what it could otherwise be.

skeptrune• 3 months ago

I really thought the photos were real as i was reading. Wow

giwook• 3 months ago

Did anyone else read this article and try to spot the differences between the first two photos? (appearing before and after the title)

coffee_and_code• 3 months ago

the baking world has the same problem. when i search any baking recipe i just get ai generated recipes with photos that dont match the instructions.

charles_f2• 3 months ago

I used claude recently to generate a booklet about a system I had to ramp up on, and which is using technology I don't know. It was pretty interesting to read, especially because a) it was tailored to what I needed, b) didn't have to do the research myself, I had most of the information I needed to at least understand the system[^1]. Nevertheless, it was a very good bootstrap resource.

But if I find an article that was obviously AI generated, I hate it. The podcasts I enjoy all have in common a great host personality, either funny, or very insightful, or have a particularly nice voice. I can't imagine listening to slop like that.

I'm wondering if this is a bit the same pivot as TV -> youtube, media is similar but usage is different. Rather than finding a TV channel you like, you find videos on the exact topic you need -> rather than subscribing to a pod about a subject you're interested in, you generate the content you need at a given moment. New media that comes as a replacement, but as something new. So, not in this garbage form at all.

[^1]: I gather that in the long run, this might be slightly detrimental because i have the information i need, and ONLY the information I need, not the information that would be useful in the future when adding to it.

chr15m• 3 months ago

No – knitting bullshit bothers me

This is a great article. The presence of this single emdash threw me off for a bit though!

classified• 3 months ago

Some of those AI-generated images are deeply disturbing with their disjointed body parts, but the 1950s vibes are just too endearing.

aanet• 3 months ago

What a masterpiece, this article.

BTW, if it's not already there, I encourage voting "Slop" as the Word of the Year.

Along with its corollary: the "Slop Factory"

johannesberlin• 3 months ago

does anyone else’s eyes just glaze over once they spot AI? there are MILLIONS of high quality public domain illustration, clipart, €5 illustration packs on etsy etc etc. It just never looks good and I assume your content is also AI generated so I ignore it

incidentist• 2 months ago

This is a great post, but am I the only person who thinks the AI-generated images are brilliant? They are haunting and disturbing in a good-art kind of way -- if I saw them in a gallery I would think the artist has real talent. I'd certainly think they were better, and more interesting, than most other modern art I see, and there are many artists who try to unnerve the viewer in exactly this way and fail. Maybe I just have bad taste. But I'd love to know exactly which AI the author used to generate them. It certainly wasn't frontier models. Midjourney, maybe, but I don't see how you'd get those images from Midjourney without adding the adjectives "unnerving" or "surreal" or something.

aaroninsf• 2 months ago

That's quite a lot of words.

Knitting bullshit

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