why the battle of creativity between humans and a.i. is rigged

AI slop isn't killing human creativity. It's doing something much worse.

Over at The Atlantic, tech writer Charlie Warzel is worried about the huge explosion of AI slop, fearing that it’s killing good, old-fashioned human creativity. He’s far from the only person ringing the alarm bells as the infuriated responses to most AI media and posts promoting AI tools will clearly show. Meanwhile, human creators are livid that in their already precarious, hyper-competitive space, they have to also compete with an army of artbarf bots that vomit a tsunami of slop every second of every day.

But is that really happening? There are two claims being made simultaneously here. The first is that AI slop is taking over the internet which is, fundamentally, true. Until the fall of 2022, the overwhelming majority of content online was created by humans. Today, AI slop is edging us out, a development that has data scientists worried about the future of their models as they’re increasingly trained on their own mistakes.

There is also the push to create AI-only competitors to TikTok from Meta and OpenAI, and a flood of reposted AI slop on all social platforms. On top of that, creative tooling like podcasting and recording app Riverside.FM and the Adobe suite are pushing AI as hard as possible, with Riverside even offering AI-edited episodes as the first thing you should check out before you download your raw recordings for editing.

All of this, combined with the nearly trillion dollar buzz of bot and click activity around ads, and political influence operations amplified by AI bots, is killing the web. And I’m not just talking about the web’s original lofty ideas, I’m also talking about the general user experience and the overall scammy, extractive feel to the whole experience.

Which brings us to the second claim, that it’s stifling human creativity. That one, I am not so sure about. Yes, there are certainly people who think of AI to compensate for a complete lack of skill and talent in becoming musicians, writers, or videographers but a desire for fans and acclaim, and those just after the ad revenue share from flooding social platforms with zero effort slop to get monetizable engagement. But there are still plenty of very motivated and talented human creatives out there.

The real problem for them is that the tech companies who own a majority of creative and social platforms spent years and many billions of dollars creating AI models they claimed would solve real problems no one even knew existed, and instead made slop machines that can actually create more problems than they solve, so now they have to promote the hell out of them to make them seem inevitable.

Creatives are not just up against overstimulated viewers who’ll never find their work thanks to how their personal algorithms work, they’re also dealing with platforms in desperate need to promote AI slop over human content. Otherwise, they would have to go back to their shareholders with tails between their legs, and admit that yes, in their presentations they promised God in digital form only to create, well, a nuisance, and a punchline about Shrimp Jesus and gullible Facebook-addicted boomers.

And that’s the real danger. It’s not that human creativity is on the decline, it’s that it’s being pushed out in favor of AI slop by companies that insist on making them a thing because they’ve plowed absurd amounts of money into tools no one asked for, that don’t actually do what people want, and the failure of which to become a tool to end all other tools will send shockwaves throughout the global economy. That’s what we really need to worry about when it comes to the near future of AI.