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> There's a weird contradiction you see from AI skeptics where they're afraid of how AI will change the world, but also seem convinced that AI will only ever produce slop that nobody would ever pay money for.

Fair enough. But the real problem, it seems, is that people love slop.

My family is trying to sell a house in the South of France; the real estate people are sending us 500-words emails every so often, that are so obviously AI it hurts. Well written, and content free. Nobody cares. I'm the only one having issues with it.

At work, a new team let Claude do all their work and write all their status reports. Everybody seems to love it. It's so fast! And mostly correct! And so fast to correct when it's wrong! And here too, I'm the only one having issues with it.

A Canadian author wrote a book in French that turned out to be 100% AI ("C'était ça ou mourir"). Before that was revealed, every critic loved it, in Canada, in France and everywhere else (25 translations were started). The public loved it too: it's one of the top best sellers, and success continued even after the "scandal".

We are drowning in slop and nobody cares.

The quote is not a contradiction at all, it can both change the world and be low quality.

If that's true for every AI output is up for discussion, but it's reasonable that if someone is skeptical about the technology, they will also be skeptical about the quality.

That the tech is taking over many areas is not a stretch at all, that's just something that can be observed. Big companies (not just big tech) have been trying to get away with lowering (cost cutting) the quality of their products for a long time, AI lends itself to the same purpose, and will (and already is) obviously be used for it. Starts with customer communication as you mentioned, and customer service, and believe it or not I don't think every company should generate their own tech stack and software for their little products.

I think the problem is calling all AI output “slop”. If people genuinely like the content then is it still “slop”?

And, playing devils advocate for a moment, does it matter if a robot or a human authored it if people like it? People loved Magic Eye pictures in the 90s and they were computer generated too.

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People absolutely cared about "C'était ça ou mourir", his publisher ended up dropping him. The reason the success continued is that people denied that he used AI and had all sorts of shaky political reasons for this (e.g. claiming that Haitian writing trips up AI detectors). Even the reason it got popular in the first place is to do with the themes of the novel rather than its writing.
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