LLMs Will Never Make Art With Caleb Wilson and Arif Hasan

**Ed Zitron** (0:01)
CAUSOR MEDIA Bonjour, I am Ed Zitron, and welcome to this week's Better Offline.
Better Offline I'm back at it, download the newsletter, subscribe to the premium, god damn, I need the money. After all, I need to make a big gold anvil to drop on my head at the end of the AI bubble. And of course, if you're not on YouTube, please subscribe on the YouTube. Please, I need you to do that immediately. Give me some ammonium because I have the diarrhea of a CEO. And today I am joined by Kill The Computers Caleb Wilson. How are you doing Caleb?

**Caleb Wilson** (0:43)
Doing fantastic. Thanks for having me.

**Ed Zitron** (0:45)
My pleasure. And how are you doing Arif Hasan of Wide Left?

**Arif Hasan** (0:49)
Doing terribly, as always.

**Ed Zitron** (0:51)
Wonderful. Today we have two illustrious subjects because Caleb delivered us a paper.
I was going to say, I'd call it that it's literally an academic paper called Why Slop Matters. And these are some of the names, Cody Comers, Yeh Mon Du, Julia Gordon, Normal, Ari Holtzman, Normal, Tess McNulty, Spencer Stewart, Lindsey Thomas, Richard Gene So, and Hoit Long. A bunch of people who work at university. Hoit Long. We love Hoit. And it's a fascinating paper that I'll link to in the notes because it's very academic, but it's also the single most accommodating piece I've ever read about slop.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:30)
It loves slop.

**Ed Zitron** (1:32)
It like genuine, it's like an indefense of slop.

**Arif Hasan** (1:36)
It does seem like that. I read it pretty briefly and I...
We'll talk about it more in depth, but it definitely just takes some things as a given in order to mount its defense of AI Slop. Yeah.

**Ed Zitron** (1:50)
AI Slop has aesthetic value. Cultural critics of history of initially dismissing low culture only to later admit its significance. This is very fucking stupid.

**Caleb Wilson** (2:00)
But I think it's like trying to use like the example like kitch in the paper as like an aesthetic form that eventually did have value. For example, like the famous dogs playing poker painting that people, you know, famously love and don't make fun of.
Right.

**Ed Zitron** (2:18)
But that so and I get what they're saying. They're saying it has like a social function. It's fulfilling a need for more content. And it makes the argument that human beings want to make more and consume more, but also assumes that Slop is the actual thing filling that rather than just spraying so much Slop out there that it eventually does so.

**Arif Hasan** (2:40)
Right. I think for me, the paper is engaging in a couple of like rhetorical tricks. One, I think, is to try and accuse people who disagree with it subtly of like being elitist. When anybody who does any social analysis of pop culture will take pop culture seriously in its analysis, but that doesn't mean that they'll argue that it matters, right? So the title works, but they'll try to extract what it is telling us about the people who produce and consume this content, the culture that allows or encourages this content to exist. And that could be a critical I, it could be a supportive I, but it tells us a lot about the culture that we're in, which is what sociologists do. And the idea that the paper is presenting that, like, sure, like in culture broadly, we dismiss it. I don't think there are many academics who are, quote, dismissing AI Slop. I think it is an object of, quote, unquote, serious study, because it says a lot about where we are, you know, for whatever reason, however it says it.
And it's mainly just making the argument that, like, if it's so bad, why does it exist? Which is the stupidest fucking argument you could make.

**Ed Zitron** (3:58)
I love that as well, because there is actually a valid discussion to be had here, which is, and this is going to sound mean, and this is dismissive. I don't think most people using Slop and making Slop should actually should be allowed to create stuff.
Like, they don't want to make the effort to make something good. So they just they're like, Oh, every idea I have must be brought to life. I don't think that that should be the case. I don't think everyone should be able to have every idea.

**Caleb Wilson** (4:26)
And it's interesting because it goes to like painstaking efforts to sort of like define what Slop is in that way, right? Of it's asymmetrical by their own admission because of how easy it is to make and how fast you can kind of crank it out. Yeah, the examples that they use was kind of strange. I can remember if this was in this one of the responses, but it was like, well, Slop only matters to the person who makes it in the sense that it's like hyper-personalized or whatever.