#193: Sludgefeast

A decade ago, it seemed novel that software could write 500 fantasy football articles per second, producing 50 million such articles over the course of a single season. Today those values seem trivial: The capacity of artificial intelligence to produce content at scale has so exceeded any meaningful threshold that there’s no point in updating the numbers. Why not 50 billion fantasy football articles, or 50 trillion, or one million articles for each living human? More generally, the infrastructure of content production has undergone tremendous development since 2012, equipping both computers and humans to collaboratively pump the world full of text and imagery and video in previously unimaginable ways (we were promised flying cars, etc etc). Whether the good content has gotten better is a complicated question to answer, but there is unquestionably more of everything, especially at the lower quality tiers—it fills our cloud storage to the brim and piles up at the margins of our digital interfaces like garbage scattered across a freeway median. It is the lorem ipsum that wallpapers and carpets the internet’s liminal spaces. One wrong click and you descend from the megaplatforms’ orderly grids into a fractured hellscape of pop-ups and chat windows and incoherent babble. Much of it is advertising, but a surprisingly huge amount is not. Theres a shocking amount of internet that must be avoided at all costs, that there is no good reason to ever encounter, not to mention the content in our feeds that we simply ignore. The internet’s present-day user experience requires knowing how to stay on the narrow path and preserve a modicum of signal amid a relentless onslaught of noise. Most of us are good enough at this that we barely even notice.

As the ratio of content to human eyeballs grows, the likelihood that a given unit of the former will be seen by the latter diminishes, but fortunately, computers are part of the audience now. Content has become sentient and now consumes itself. Of AI’s myriad applications, creative production has become the most visible, the best showcase for AI’s recent progress. The technology’s capabilities have evolved beyond writing fantasy football articles to higher-order tasks like crafting plausible narrative arcs, imitating specific aesthetic styles, and producing animation. Working with AI, a single individual could soon conceivably make 1,000 full-length movies in a single weekend—each one only requiring as much effort as the brief prompt that generates it. The relationship between content production and consumption has long since inverted, with human attention as the primary bottleneck; as the content continues to accumulate, its purpose will evolve. Instead of an output—something to inform or entertain humans—content will increasingly be an input for our massive global culture machine, with AI distilling the existing archive into yet more content in an accelerating cycle. Whether this will generate better content remains to be seen, but there will undeniably be more…and more, and more.

Whether understood as input or output or both, content is undeniably a core element of the synthetic landscape that contemporary humans inhabit. Just as the “endless building” of physical junkspace requires air conditioning, digital junkspace requires content above all, particularly the kind that AI is well equipped to make. Someone (I forget who) pointed out that DALL-E is basically Google Image Search, with the text prompt replacing the search term. Even when humans are producing most of the content, in other words, the internet is Borges’ Library of Babel; in a universe where every possible image has been created, the two are indistinguishable and the act of hunting for something is the same as making it from scratch. Again, AI promises to fill in many of the gaps in the human-made archive. But the original question remains: When everything already exists, what job is left for content-creating AI to do? If it doesn’t show us anything new, it will at least keep stirring the vast soup of text and imagery. We may scoff at this, but we’ve already been hard at work stirring it ourselves.

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Reads:

• The Instagram capital of the world is a terrible place to be. “True luxury, as any rich person knows, is the ability to separate oneself from the masses, to avoid being next to or even seen by regular people. In the age of algorithms, the only way to replicate any semblance of luxury is to take the keystrokes less traveled.”

• Michelle Lhooq on how the internet has ruined famous Berlin nightclub Berghain (paywalled). “Berghain’s virality has reduced a culture that developed organically over the last 18 years into a caricature of itself, with this cringey conformity amplified by obsessive TikTok/Reddit guides on how to get in, what to wear, how to act, right down to the facial expressions you should copy-paste on your face.”

• Turn your dead NFT into a Spirit Halloween.