The_ai_tarpit

I’ve been noticing a trend of people sending me AI slop as insights. It’s been a slow burn, but it is increasing. A salesperson sending me obviously AI generated content, a four page value study filled with AI nonsense, a graphic portfolio of the most milquetoast content. Whatever it is, you can tell that it’s AI generated because of the cloyingly polite way it says nothing.

The thing that concerns me is the frequency with which otherwise smart people are missing the fact that it says nothing. The most obvious users of this nonsense are the “hussle bros”, the men and women who tell you that a second of peace and tranquility in your life is a second wasted in your all-consuming pursuit of wealth and prosperity.

I think the thing that is most annoying about it is the blandness. The most trite parables repackaged as business maxims. The reality of business is that it is boring and methodical. You post journal entries every day, you reconcile accounts every month, you budget every year. These are not blogworthy events, they’re hardly passing awareness events. When I worked in manufacturing, we would agonize over every ounce of scrap, every wasted step on the line, every basis point of improvement. But through it all there was a humanity to it. We used to laugh at the “GE Alumni” who would pilot into the plant. They never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

And that’s what’s happening today. There is a utility to these tools and they can make you more productive. But they also have a foolishness and a mediocrity to their answers that must be guarded against.

The worst thing you can do is assume that these things will be able to do all of your thinking for you and that your existence won’t be worse off because of it. There is a value in intellectual struggle that should not be overlooked.

The longer this goes on the more convinced I am that there will be lots of room for real artistic and commercial expression: in art and in commerce.