Hollywood Reporter and other news sites reported yesterday that YouTube plans a round of voluntary buyouts (read: layoffs) to their staff in preparation for the “AI Disruption.” YouTube’s CEO, Neal Mohan thinks that AI “will create a lot more opportunity for that entire supply chain of creation.” Yes, you read that right. Neal Mohan thinks of the hundreds of thousands of human YouTube creators as a “supply chain.” You are just a widget to him. A product.

And, yeah, this is a blog about writing fiction, not creating YouTube video “content,” but it’s hard to not see this as the first salvo in a wave of media companies embracing AI-generated content at the expense of human created ones. I guess the “You” in YouTube isn’t that important anymore. Of course, YouTube is owned by Alphabet, and their primary motivating factor is profit, not people.

But here’s the thing: AI-generated content is called “slop” for a reason. It’s soulless, vapid drivel that any talentless hack can produce by putting in a Tweet-length (or less) of words and watching as the magic box spits out something that sorta, kinda looks like the thing you wanted, except there’s something uncannily eerie about it, like that time you took too many shrooms and thought all of your friends were 2D cartoon people and the world was just a thing that exists only in your head.

It’s called “slop” because it can be churned out by the terabyte, saturating real, human-made, valuable, interesting artistic creations with machine-generated garbage. Bu-bu-but Matt, it can make all my imaginings real! Yeah, you can already do that without AI, it just takes effort to do it well, and practice, and patience, and an ability to abide boredom and hard work. You want the reward without the effort? Well that’s what a participation trophy is. You want the result without the labor? Then you’re not a creator. You’re a poseur. But it’s cool to play with. Yeah, so’s fire, but there’s a reason we don’t play with matches at a gas station.

Look, CEOs like Neal Mohan don’t care about you. They care about maximizing shareholder profit. If that means they will abandon human creators in favor of machine generated slop, they will. Their spreadsheets and the current AI-hype bubble demands it. But it will burn them in the end.

Do you remember Usenet? (Now I’m dating myself.) Think Reddit back when the internet was text only. Usenet died because the spam problem got out of control. Remember Yahoo Groups? At one point, they were one of the most popular sites on the internet. But again, spam killed them. People went elsewhere because the signal to noise ratio, that is, the ratio of good content to spammy garbage was too low.

This will happen to YouTube too. Bu-bu-but Matt, YouTube can filter out the spam. They’re the best on the planet at doing so! Just look at Gmail! No, no. We’re not talking about third-party spam (though that will undoubtedly come), we’re talking about spam that YouTube will encourage you to add to their platform. Now that YouTube has filtered out everyone else’s spam, they’re free to insert more of their own.

When most things on YouTube become AI-generated slop, people will flock elsewhere, to other sites, where the content is real, human-created, and more interesting than a video of Trump shitting on protestors from a fighter plane.

If you want to see what this is like, just head over to Facebook, where your feed is 45% AI slop, 45% content you never subscribed to but Facebook thinks you will “like”, and only 10% from your actual “friends.” And even then, what you see is highly curated by AI algorithms to maximize your time on the platform. Facebook used to feel like heading over to a party where all my friends hung out. Now it feels like I’m walking into someone’s estate sale, where it’s mostly junk, and everything is kinda sad and depressing in a inexpressible way.

Netflix hasn’t jumped on the AI boxcar just yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they announce some big AI initiative before the end of the year. I mean, everyone’s doing it.

But it’s all going to be shit. I know this because I know that no AI-created garbage is ever going to be better than something a human created, a person who feels and experiences and suffers, who filters their creations through the lens of intense being. Look, I watch Adrian’s Digital Basement, not just because I think it’s fun to repair old computers, but because I like Adrian himself. He’s fun, he’s interesting and entertaining, and I enjoy watching him problem solve. I watch him not just for the technical stuff, which I like, but the human factor. Once you remove the human factor, what is there? In this case: a technical manual and some tools.

And, you know, this is already happening in the fiction space. Editors I know tell me they receive AI-generated stories in their slush piles all the time. Worse, they tell me, it’s often not the entire story that is AI-generated, but only sections of them, as if by using AI only on some sections you might pass through their filter. (Hint: you won’t; they have tools to detect AI, and you will be blacklisted or your chances of ever getting published by them going forward will be very, very small.)

We call AI-generated content “slop” because it gunks up the works, it makes it harder to find real, human-generated creations, and because it’s effortless, talentless goop that any asshole with a keyboard can shit out.

But you — yes YOU — the one reading this, have a chance to be different. You can resist the urge to use that new shiny AI tool that makes cool pictures, and oh have you tried it for pornography?, and can “write” a story for you in seconds, hey isn’t that freakin’ awesome? I don’t have to work hard anymore, I can have this machine do all the suffering for me, and I don’t have to tell anyone and I can get all the praise. But no one will praise you, because what you “made” was garbage, and even if they do perchance praise you, you didn’t really “make” anything except a fool of yourself, and the only one who really knows who the fool is is you. You’ll be a walking lie.

You have a chance to choose which path you will take: the path of authenticity and truth, or the path of slop and falsehoods. The former is a path of hard work and the risk of failure, but also of great reward. The latter is a path of lies and feeding the slop engine so oligarchs can get even richer and our creative spaces get ever more polluted by garbage.

It’s up to you, but I know which path I’m choosing.

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