everyone calling out any hint of slop seems great! but reducing that to AI-or-not would terribly miss the point people want to use AI as a yes/no proposition to side step the harder task of instead judging if something was made with only efficient and viral intent

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 4d ago

Raise your hand if you look forward to a cultural future that consists of policing every artist, performer, entertainer, or author whom you love and admire for the slightest whiff of “AI,” defined by vibes and whatever set of folk forensics is currently in circulation.

AI is not advanced enough to create content more sloppified than human-made LinkedIn posts www.404media.co/linkedin-int...

www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/is-ambient...

nothing is less "real," authentic," or "in the moment" less than things marketed as such

fred never misses thebaffler.com/salvos/the-t...

entirety of Disclosure Day's plot rests on the assumption that everyone believes TV news and not anything online lol

while Pump dot Fun is extreme, i think its a good, if hyperbolic, example of what all gamified platforms are: metrics-saturated platforms like X and Insta but also here are about conforming to *and thus debasing yourself for* what the number counts encourage

Taylor Lorenz@taylorlorenz.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Pump Fun GO is just the latest in a new class of platforms that are defining the next phase of the attention economy. Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are part of this new era, as is the rise of so-called “UGC marketing.” www.usermag.co/p/the-bounty...

alternate take: using "POV" to caption third-person videos makes total sense when your own point of view and the imagined viewer of your self-as-content are collapsed together www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/m...

A Whole Generation Seems to Be Using ‘POV’ Wrong

nytimes.com

"AI is a normal technology, meaning it can be adopted and analyzed using normal business principles; the abnormality is in how we talk about it" mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-logic-...

The logic of a termination

On Scott Pelley; on AI and the mathematical replaceability of workers.

mattdpearce.substack.com

dealing with "AI" is a bit like dealing with a pandemic — if there isn't social trust and a widely shared prosocial commitment to shared protocols of public health, then there is no protection for anyone, just paranoia and individualistic voodoo

underrated question is what is the role of media/cultural criticism when meanings and power dynamics arent being hidden?

Jacob Birken@jbirken.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Decades of media studies and so on painstakingly deconstructing popular speculative fiction narratives to point out their underlying racist/xenophobic content, also decades of nerds accusing academia of 'reading too much' into stuff but here we are

"When AI hallucinates, it’s going through the same steps as when it’s working properly" on why saying "hallucinates" wrongly humanizes a process that is not at all like a brain malfunctioning: elftheory.substack.com/p/why-ai-doe...

let's check in on the UpWorthy guy...oh, lol

felt like this too neatly linked the feeling of fakeness to the recent pivot to short form video. all metricized and algorithmic media is deceptive. like, what's the "real" way to post content in a system that links attention to profit?

I hear critical positions towards so-called «artificial intelligence» nowadays framed more and more as «rejectionism», and this is especially formulated as a critique of the left. The argument often goes something like this: Rather than seeing the potentials of AI, the left merely rejects it 1/

the psychoanalytic distinction between "desire" and "drive" also seems useful to explaining that shift from "wanting to converse with friends and build relationships" to "compulsion to consume repetitively to sustain a machine-zone-like fugue state"

To call slop automated is not to say it is free of human labor — rather, this human labor is already embedded in automated operations, not only made machine-like and subsumed under the logic of algorithmic curation, but made machine-readable, dissolved into patterns and quantifiable reactions 5/

new danah 🎯 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... it's weird we say "social media" to describe broadcast-like influencer-filled platforms and not use it to describe group chats, discords, and other far more "social" places

i read a million takes about how cameras lost their relation to truth, and here's yet another news event filled with conspiracies about everything but the footage

to me, the more interesting question isnt why highlights are more viewed, of course they are, but what accounts for the enduring popularity of the endlessly long streams the highlights are clipped from?

Rob Horning@robhorning.bsky.social · 4mo ago

popularity of "clipping" suggests people like consuming highlights, even of (or mostly of) things they wouldn't care about in its full form www.garbageday.email/p/what-happe...

always skeptical of AI apologism that rests on "people want," "humans are inherently" essentialism. as rob notes, the creation of those desires is the whole point here

Rob Horning@robhorning.bsky.social · 5mo ago

this claims that there is no theoretical limit to the demand for hyper-personalized content; but the actual demand for actual content is dictated by social relations (desiring the desire of the other, etc.) arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06060

AI slop and nostalgia go so well together because nostalgia itself is the desire to misconstrue the past by smoothing its messy lived reality away into conceptual ideals. nostalgia and AI work in similar ways

David Higham@oldtrotter.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The good old days when shops didn't have doors, windows had flags mounted in them, the local bakers sold baguettes and we used decimal currency?

improved framing, takes into account the enduring truth-telling function of cameras and is not just the too-easy panic over some linear descent into fakery www.nytimes.com/2026/02/15/u...

More Than Ever, Videos Expose the Truth. And Cloud It, Too.

nytimes.com

👁️@nathanjurgenson.com · 10mo ago

read this same take every month for years even though there's a constant stream of newsy widely-believed video happening all around us the better question is: what accounts for the enduring truth-telling function of cameras in an age where believable fakes are easy to generate?

New piece: "ALGO-READ: The creative automation of the reading subject" Open access. Critical study of the production of ‘the reading subject’ as a media trend, unit of value and data point www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph-de... in RELATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES (eds A. Lagerkvist, J. Smolicki

there’s a new edition of The Social Photo (Verso) and i wrote a little preface for it

We have another exciting CFP! "Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology & Computation examines noise across technical, social, and cultural domains, bringing together machine learning, critical AI studies, media theory and archaeology, art history, philosophy, and practice-based research."

also seems like a good guide to what writing about AI not to take so seriously; shows who is either not thinking carefully enough about the topic or is deliberately writing obfuscatory hype

useful chart for "deanthropomorphizing" discussions of "AI" firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

modernity is the doom loop of having to describe the same thing with ever new terms

The “human” we compare to AI, though, mistakes the dichotomy. It’s not that AI isn’t human — it is an automation of capitalism, a human imaginary. The opposite of Artificial Intelligence isn’t the human mind, the opposite of AI is a community.