What Spotify has been engaged in — and it’s hardly alone — is a large-scale experiment to test the fungibility of culture. How far can we go in replacing creative work (and the artists who create it) with manufactured slop? With generative AI, the scale of that experiment is going to get much, much larger. By automating content farming, platforms will be able to further drive down the cost of content — and further reduce their reliance on actual artists. More than that, they’ll be able to generate the content in real time, custom-fitted to individual demand. The supply is unlimited.
AI slop is a sort of liquid nothingness that will pour through culture, searching for whatever’s fungible and displacing it. What’s really being tested here is human taste. Will we accept a simulacrum of a work of art or craft as a satisfactory substitute for the real thing? Will we even notice the difference?
I think a similar fungibility principle applies to AI in education as well. If you presume that education is primarily about content delivery than its only natural that we’ll all have AI teachers and self-driven educational advancement, a personalized teacher will march you towards an individualized degree attainment program.
But in my opinion education has always been a complex combination of content creation, creative expression, empathetic dialogue, and bureaucratic/administrative processes (particularly as it has become a public service instead of a private endeavor). It’s a fundamentally human powered endeavor and we automate components of it at our own peril.
