AI slop

[laughs]

But I would prefer that you not make this AI slop.

It's taken over my household.

My kids are obsessed with World Cup songs sung by an AI Shakira about their favorite players.

Yeah.

But clearly there is a market for them, and now they're feeding it.

And it also, this really, um, made something click for me about how AI slop works.

Mm-hmm.

GCP Bytes is a podcast where we discuss Google Cloud and tech, and I'm your host, Stephen Bancroft.

On today's show, are you sick of the AI slop? I was too.

always on cloud run instances your agent needs it what exactly happened with the telstra ntp debacle and what a fortnight in ai find out in the ai wars but before we get to any of that i'd like to introduce the co-host of the show dave wall how are you dave You know, I'm tired, boss.

There's just too

And our very own GDE, Ian Brown.

How are you, mate? I'm good, mate.

How are you? Are you not exhausted of all the AI and the AI slop?

It is exhausting, but, you know, we're here.

As I was saying at the start, I do find the cultural piece just so interesting and it made me think I was on, as I've mentioned on this podcast before, I'm a member of a recruitment community, as it were, and I had a meeting this week and one of the heads of marketing for another recruiter was basically saying that their founder was absolutely categorically against Claude Comte.

which I completely understand, right? You don't just want to be putting AI slop out on your website or your posts.

But what this professional was trying to explain to them is that they have requested help with writing blogs that they ultimately want to come from this founder.

So what she was doing was getting it almost there using Claude, passing that then to the founder to then take this clay and mold something with it.

but that relationship and communication just totally broke down because their response was it's clawed it's bad it's ai slop rather than viewing it as a as a piece of information that needs to then be developed into something now some people can just have a blank sheet of paper and write a fantastic piece of content from the off generally speaking founders don't have time for that or they may not be very good at it

but

culturally it was just really really interesting to me that They just shut down that conversation because of this kind of narrative, as we were saying, of being kind of that anti-AI, anti-slop.

And I think we see this in big enterprise.

but I could be wrong, by the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

It is a special issue, and the special issue is called Cultural Commons on Brain Rot, AI Slop, and the Enshitification of the Internet.

This is a special collection from the European Journal of Cultural Studies that is, I believe, all... open access which is something that we got lucky with last time too for our paper report all the papers were open access this time I purposefully went and looked to see if there was anything that I could get where we could have an interconnected conversation with a bunch of things that were open access and we really lucked out because not only is that the case it's also about slop and in shitification and brain rot and stuff so right in our wheelhouse yeah All this to say, that means you, the audience, if you want, you can go and read some of these things.

So, Hans, I'm doing a screen share.

It is a state of being.

And this is kind of the nugget of the special collection, the special issue.

What we will suggest is that the terms brain rot, AI slop, and enshitification signal a new phase of digital capitalism, one emerging in the wake of generative AI's widespread integration into the foundations of platform culture.

These concepts, we argue, exemplify a further intensification of what has been described as platform capitalism, which I think we're all familiar with, or more recently vibes capitalism,

And I'm sure you have noticed, Tom, that it has accelerated.

So why would it be? And it occurred to me that as he tries to turn America into this autocratic state and actually looking at taking over our neighbors, He is using this AI slop, this low grade, you know, mimetic warfare in order.

It's basically become a tool of governance to achieve his political aims.

And what's fascinating to me about it is we knew, you know, in the later part of his first term that he was using this type of, you know, he used he used memes considerably more so than, you know, any other world leader at the time.

For me, it's kind of like an emotional hand grenade.

And the other thing is, I'm sure you know, Sunday, my column, Sloptocracy and Byline Times, ran on Saturday.

By Sunday, there was a 10-hour bender of AI slop coming out of Trump's true social posts.

And I believe, again, super dangerous.

And now OpenArt is over 70 million AR with just about 60 employees, redefining what creativity and democratizing creativity looks like.

Koko and I talk about the inflection of open art, how they've iterated to what the platform is today, her view on AI slop and what makes actually good AI-generated products, and so much more.

This was a really rich conversation, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Let's get to it.

But he's posting all the time.

And he's doing what every other 80-year-old, 70-year-old boomer is doing, creating AI slop of themselves and thinking it's amazing.

Has anyone else experienced this phenomenon before? Of, like, people, like, I don't know what, I think it's with, and it's not to be insulting, but, like, not everybody is a creative, artistic type of person.

Not everybody's a musician, let's say, or a painter, or an artist, or a graphic designer, or, right.

And they think it's amazing.

And it's not amazing.

It's just AI slop.

And it's a lot of, you know, those types of people.