Oh... No it isn't... Everyone and their aunt was writing books about the JS framework of the month before that... Slop before the AI slop existed.

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JonathanMerklin a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think the universal applicability of Sturgeon's Law necessarily leads to a contradiction here.

My incredibly, almost insultingly oversimplified model for what I, a lifelong consumer of text, feels is happening here goes like:

90% of culture is "bad". 10% is "good". Previously, we'd iterate on the 10% and (I remind you: oversimplified) discard the 90%, but `derive :: culture -> culture` still follows Sturgeon's Law, so at the next iteration, 90% is "bad" and 10% is good. But now what's happening is we're iterating on the whole sample, and a polished turd is still feculent. So in the next iteration, 90% + 90% of 10% of the culture is "bad". And so on.

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antisthenes a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most content is slop, whether books or TV shows or movies or journalism.

That's why we have IMDB Top 250 lists, and books called "Classics". Curating collections and having taste has always been important, and is even more important now.

AI hasn't really changed that. There is good investigative AI-assisted writing today and there is also fully AI-slop fly-by-night websites made in 15 minutes with Claude.

	▲	TFNA 21 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Curation and the creation of canons requires enough people to have a shared context and be able to build community among themselves. This has been undermined by the shift from early-internet arts websites to social-media platform's algorithmic feeds where people are easily atomized into personal silos. And once atomized, they don't know there are alternatives to slop. For-profit taste-making websites either got acquired and extinguished, or are in dire straits now, and in any event their influence over core audiences (especially young people with time for discovery) has waned to almost nothing. The non-profit blogosphere blogging about arts and literature largely grayed out and was never replaced; you can still set up a blog today, but you'll be talking to the void, you won't attract any real slice of your topic's fandom community like you once could. A putative scene hangs on at Substack, but if you look closely it's largely hustling and grifting. All in all, curation just isn't there any more at a societal level in the same way it was in the twentieth or early twenty-first centuries.
	▲	komali2 a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I maintain that the AI era is forcing us to finally build good filters.
	▲	incognition a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Part of the outrage is so called high literary critics have been fooled at book prizes. Maybe a revolution like the blind taste testing of fine wines needs to happen in literature.

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thundergolfer 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You read “of culture” and think of JS framework textbooks?

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esafak a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you think that's the kind of book the article is about?