I wonder if they went straight to "AI" as an insult independently from the older generations, or if they were using "slop" like the rest of us but had to adopt a new insult because "slop" has been co-opted to refer to things that are terrible whether AI or not.
While slop seems to be the popular term online, I never hear it spoken aloud. With Gen Alpha’s exposure to AI mostly through school, spoken media (youtube, tv), and their parents, “AI” probably cropped up independently as an insult
I feel "slop" is more specifically about the quality of some output rather than a synonym for "bullshit" like "AI" appears to be. And like "bullshit", "AI" can mean either "not true", "poor quality", or "this/that sucks".
And "That’s so slop" sounds awkward. But mostly I think the kids haven’t even heard of "AI slop" which isn’t really in the general lexicon, at least yet. That is, the prevalence of its use in these circles is a bubble effect. I doubt anybody ever uses it in kids' Tiktoks or Youtubes or whatever.
Slop meant cheap garbage meant for mass consumption before it was used for AI. The roots are actually antisemitic. 4chan's cooking board used "goyslop" to mean fast food and other cheap consumerist foods that they claimed the illuminati or jewish conspiracy or whateve fed to non jews to keep them unhealthy. Its crazy how often 4chan's neonazi rambling are the start of so many cultural phenomena. They supported trump way before he became a serious candidate in 2016
People give 4chan far too much credit. Slop was a term that was used, maybe not widely, well before it was picked up by internet racists. Slop was used to refer to the stuff you'd feed to pigs, and if you were American, school children.
The term is a compound word joining goy, a Hebrew and Yiddish word for a non-Jew or gentile,[4][3] and slop, meaning food waste or refuse of low quality
So you're telling me that a word which has "slop" in its origins is itself the origin of "slop"?
This must be the first case of circular etymology!
There are a couple of other cases. Dog was once (1845, UK) slang for sausage, due to fears of dog meat. Then a hot sausage was a hot dog, and then hot dog was a sausage, and finally just dog was slang for a sausage again, with the sinister implication removed. I also found pepper, from Latin (from Sanskrit?), leading to pep, the thing a pepper does to you, leading back to pepper (a kind of pre-game warm-up in baseball designed to give players pep).
You might object that those are really back-and-forth, but so is the claim being made here about slop. (I kind of doubt the claim though.)
I don't think your examples apply though. The dog example is just dog meaning sausage, sometimes with a temperature quality added (or ignored), but always a sausage with no other connotations.
The pepper one, maybe a little, though according to Etymonline [0] pep is short for pepper, so it's all the same really.
That’s a different word. And it’s a word that came long after “slop.” It only makes sense if you know what “slop” means. I don’t actually understand why you’re linking me to this.
I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.
That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.
I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.
I think there’s 2 factors at play. 1) they grew up with technology rather than having it introduced later in life and 2) they grew up with a version that is arguably quite negative.
For e.g millennials, we didn’t have internet until our teens, and the early years of the internet looked very different from the ad-infested hellscape that it is today.
Those younger generation are in a really dark place right now. In many cities they will never be able to afford a house; and on top of that AI labs are now saying they will never have a job.
Effectively, they will never have a true life. They will just meander around here and there, making money whatever ways they can, surviving, and ultimately pass away from something they can’t afford to fix.
That, or become violent. I'm not saying that in a supportive way, moreso thinking of uprisings historically arising from people with no other option. Although, that was before facial recognition technology...
They didn't need facial recognition technology because they were physically in one place and the cops could just arrest everyone in that place - if there were enough cops which there never were.
In like five cities in the USA. I live in a top 10 city by population in the USA (so it's not "flyover"), and the median home price is 288–319, while median HHI is 89. That's easily in the recommended home loan range of 3*HHI.
Look, I'm sorry you can only be happy living in SV, but there's plenty of jobs in the boring parts of America, and the homes are affordable.
All that being said, homeownership is largely a scam, financially. Use your downpayment as a market investment and rent. You'll end up with more money when you retire, and as a bonus, you aren't tied to one geographic location if you lose your job.
The only reason apartments can even exist is because of economies of scale. If you have one rental property, it's virtually impossible to make money (certainly not in a way that outpaces index funds) because you don't have the economies of scale at your disposal.
I hired a few contractors out of the bay area to another state where their salary was 1/3 a nice permanent home and they ended up scattering to other parts of the country. One even went back to the Bay Area. Yes there are nice places to live besides the bay area.
Your entire premise is one that's missing important context. Based on the numbers you provide, you're probably in Chicago or Dallas, maybe Austin, but that's pushing more like 400K.
Homes in the median are generally not viable unless you don't have a family or don't care about quality schools. In my city (90K), two houses that are identical but divided by the school district boundary between rank #1 and rank #265 out of 359 is a difference of $300K. One would be within the median and the other well above.
And let me be clear: ALL HOUSING IS A SCAM FINANCIALLY. Rent screws you one way and housing screws you another.
Why? Serious question, they completely lack the context essential to understand, the previous generation does not seem to have an improved understanding either, they are just users. Consumers of ads.
Parents around me are somehow quite aware of the problems, some more deeper in, some less:
Esp. the ones from the education group are, agains my expectation, very well educated and up-to-date regarding problems of all this stuff. So, yes. For sure, Im in a bubble and I do not know about people & their society outside of my bubble.
The problem with that though, they don't really get to see what great feats a healthy adult brain is allegedly capable of, for example from their parents, nor their teachers if we're being honest for a millisecond. So why bother? Offline adult brains have failed at preventing any of this - nor are they more successful. It's really not brain health that predicts success in 2026.
Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?
Yes, they do. Social media is, ironically, full of young Gen-Z rediscovering the joys of the analog world, saying they want to get off social media, looking into dumb phones. You don't see many "grown adults" talking about it. They're too far gone.
OK, transferring this would also mean then that teens aware about the bad things with smoking/alkohol/etc.?
Yes. Smoking and alcohol are less popular with young people than they've ever been. The social pressure and perception of smoking or even drinking as cool and rebellious have mostly vanished.
I have a different perspective and I clearly see that they need guidance, same with their folks in school.
It depends, no one's saying that the 'aware of societal ills' position is even in the majority, but it is a considerable group, especially with the older ones. I see polarization where one group trends towards full brainrot and the other trends towards full disillusionment. Again, this is not the majority opinion, but it seems at least common enough.
They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
Opposite of my experience. A few family members and their friends invited me to a discord server recently; I'll join for games some nights. They're very acutely aware of how things work. We talk a lot about how even their schoolmates don't really use social media much (at least, not the big ones) and despise AI.
I'm a fan of generated music and have run across some generated vids I like. I've seen some really creative stuff which took existing fiction and generated vid content around that. Previously, that content simply would not have been created because it would have been way too expensive. I know I'm not the only one out there who enjoys it at times.
There is undoubtedly some performative element, how big that is who knows?
Confessing to liking generated music is wild and legitimately embarrassing. Somehow, even compared to ripoff visual art, fake music is even more obviously plagiaristic. The stuff that it's ripping off already exists and isn't even hard to find since ALL of it is billed exactly as the style/genre that it's stealing from. That's the equivalent of framing and hanging a "ghibli style" generated print in your living room.
This is what I mean, people don't feel the same way. I find the lyrics creative enough, the style hits, that's all I'm looking for. I don't find most music on the market that interesting, anyway. I found people making music about UFOs and disclosure of all things, there isn't exactly a huge market for that. It's allowing people to express things in music they previously weren't.
This is the kind of stuff which will just cause people to be contrarian and like it because we're told it's something to be embarrassed over. People put human-created content on way too high of a pedestal.
I find it interesting that we have tools which can take a general concept and sound and create hours and hours of content out of that and I don't consider it any different than remixing human stuff, it is still human at its core.
Honestly, for the people who hate this stuff, the best thing you can do is not to mock people in this way because I promise you, that's how you get contrarians. Do you know how rude it is to be told that what you like is legitimately embarrassing? What caused you to say that to another human being? Come on!
Everyone likes slop. That's why Instagram, Tiktok and Linkedin were so popular pre-AI.
They don't like slop when they're looking for non-slop and they recognise the slop, because it's not solving their problem. If they don't recognise the slop they'll just treat it as non-slop and use it, and in this case they arguably still liked it.
NAT and the slow adoption of IPv6 are partly to blame for this; so are phones. To host your own anything, you need a machine that can be left turned on (so a desktop fixed in one place) and an IP address.
> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
You and the GP are talking about totally different things.
Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.
The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.
Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.
Every generation is full of people that have a strong aversion to tech. The mistake was thinking it would magically only be the Boomers with that problem, but I've always known people in my age group who needed that remedial tech class in college.
It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.
But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.
Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.
They can't use a Windows-95-style filesystem for the same reason I can't use IBM-style JCL and COBOL. That is not the entire field of computing, in fact it's barely any of the field of computing which is the reason they can't use it. Just because that paradigm was once dominant, doesn't mean it still is.
And what replaced it? Can you do the same tasks within that unstated "new paradigm"? Not knowing how to use a desktop computer limits you from all creative software from IDEs to video editors. That's like saying illiteracy is just a new oral paradigm.
But they are all still using traditional file systems constantly, but usually through an abstraction that gives them less understanding and control. Dragging stuff around on a smart phone is often changing some files and folders under the hood. The knowledge of how things work one step down the abstraction layer is still valuable for anyone who wants more than the lowest level control and understanding of what they're doing.
Do they have the motivation to learn though? You could say the same about gen Z with books; it's just that many have never cared enough to make it a habit.
That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.
Maybe the impacts but Gen Z at least the younger ones really struggle with technology. Things like file systems (even the gui kind) and the keys in a keyboard - had one ask me what’s a semicolon, he was a fully formed adult. They are not digital natives they were raised from behind the walls of the iGarden.
Google drive, icloud drive, anything drive is also file/folders based. Someone that doesn't know about that is a modern-day illiterate. Yeah, I know, there are many of them nowadays.
Are they actually? Google Drive has folders, but there's no concept of things like "which folder is this file in", you can have access to many root folders but not a list of them all, and the most convenient way to find anything is to search.
It’s the opposite reason , for them social media is everything, and if that’s ai , it’s not cool , influencers don’t like it , until new ai influencers will emerge and will break a stereotype. It’s a s simple as that
I think the key is that young people get to approach new technology playfully, over-use it, and make mistakes.
I learned lessons as a teenager on Twitter in 2012 that clearly none of the middle-aged people posting constantly on the company Slack ever internalized.
I can't imagine what gave you that idea. I find there is a small slice of people who actually understand technology and it's massively underrepresented by the younger generations. They have no concept of files/folders or how the computer works at any level. Their views are often half-baked (I know mine were) and the news never actually portrays what the majority are thinking. The news is much more interested in quick hits and shock pieces "Kids are going back to dumb phones" (no they aren't), "Kids are using paper maps" (nope, a few people find them quirky and treat them as art, they aren't using them).
You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.
Fair, but I also think that kids aren't any better at seeing the externalities. Kids are very good at following what is "hip" and it's currently in vogue to dislike AI. But just because their influencer-doom-scroll-fed brains are currently hearing "AI Bad" doesn't mean they have any actual understanding.
I'm sure this is some kind of logical fallacy but: show me a kind not on TikTok/Reels/IG/brainrot that has a coherent argument against AI and I'll be interested in listening. Outside that it's all echo chambers on social media IMHO.
I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
People are taking your words to the literal meaning and miss the forest for the trees.
Kids aren't conditioned by society and are more in touch with their instinctual drives than adult people. They are much more keen to perceive that a piece of technology isn't "good" or "natural" or "desirable" without being able to form a reasoned argument. Any kid grown on an iPad is able to tell that it's an unnatural environment, and less preferable than growing up among and being cared by other humans.
It's a bit like that IQ curve meme, where the uneducated person (the children in this case) and genius agree that the modern world has gone too far, while the average adult self-indulgently defends our modern world, crying that we should be grateful to technology and if it weren't for it we would be dying of dysentery and we shouldn't resist AI but just learn to embrace it, yadda yadda.
I'd rather trust the instincts of a kid than the rationalizations of many adults, in this case.
Wonderful writeup, I couldn't have formulated it better! Honestly, I never expected my comment to gain traction but I find it interesting that it had such resonance in both directions.
In a way I am happy I left so much to the imagination for open interpretation.
Doesn't tell us anything. This would be good if that meant they've developed some kind of "taste" for human output, I highly doubt it and for sure it will not reduce over-reliance on "AI" for school homework. I will not be surprised when this will be considered a "lost generation" from many points of view.
It's just the new term for "NPC" (like "My teacher is such an NPC"), meaning someone/something is bland or generic (like a non-playable character in a video game).
Why do we need to decipher this like its some abstract concept? While AI's output is impressive to older generations clearly younger folks think its ass otherwise it wouldn't be an insult.
In the world of arts/media, I think AI basically only has a future as a hidden thing. Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you, in order to dismiss your work. For a lot of people/things, it already is - see Hank Green, or the daily comments about "I don't want to read what you didn't write."
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
Maybe, but the slop will still be painfully visible and avoided. I don't need to be told it's AI when I see a perfectly-formatted and overly-detailed comment — I already know.
That used to be true of autotune too. It was either tastefully hidden, or obvious and trashy. Then projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III put it front and center and it's been a legitimate tool ever since.
I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
Autotune, and quantization in general, is a legitimate artistic choice though. It's like using a ruler. It's not strictly required either.
AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.
One mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not. Another mistake is that approximations are always enough to satisfy all problems, or at least "real world" problems. That's obviously not true either. That's flat out ignorance.
Autotune is legitimate as a surgical tool, used as little as necessary so you can't ever hear it, not when it's front and center as they have tried to do in the 2010 era of awful.
AI is still in the 2010 autotune phase, where more is better.
It’s autoslop can become an adjective for Generative AI content whether it’s hidden or not. It’s so AI - can mean different things to different generations - derogatory for Gen Alpha and like a good thing for older generations
I really doubt it. I think more and more people will get used to it and accept it. It's not going anywhere. The best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them and then what will the rest of the artists and creatives do? Refuse to engage with modernity? I doubt it.
It only takes a single project to show it works to get other people jumping on board. Some amount of gamers are pretty vocal about it (though I'm sure it's being used in most studios these days in some fashion). If a company creates a game which embraces the "slop" and has great assets on a fun game are people going to avoid it? If that works out, will companies following them avoid it? That's just not how people work.
he best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them
But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.
If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.
You're replacing some artist and empowering others. If a single creative can gen a 3 hour movie (we'll pretend it is high-quality), then they can do things which were previously impossible. Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?
Again, that is not what either sales pitch was nor long term vision. It was sold LITERALLY with "hahahha artists are useless now, AI will replace them'.
And quite a few on HN run that talking point too.
Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?
Oddly, no. I remeber it, because I found it weird. I found the open hostility toward creatives very noticeable. The way this campaign came across made me reject the "refuse to engage with modernity" style of arguments. If you run around insulting and taunting people, them rejecting you is not necessary rejection of modernity. It is rejection of insults and taunts targeted at them.
We know our society doesn’t value creative people. It never has, really. The greats of the classical era all had sponsors because it has never been workable for most people to earn their living in a creative field. Today you have to come from generational wealth pretty much.
But also people have bad taste. AI music really only works on people who don’t critically listen to it. Most people just seem to want a catchy hook and the general structure of a pop song, and that’s how Spotify gets away with it.
But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.
It allows them to take on tasks they could not before.
For example, creating a game where before you'd have to pay for assets or creating a movie to where you'd have to pay for a lot of various things. I gave an example earlier where I've watched vids people generated based on existing fiction. These are artists (you're still framing the shot, selecting dialogue, etc), and they could not have done this before; it would have been too expensive.
Some artists get cut out of the loop but it allows small teams to do what was impossible. Is this not valid?
I went to buy a new phone about a year ago - all the branding/blurbs etc was "AI this! AI that!"
I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.
I actually agree with your prediction (on a longer time-scale though) but because I'm convinced it'll go the opposite, where AI begins to blend in to services people use in the background more and more, and people slowly move on and stop caring about it, both in terms of hype and doomerism.
I have heard multiple arguments that point towards this future, where AI largely becomes "normal" technology. I'm hopeful for it. There are tons of great use cases for AI, but it absolutely should not be in... everything.
This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.
Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.
I almost always use Claude when shopping online, to find unknown unknowns. And I loved using Claude to plan a recent trip, instead of not bothering to plan at all because it’s so tedious. Just as a counterexample.
Since GP compared this to the dot com era, I’ll just say this all tracks
You are using Claude like people use search engines. Back then there were tons of people who said they don’t need the internet or google to buy things just like they say the same things with AI
But people don’t control the market. Once Amazon bullied their way to 50% of all retail sales people no longer had a choice. It’s all coming from the same warehouses so you might as well get the lowest price
If it’s cost effective to have an LLM operated business, that business will outcompete the ones you like until they either fold or end up looking like everybody else.
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
The slogan that keeps coming to mind to me is 'AI has a massive PR problem'
When such a disruptive and powerful technology is made popular by slop art that undervalues creators and shits upon the cultural value of the arts, by unlikeable billionaires telling people how you'll soon be out of a job, by having it forced upon you by your boss, by marketing teams pushing for doomerism to increase the IPO value, you know that no PR campaign will ever save it and make it palatable for the masses.
And it's for the best, I'll say. AI as a technology is here to stay, but the masses will be wary and mildly disgusted by it for a very long time. The lunatic dreams of artificial superintelligences ruling over humanity are accepted to be blasphemy, not a glorious future to rush towards. The tech world is still too far deep in its echo chamber to see that no one really wants whatever they are selling.
AI seems like a better derogatory adjective for most AI generated tweets, comments, blogs, reels, slop grenades that’s thrown at us these days. I wish a better adjective or slang comes along that clearly means inauthentic content
My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:
Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.
Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.
He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.
I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.
If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.
Not to be taken too literally but, everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file. You don't need a server. Yes, many clipboard/camera/mic/etc. APIs and other sensitive stuff are restricted but it's great for starting.
And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring and absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.
In a similair boat with my 11 y/o. My observations leave me still optimistic that what comes out the other side is generally positive, despite a lot of reasonable dread that a lot of us also (justifiably) feel about the current era surrounding generative models.
Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where it supports creativity, no ai where it destroys creativity. The kids are alright.
My elementary-aged kids call AI-generated content "slop" and actively ask me if some videos on Youtube are slop before watching them. I'm proud. I think they will be able to detect AI manipulated content far better than older generations.
Found a (many years old) video of an oranutang driving a golf cart -> "dad that's AI can't believe you fell for that"
"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"
Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"
I suspect "That's so AI" is just the bad toupee fallacy in action. People only notice the blatant, unpolished slop and meanwhile, the seamless stuff slips right past undetected.
What's ironic is that while kids have seemingly always had a nose for the inauthentic, they have just about no way to express anything of their own identity.
Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.
But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.
"Is "That's AI" the new "six-seven"? No, this bit of slang means something: the young people have simply broadened the definition of AI to make it equivalent to "bullshit"."
How am i supposed to read this? it's hard to do so
Like an FAQ I presume
Like "A quick chat designed to tell you everything you need to know about a story you don't need to know about", it says here[0]
It's been going since forever in this format, I've seen people complain about it here before but I don't really see the problem.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/pass-notes
I wonder if they went straight to "AI" as an insult independently from the older generations, or if they were using "slop" like the rest of us but had to adopt a new insult because "slop" has been co-opted to refer to things that are terrible whether AI or not.
"slop" existed before AI. It wasn't co-opted: it never specifically meant AI-generated.
While slop seems to be the popular term online, I never hear it spoken aloud. With Gen Alpha’s exposure to AI mostly through school, spoken media (youtube, tv), and their parents, “AI” probably cropped up independently as an insult
I feel "slop" is more specifically about the quality of some output rather than a synonym for "bullshit" like "AI" appears to be. And like "bullshit", "AI" can mean either "not true", "poor quality", or "this/that sucks".
And "That’s so slop" sounds awkward. But mostly I think the kids haven’t even heard of "AI slop" which isn’t really in the general lexicon, at least yet. That is, the prevalence of its use in these circles is a bubble effect. I doubt anybody ever uses it in kids' Tiktoks or Youtubes or whatever.
Slop meant cheap garbage meant for mass consumption before it was used for AI. The roots are actually antisemitic. 4chan's cooking board used "goyslop" to mean fast food and other cheap consumerist foods that they claimed the illuminati or jewish conspiracy or whateve fed to non jews to keep them unhealthy. Its crazy how often 4chan's neonazi rambling are the start of so many cultural phenomena. They supported trump way before he became a serious candidate in 2016
People give 4chan far too much credit. Slop was a term that was used, maybe not widely, well before it was picked up by internet racists. Slop was used to refer to the stuff you'd feed to pigs, and if you were American, school children.
I looked up the etymology of "slop" and I did not find any reference to antisemitism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goyslop
So you're telling me that a word which has "slop" in its origins is itself the origin of "slop"?
This must be the first case of circular etymology!
There are a couple of other cases. Dog was once (1845, UK) slang for sausage, due to fears of dog meat. Then a hot sausage was a hot dog, and then hot dog was a sausage, and finally just dog was slang for a sausage again, with the sinister implication removed. I also found pepper, from Latin (from Sanskrit?), leading to pep, the thing a pepper does to you, leading back to pepper (a kind of pre-game warm-up in baseball designed to give players pep).
You might object that those are really back-and-forth, but so is the claim being made here about slop. (I kind of doubt the claim though.)
:D TIL where "hot dog" comes from! Thanks! :D
I don't think your examples apply though. The dog example is just dog meaning sausage, sometimes with a temperature quality added (or ignored), but always a sausage with no other connotations.
The pepper one, maybe a little, though according to Etymonline [0] pep is short for pepper, so it's all the same really.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pep
That’s a different word. And it’s a word that came long after “slop.” It only makes sense if you know what “slop” means. I don’t actually understand why you’re linking me to this.
It has meant the unwanted, waste food scraps dumped into a trough and eaten by pigs (the farm animal) for a lot longer than that.
I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.
That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.
I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.
I'm a little short on primary reference material, but here's an example from 1917: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22692/pg22692-images.ht.... Conversation on language log has at least two others from 1897 and 1920 respectively.
I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
I think there’s 2 factors at play. 1) they grew up with technology rather than having it introduced later in life and 2) they grew up with a version that is arguably quite negative.
For e.g millennials, we didn’t have internet until our teens, and the early years of the internet looked very different from the ad-infested hellscape that it is today.
Before the like button, it was more individualistic. Before web 2.0, before global market penetration had hit 10%, it was mainly early adopters.
Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.
The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.
More likely the adoption increasing to near 100% made it a prime revenue source opportunity for bad actors.
Not everything is Silicon Valley stereotypes trying to feel special.
Those younger generation are in a really dark place right now. In many cities they will never be able to afford a house; and on top of that AI labs are now saying they will never have a job.
Effectively, they will never have a true life. They will just meander around here and there, making money whatever ways they can, surviving, and ultimately pass away from something they can’t afford to fix.
That, or become violent. I'm not saying that in a supportive way, moreso thinking of uprisings historically arising from people with no other option. Although, that was before facial recognition technology...
They didn't need facial recognition technology because they were physically in one place and the cops could just arrest everyone in that place - if there were enough cops which there never were.
Historically people needed to starve a little for this. But perhaps energy shortages might do it today.
I bet they wouldn’t radicalize and elect people with bad intentions in mind.
And the guys outside the AI labs are saying they won't even reach adulthood.
In like five cities in the USA. I live in a top 10 city by population in the USA (so it's not "flyover"), and the median home price is 288–319, while median HHI is 89. That's easily in the recommended home loan range of 3*HHI.
Look, I'm sorry you can only be happy living in SV, but there's plenty of jobs in the boring parts of America, and the homes are affordable.
All that being said, homeownership is largely a scam, financially. Use your downpayment as a market investment and rent. You'll end up with more money when you retire, and as a bonus, you aren't tied to one geographic location if you lose your job.
The only reason apartments can even exist is because of economies of scale. If you have one rental property, it's virtually impossible to make money (certainly not in a way that outpaces index funds) because you don't have the economies of scale at your disposal.
I hired a few contractors out of the bay area to another state where their salary was 1/3 a nice permanent home and they ended up scattering to other parts of the country. One even went back to the Bay Area. Yes there are nice places to live besides the bay area.
Your entire premise is one that's missing important context. Based on the numbers you provide, you're probably in Chicago or Dallas, maybe Austin, but that's pushing more like 400K.
Homes in the median are generally not viable unless you don't have a family or don't care about quality schools. In my city (90K), two houses that are identical but divided by the school district boundary between rank #1 and rank #265 out of 359 is a difference of $300K. One would be within the median and the other well above.
And let me be clear: ALL HOUSING IS A SCAM FINANCIALLY. Rent screws you one way and housing screws you another.
Why? Serious question, they completely lack the context essential to understand, the previous generation does not seem to have an improved understanding either, they are just users. Consumers of ads.
Absolutely not:
Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?
To put just one example.
I've seen the same thing in my family and relatives across all age groups, I doubt they understand it either.
Does your age bracket, in general?
Parents around me are somehow quite aware of the problems, some more deeper in, some less:
Esp. the ones from the education group are, agains my expectation, very well educated and up-to-date regarding problems of all this stuff. So, yes. For sure, Im in a bubble and I do not know about people & their society outside of my bubble.
The problem with that though, they don't really get to see what great feats a healthy adult brain is allegedly capable of, for example from their parents, nor their teachers if we're being honest for a millisecond. So why bother? Offline adult brains have failed at preventing any of this - nor are they more successful. It's really not brain health that predicts success in 2026.
Yes, they do. Social media is, ironically, full of young Gen-Z rediscovering the joys of the analog world, saying they want to get off social media, looking into dumb phones. You don't see many "grown adults" talking about it. They're too far gone.
OK, transferring this would also mean then that teens aware about the bad things with smoking/alkohol/etc.?
Regarding my two 12-year-old-twins, I have a different perspective and I clearly see that they need guidance, same with their folks in school.
Yes. Smoking and alcohol are less popular with young people than they've ever been. The social pressure and perception of smoking or even drinking as cool and rebellious have mostly vanished.
It depends, no one's saying that the 'aware of societal ills' position is even in the majority, but it is a considerable group, especially with the older ones. I see polarization where one group trends towards full brainrot and the other trends towards full disillusionment. Again, this is not the majority opinion, but it seems at least common enough.
They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
Opposite of my experience. A few family members and their friends invited me to a discord server recently; I'll join for games some nights. They're very acutely aware of how things work. We talk a lot about how even their schoolmates don't really use social media much (at least, not the big ones) and despise AI.
Gives me some hope that the kids will be alright.
Most of them are using AI for all their schoolwork while performatively hating it because "it wastes water" or some other half-understood meme.
no? it's because nobody likes AI slop
People actually do like AI slop. I run into older people all the time that think its beautiful and/or fun.
I'm a fan of generated music and have run across some generated vids I like. I've seen some really creative stuff which took existing fiction and generated vid content around that. Previously, that content simply would not have been created because it would have been way too expensive. I know I'm not the only one out there who enjoys it at times.
There is undoubtedly some performative element, how big that is who knows?
Confessing to liking generated music is wild and legitimately embarrassing. Somehow, even compared to ripoff visual art, fake music is even more obviously plagiaristic. The stuff that it's ripping off already exists and isn't even hard to find since ALL of it is billed exactly as the style/genre that it's stealing from. That's the equivalent of framing and hanging a "ghibli style" generated print in your living room.
This is what I mean, people don't feel the same way. I find the lyrics creative enough, the style hits, that's all I'm looking for. I don't find most music on the market that interesting, anyway. I found people making music about UFOs and disclosure of all things, there isn't exactly a huge market for that. It's allowing people to express things in music they previously weren't.
This is the kind of stuff which will just cause people to be contrarian and like it because we're told it's something to be embarrassed over. People put human-created content on way too high of a pedestal.
I find it interesting that we have tools which can take a general concept and sound and create hours and hours of content out of that and I don't consider it any different than remixing human stuff, it is still human at its core.
Honestly, for the people who hate this stuff, the best thing you can do is not to mock people in this way because I promise you, that's how you get contrarians. Do you know how rude it is to be told that what you like is legitimately embarrassing? What caused you to say that to another human being? Come on!
That doesn't refute what GP is saying at all.
If it makes you feel better, it can be rephrased as:
that's not "performative" though?
and how is it "half-understood"? it's simply not the same thing
Everyone likes slop. That's why Instagram, Tiktok and Linkedin were so popular pre-AI.
They don't like slop when they're looking for non-slop and they recognise the slop, because it's not solving their problem. If they don't recognise the slop they'll just treat it as non-slop and use it, and in this case they arguably still liked it.
At least kids back then knew how to host their own TeamSpeak server ;) Clicking yourself a Discrd "server" is the easiest thing you can do.
NAT and the slow adoption of IPv6 are partly to blame for this; so are phones. To host your own anything, you need a machine that can be left turned on (so a desktop fixed in one place) and an IP address.
Discord is definitely one of the big ones for their generation.
You and the GP are talking about totally different things.
Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.
The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.
Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.
Every generation is full of people that have a strong aversion to tech. The mistake was thinking it would magically only be the Boomers with that problem, but I've always known people in my age group who needed that remedial tech class in college.
It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.
But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.
Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.
They can't use a Windows-95-style filesystem for the same reason I can't use IBM-style JCL and COBOL. That is not the entire field of computing, in fact it's barely any of the field of computing which is the reason they can't use it. Just because that paradigm was once dominant, doesn't mean it still is.
And what replaced it? Can you do the same tasks within that unstated "new paradigm"? Not knowing how to use a desktop computer limits you from all creative software from IDEs to video editors. That's like saying illiteracy is just a new oral paradigm.
I don't know the details because I haven't used one, but yes there are video editors for phones and tablets.
And there's a good reason we aren't seeing many videos edited on phones, just as programs written on iPads (RDP notwithstanding).
But they are all still using traditional file systems constantly, but usually through an abstraction that gives them less understanding and control. Dragging stuff around on a smart phone is often changing some files and folders under the hood. The knowledge of how things work one step down the abstraction layer is still valuable for anyone who wants more than the lowest level control and understanding of what they're doing.
Not really any more than I have to understand journalling to use sqlite.
Do they have the motivation to learn though? You could say the same about gen Z with books; it's just that many have never cared enough to make it a habit.
That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.
Maybe the impacts but Gen Z at least the younger ones really struggle with technology. Things like file systems (even the gui kind) and the keys in a keyboard - had one ask me what’s a semicolon, he was a fully formed adult. They are not digital natives they were raised from behind the walls of the iGarden.
Where do you live? Ipad kids here need to be explained what files and folders are. They've never even used a mouse.
That's not what OP is saying.
They're saying they have a better understanding of the impact of technology, not the specifics of using technology.
Which sounds like a soft subject on the periphery.
There’s still a massive disadvantage if you want a technical role and you think the Internet, Web and Wifi are all the same thing.
It is a soft subject.
Directories and files as computing concepts are ~50 years old while the impact of the printing press is around ~600.
The aspects of computing you deem important may be lost to time within a century, while the "soft subject" of social impact will still be felt.
That’s old technology now.
That’s like being GenX and saying millennials never learned to use a rotary phone.
Files and folders are far from old tech. It is like not knowing how to calculate 2+2.
I know this one you ask jev for that right?
Where do you see files and folders nowadays? They're pretty much only used by developers and some corporate offices.
Google drive, icloud drive, anything drive is also file/folders based. Someone that doesn't know about that is a modern-day illiterate. Yeah, I know, there are many of them nowadays.
Are they actually? Google Drive has folders, but there's no concept of things like "which folder is this file in", you can have access to many root folders but not a list of them all, and the most convenient way to find anything is to search.
It’s the opposite reason , for them social media is everything, and if that’s ai , it’s not cool , influencers don’t like it , until new ai influencers will emerge and will break a stereotype. It’s a s simple as that
I think the key is that young people get to approach new technology playfully, over-use it, and make mistakes.
I learned lessons as a teenager on Twitter in 2012 that clearly none of the middle-aged people posting constantly on the company Slack ever internalized.
I can't imagine what gave you that idea. I find there is a small slice of people who actually understand technology and it's massively underrepresented by the younger generations. They have no concept of files/folders or how the computer works at any level. Their views are often half-baked (I know mine were) and the news never actually portrays what the majority are thinking. The news is much more interested in quick hits and shock pieces "Kids are going back to dumb phones" (no they aren't), "Kids are using paper maps" (nope, a few people find them quirky and treat them as art, they aren't using them).
You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.
Fair, but I also think that kids aren't any better at seeing the externalities. Kids are very good at following what is "hip" and it's currently in vogue to dislike AI. But just because their influencer-doom-scroll-fed brains are currently hearing "AI Bad" doesn't mean they have any actual understanding.
I'm sure this is some kind of logical fallacy but: show me a kind not on TikTok/Reels/IG/brainrot that has a coherent argument against AI and I'll be interested in listening. Outside that it's all echo chambers on social media IMHO.
People are taking your words to the literal meaning and miss the forest for the trees.
Kids aren't conditioned by society and are more in touch with their instinctual drives than adult people. They are much more keen to perceive that a piece of technology isn't "good" or "natural" or "desirable" without being able to form a reasoned argument. Any kid grown on an iPad is able to tell that it's an unnatural environment, and less preferable than growing up among and being cared by other humans.
It's a bit like that IQ curve meme, where the uneducated person (the children in this case) and genius agree that the modern world has gone too far, while the average adult self-indulgently defends our modern world, crying that we should be grateful to technology and if it weren't for it we would be dying of dysentery and we shouldn't resist AI but just learn to embrace it, yadda yadda.
I'd rather trust the instincts of a kid than the rationalizations of many adults, in this case.
Wonderful writeup, I couldn't have formulated it better! Honestly, I never expected my comment to gain traction but I find it interesting that it had such resonance in both directions.
In a way I am happy I left so much to the imagination for open interpretation.
My nephew rejects AI and took a creative writing class to get away from it.
Our college library is having a surge of requests for new fiction.
I wonder if this is a combination of burnout and good old fashioned rebellion.
Doesn't tell us anything. This would be good if that meant they've developed some kind of "taste" for human output, I highly doubt it and for sure it will not reduce over-reliance on "AI" for school homework. I will not be surprised when this will be considered a "lost generation" from many points of view.
It's just the new term for "NPC" (like "My teacher is such an NPC"), meaning someone/something is bland or generic (like a non-playable character in a video game).
Why do we need to decipher this like its some abstract concept? While AI's output is impressive to older generations clearly younger folks think its ass otherwise it wouldn't be an insult.
people this young don't even know all the words in your comment
In the world of arts/media, I think AI basically only has a future as a hidden thing. Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you, in order to dismiss your work. For a lot of people/things, it already is - see Hank Green, or the daily comments about "I don't want to read what you didn't write."
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
Maybe, but the slop will still be painfully visible and avoided. I don't need to be told it's AI when I see a perfectly-formatted and overly-detailed comment — I already know.
This sounds like the toupee fallacy.
I wonder if any movie special effects that you notice will be considered AI?
Zach King is a YouTuber to watch on this topic.
That used to be true of autotune too. It was either tastefully hidden, or obvious and trashy. Then projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III put it front and center and it's been a legitimate tool ever since.
I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
“Death of autotune, moment of silence”.
Nah, they were still keen to let people know it made you a clown.
Autotune, and quantization in general, is a legitimate artistic choice though. It's like using a ruler. It's not strictly required either.
AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.
One mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not. Another mistake is that approximations are always enough to satisfy all problems, or at least "real world" problems. That's obviously not true either. That's flat out ignorance.
Autotune is legitimate as a surgical tool, used as little as necessary so you can't ever hear it, not when it's front and center as they have tried to do in the 2010 era of awful.
AI is still in the 2010 autotune phase, where more is better.
It’s autoslop can become an adjective for Generative AI content whether it’s hidden or not. It’s so AI - can mean different things to different generations - derogatory for Gen Alpha and like a good thing for older generations
I really doubt it. I think more and more people will get used to it and accept it. It's not going anywhere. The best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them and then what will the rest of the artists and creatives do? Refuse to engage with modernity? I doubt it.
It only takes a single project to show it works to get other people jumping on board. Some amount of gamers are pretty vocal about it (though I'm sure it's being used in most studios these days in some fashion). If a company creates a game which embraces the "slop" and has great assets on a fun game are people going to avoid it? If that works out, will companies following them avoid it? That's just not how people work.
But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.
If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.
You're replacing some artist and empowering others. If a single creative can gen a 3 hour movie (we'll pretend it is high-quality), then they can do things which were previously impossible. Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?
Again, that is not what either sales pitch was nor long term vision. It was sold LITERALLY with "hahahha artists are useless now, AI will replace them'.
And quite a few on HN run that talking point too.
Oddly, no. I remeber it, because I found it weird. I found the open hostility toward creatives very noticeable. The way this campaign came across made me reject the "refuse to engage with modernity" style of arguments. If you run around insulting and taunting people, them rejecting you is not necessary rejection of modernity. It is rejection of insults and taunts targeted at them.
We know our society doesn’t value creative people. It never has, really. The greats of the classical era all had sponsors because it has never been workable for most people to earn their living in a creative field. Today you have to come from generational wealth pretty much.
But also people have bad taste. AI music really only works on people who don’t critically listen to it. Most people just seem to want a catchy hook and the general structure of a pop song, and that’s how Spotify gets away with it.
But you ask people to pay even $1 for a track they will listen to hundreds of times? No thanks.
So people get what they deserve.
How does AI “empower” artists…?
It allows them to take on tasks they could not before.
For example, creating a game where before you'd have to pay for assets or creating a movie to where you'd have to pay for a lot of various things. I gave an example earlier where I've watched vids people generated based on existing fiction. These are artists (you're still framing the shot, selecting dialogue, etc), and they could not have done this before; it would have been too expensive.
Some artists get cut out of the loop but it allows small teams to do what was impossible. Is this not valid?
I went to buy a new phone about a year ago - all the branding/blurbs etc was "AI this! AI that!"
I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.
I actually agree with your prediction (on a longer time-scale though) but because I'm convinced it'll go the opposite, where AI begins to blend in to services people use in the background more and more, and people slowly move on and stop caring about it, both in terms of hype and doomerism.
I have heard multiple arguments that point towards this future, where AI largely becomes "normal" technology. I'm hopeful for it. There are tons of great use cases for AI, but it absolutely should not be in... everything.
This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.
Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.
I almost always use Claude when shopping online, to find unknown unknowns. And I loved using Claude to plan a recent trip, instead of not bothering to plan at all because it’s so tedious. Just as a counterexample.
Since GP compared this to the dot com era, I’ll just say this all tracks
You are using Claude like people use search engines. Back then there were tons of people who said they don’t need the internet or google to buy things just like they say the same things with AI
But people don’t control the market. Once Amazon bullied their way to 50% of all retail sales people no longer had a choice. It’s all coming from the same warehouses so you might as well get the lowest price
If it’s cost effective to have an LLM operated business, that business will outcompete the ones you like until they either fold or end up looking like everybody else.
This is super naive. And does not follow any other productive technology's trajectory.
Counterexamples: windshield wipers and spellcheck.
I agree strongly with your sentiment.
Historically, including "AI" in a name meant it wasn't complete or ready for prime time use.
I'm not convinced our AI nor ML implementations that throw "AI-powered" into the marketing copy have meaningfully changed that notion.
We don't call spellcheck "SpellcheckAI" or "SpellcheckML" but it is arguably one of the best integrations of AI we've ever seen.
yesh I argue! Spellchrc ist he beat investor humanity has ever conceded of!
The slogan that keeps coming to mind to me is 'AI has a massive PR problem'
When such a disruptive and powerful technology is made popular by slop art that undervalues creators and shits upon the cultural value of the arts, by unlikeable billionaires telling people how you'll soon be out of a job, by having it forced upon you by your boss, by marketing teams pushing for doomerism to increase the IPO value, you know that no PR campaign will ever save it and make it palatable for the masses.
And it's for the best, I'll say. AI as a technology is here to stay, but the masses will be wary and mildly disgusted by it for a very long time. The lunatic dreams of artificial superintelligences ruling over humanity are accepted to be blasphemy, not a glorious future to rush towards. The tech world is still too far deep in its echo chamber to see that no one really wants whatever they are selling.
AI seems like a better derogatory adjective for most AI generated tweets, comments, blogs, reels, slop grenades that’s thrown at us these days. I wish a better adjective or slang comes along that clearly means inauthentic content
i love the "Do say" and "Don't say" sections; how else am i supposed to speak like gen alpha
Yeah, the Guardian's "pass notes" series has been going for a while and is regularly absolute gold[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/07/death-o...
I can't wait until a model slurps this up and answer "What is AI?" with "AI is a pejorative term inferring low effort and dubious quality". Mmm-mm.
Can confirm my 8 year old uses this to roast as well.
The whole article is so AI.
My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:
Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.
Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.
He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.
I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.
If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.
Not to be taken too literally but, everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file. You don't need a server. Yes, many clipboard/camera/mic/etc. APIs and other sensitive stuff are restricted but it's great for starting.
And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring and absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.
In a similair boat with my 11 y/o. My observations leave me still optimistic that what comes out the other side is generally positive, despite a lot of reasonable dread that a lot of us also (justifiably) feel about the current era surrounding generative models.
Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where it supports creativity, no ai where it destroys creativity. The kids are alright.
Counterpoint: one could say the exact same thing about the internet, but social media has (IMHO) proved... sub-optimal at a societal level.
Can confirm my 11 year old says 'thats so AI' and means it as a slight insult.
My elementary-aged kids call AI-generated content "slop" and actively ask me if some videos on Youtube are slop before watching them. I'm proud. I think they will be able to detect AI manipulated content far better than older generations.
Found a (many years old) video of an oranutang driving a golf cart -> "dad that's AI can't believe you fell for that"
"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"
Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"
I suspect "That's so AI" is just the bad toupee fallacy in action. People only notice the blatant, unpolished slop and meanwhile, the seamless stuff slips right past undetected.
What's ironic is that while kids have seemingly always had a nose for the inauthentic, they have just about no way to express anything of their own identity.
Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.
But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.
It's true. My 9yo and 6yo use this as an insult all the time.
6yo? How much screen time do you have to have to come up with that.
"Is "That's AI" the new "six-seven"? No, this bit of slang means something: the young people have simply broadened the definition of AI to make it equivalent to "bullshit"."
Perhaps criticial thinking is not in decline