Post #2839670

https://unherd.com/2026/05/how-to-end-the-age-of-slop/ Strawberina and her husband Banannito are expecting. The baby is born, but — shock horror: it’s a zucchini. Banannito breaks down in tears as Strawberina’s twisted affair with the scheming Zuchinito is exposed. We live in bizarre times. For all of the tech industry promises that AI will unlock an age of abundance and innovation, it seems that so far, its greatest achievement is the mass proliferation of AI-slop anthropomorphic fruit TikTok micro-soap operas, which have gained billions of views in just a few months. An infinite tide of AI-generated video is torching our retinas and our souls. Is this it? Is this really the future of culture? An endless torrent of AI slop, engineered by an invisible Slopbeast. Most agree we should reject the Slopbeast. Humanity is built for greater things than amusing itself to death in TikTok pleasure palaces. However, few agree on how we move forward. The difficulty is that changing culture requires changing norms. Yet, if we have no sense of what should replace our current norms, then the task feels impossible. At both the individual and collective levels, few have any idea what humans ought to be beyond pleasure-seeking machines. https://archive.ph/33m1J