I think the biggest issue with stable diffusion based approaches has always been poor compositional ability (putting stuff where you want), and compounding anatomical/spatial errors that gave the images an offputting vibe.

All these problems are trivially solvable (solved) using traditonal 3d meshes and techniques.

IMO current generation models are capable of creating significantly better than "slop" quality content. You need only look at NotebookLM output. As models continue to improve, this will only get better. Look at the rate of improvement of video generation models in the last 12-24 months. It's obvious to me we're rapidly approaching acceptable or even excellent quality on-demand generated content.

I can only speak for myself, but a large and growing proportion of the text I read every day is LLM output. If Claude and Deepseek produce slop, then it's a far higher calibre of slop than most human writers could aspire to.

You're too old and jaded [1]. It's for kids inventing infinite worlds to role play and adventure. They're going to have a blast.

[1] Not meant as an insult. Working professionals don't have time for this stuff.

Minecraft is procedurally generated slop, yet it's insanely popular.

Screw Metaverse. Let's make a VR holodeck.

Star Trek's Holodeck is actually a good case study here (especially with the recent series, Lower Decks, going as far as making two episodes that are interactive movies on a holodeck, going quite deep into how that could work in practice both in terms of producing and experiencing them).

One observation derived here is that infinite procedural content at your fingertip doesn't necessarily kill all meaning, if you bring the meaning with you. The two major use cases[0] for the holodeck are:

- Multiplayer scenarios in which you and your friends enjoy some experience in a program. The meaning is sourced from your friendship and roleplay; the program may be arbitrary output of an RNG in the global sense, but it's the same for you and your friends, so shared experience (and its importance as a social object) in your group is retained.

- Single-player simulations that are highly specific. The meaning here comes from whatever is the reason you're simulating that particular experience, and it's connection to the real world. Like idk., a flight simulator of a random space fighter flying over random world shooting at random shit would quickly get boring, but if I can get the simulator to give me a highly accurate cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet, flying over real terrain and shooting at realistic enemies in realistic (even if fictional) storyline - now that would be deeply meaningful to me, because 1) F/A-18 Hornet is a real plane that I would otherwise never experience flying, and 2) I have a crush on this particular fighter because F/A-18 Hornet 3.0 is one of the first videogames I ever played in my life as a kid.

Now, to make Metaverse less like bullshit and more like Star Trek, we'd need to make sure the world generation is actually available to the users. No asset stores, no app marketplace bullshit. We live in a multimodal LLM era - we already have all the components to do it like Star Trek did it: "Computer, create a medieval fantasy village, in style of England around year 1400, set next to a forest, with tall mountains visible in the distance", then walk around that world and tweak the defaults from there.

--

[0] - Ignoring the third use case that's occasionally implied on the show, and that's really obvious given it's the same one the Internet is for - and I'm not talking about cat pictures.

I think you’re being short sighted. Imagine feeding in your favorite TV shows to a generative AI and being able to walk around in the world and talk to characters or explore it with other people.

It worked for Minecraft.

It was rough at first, and needed plenty of tuning, but the terrain and environments it's capable of certainly have a wide audience.

But as far as pure, unbridled generation goes, yeah; I'm sure there will be plenty of slop made in the coming decade.

I think it has its place. For 'background filler' I think it makes a lot of sense; stuff which you don't need to care about, but whose absence can make something feel less real.

To me, this takes the place / augments procedural generation stuff. NPC crowds in which none of the participants are needed for the plot, but in which you can have unique clothing / appearance / lines is not "needed" for a game, but can flesh it out when done thoughtfully.

Recall the lambasting Cyberpunk 2077 got for its NPCs that cycled through a seemingly very limited number of appearances, to the point that you'd see clones right next to each other. This would solve that sort of problem, for example.

> a Metaverse consisting of infinite procedural slop sounds about as appealing as reading infinite LLM generated books

Take a look at the ImgnAI gallery (https://app.imgnai.com/) and tell me: can you paint better and more imaginatively than that? Do you know anyone in your immediate vicinity who can?

Read this satirical speech by Claude, in French https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869448275177764) and in English (https://x.com/pmarca/status/1881869651329913047) and tell me: can you write fiction more entertaining or imaginative than that? Is there someone in your vicinity who can?

Perhaps that's mundane, so is there someone in your vicinity who can reason about a topic in mathematics/physics as well as this: https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1881696226669916408 ?

Probably your answer is "yes, obviously!" to all the above.

My point: deep learning works and the era of slop ended ages ago except that some people are still living in the past or with some cartoon image of the state of the art.

> "Cost to zero" implies drinking directly from the AI firehose with no human in the loop

No. It means the marginal cost of production tends towards 0. If you can think it, then you can make it instantly and iterate a billion times to refine your idea with as much effort as it took to generate a single concept.

Your fixation on "content without a human directing them" is bizarre and counterproductive. Why is "no human in the loop" a prerequisite for productivity? Your fixation on that is confounding your reasoning.