alt Hacker NewsOh... 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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antisthenes • today at 4:24 PM
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.
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esafak • today at 4:22 PM
Do you think that's the kind of book the article is about?
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.