It isn’t hard to smell AI Slop – at least not yet. AI slop leaves an odor of metal gears and burning oil. Not literally, of course, but you get the meaning. AI doesn’t get a “meaning” because AI doesn’t have a sense of humor. It doesn’t have a sense of anything. AI doesn’t feel. AI doesn’t really think – it just grinds out slop.
If I still practiced law, I would likely use AI to churn out the majority of mindless pleadings, like demurrers and discovery. “Back in the day”, lawyers would write most of their pleadings, but in today’s environment, I can guarantee you that most lawyers do not write pleadings; they use AI to do it for them.
They still bill at lawyer hourly rates for “prepare and draft”, but AI has replaced human lawyers’ writing. Is that fraud? Absolutely. I saw a lot of billing fraud when I practiced, but I am sure what I witnessed 20 years ago is a poor stepchild to the billing fraud committed by lawyers in the age of AI.
I recently contributed to an online site. Editors warned the writers cohort that “some of you” are using AI. The warning was “cut it out”. I knew it wasn’t directed at me. I also knew who they were referring to. One of the contributors is a hack. I avoided his writing, but on occasion, I’d read one of his 600-word grinder pieces and instantly know most of it was “written” by a machine.
I admit I use “Grammarly.” It’s like a paralegal or an editor correcting punctuation and grammar. I am a terrible speller, and that tech has saved me from looking, well, terrible.
AI is ruining everything. Yesterday, I saw a commercial that was all AI. It mimicked humans and animals pretty well, but it was AI, and even if it was advertising something I wanted, I wouldn’t buy it. PC Magazine reports:
As tools like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo make AI video creation more accessible than ever, “AI slop” is also invading YouTube, according to a report by video-editing firm Kapwing.
The company created a new YouTube account and tracked the number of AI-generated videos it saw on YouTube Shorts. Of the 500 videos it scrolled through, 104 (or 21%) were AI-generated, and 165 (33%) of those 500 videos were what Kapwing considers to be brainrot, or “nonsensical, low-quality video content that creates the effect of corroding the viewer’s mental or intellectual state while watching.”
Yesterday I saw an X post about Kitty Kelly reviewing a new book by Mark Oppenheimer. I am aware of Kitty Kelly. I frankly didn’t know who Mark Oppenheimer was. Kelly wrote books about Jackie Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, and Nancy Reagan. Her own publisher knew she’s a fabulist. Kelly is a hack of the highest order of hacks.
Oppenheimer read Kelly’s “review” of his book. He noted that she made up multiple quotes and pretty much lied about what is in Oppenheimer’s book. Here is a “for instance” of Oppenheimer’s critique of Kelly’s critique:
Will legendary celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley kick back in her Jacuzzi, tell Alexa to ‘play smooth jazz,’ sip some bubbly, fire up ChatGPT, and insert its madcap hallucinations into a review of my book?”…
Anyway, long story short, it seems the piece was by the famous Kitty Kelley, and, as originally posted—the review has since been taken down, although the editor told me that they may post a new and improved version—it contained approximately 1,734 errors, as when Kelley writes, in the second paragraph:
“I just love her,” writes Mark Oppenheimer, who grew up reading and re-reading Blume’s books dozens of times …
But I never write “I just love her.” It’s not in the book, or anywhere else in my writing.
What is my point? Hacks like Kitty Kelly didn’t have the “benefit” of AI when they were lying decades ago. Now, they can lie using AI. Here is an example using AI:
AI is Kelly’s wingman. Producing a fable for a fabulist.
AI “thinks” Kelly is a renowned author and journalist. “Scrupulous” researcher? Kelly is a lowlife, old-as-dirt hack who has been reliably accused of making up her “research”. The Kellys of the world benefit from AI. They will type in a prompt, and AI will gather AI slop off of the internet, make a few changes to “humanize” the bullshit, and zap, they’ve pumped out an article or a book review or, maybe, an entire book. If they were hacks before, now they have a machine to help them with their hackery.
AI is awful. AI is going to ruin, everything.