FROG IN HOT SLOP
If you’re unfamiliar with the boiling frog allegory, it’s a metaphor straight out of Aesop’s fables by way of Blumhouse. It involves a frog and a pot of boiling water. As you may suspect, this is bad news for the frog. It explains that if you attempt to put a frog in a pot of boiling water? It will, (as it is well within its rights to,) fight for its fucking life. If you place a frog in a pot of cool water, however, and then boil the water? The frog will simply sit, and sink, and stare, until it’s dead and fully al dente.
If you’re thinking this sounds like weapons-grade horseshit on a scientific scale, you’re right. According to experiments done to test this, “as the water temperature gradually increases, frogs will become more and more active in their attempts to escape.” In other words, they generally exhibit the behavior of something that would like to be alive. So, file it away with the farmer’s tale of the turkeys that stare, slack-jawed, straight up at rainstorms until they drown.
Sidebar, I’m fascinated by this excerpt from the rain-turkey Snopes article:
The notion that a "dumb" animal would be fascinated by something as mundane as rain is another anthropomorphization. The concept of "fascination" requires a level of intelligence that even the smartest turkeys do not possess. Animals of this order react to a phenomenon such as rain in one of two very simple ways: If they don't mind it, they ignore it (as ducks do); if they don't like it, they seek shelter from it.
Christ, man. I thought you were on the turkeys’ side. “The concept of fascination requires a level of intelligence that even the smartest turkeys do not possess” is something I could imagine Gary Oldman screaming at a group of goons that failed an attempted underworld coup.
To the fable at hand, though: even though frogs are not happily accepting bubbly, permanent peace like a devoted monk, the general idea is useful. What brought it to mind most recently is the preponderance of slop content, and specifically, the rise of AI-generated writing. Oh no! This is an article about AI! Sound the conch over on X, the Everything App! Scramble a squadron of men who are disappointed Google Glass was discontinued and send them, posthaste, to my personal e-mail. Thank you, free thinkers, for this picture of my front door, but given that you can’t put together a grocery list without a data center, I feel confident that you lack the ability to track and kill me.
Thankfully for the mental quietude of everyone involved, I don’t really feel the need to further debate the downfalls of AI. The fact that, for the low cost of a single midwest town’s water supply, a computer can speak to you with the poetry of a moon-faced cheese merchant from a tertiary town in a Bethesda game? This apparently leaves futurists agog. Who am I to behead their wonder?
What’s more fascinating to me is how we got to a point where AI taking writing jobs specifically is actually occurring, given that the product is nigh-unreadable. How actual websites are able to stir AI slop in without the website immediately dying. That multiple supposedly reputable organizations are signing off on prose that reads like a required book report from a fourth-grader that’s actively pissing their pants in front of the class. Aren’t these the same companies that have three meetings a week about the sanctity of their *brand identity*?
Now, is AI writing soulless? Sure. By definition, actually. But I don’t think it even earns the right to that debate, because the end product is so inarguably awful. We don’t need to stare at a skull in our hand and consider what it is to be human because of an article that purports to summarize season four of Stranger Things, yet seems more like a vehicle to deliver a word string developed by the CIA to sleeper agents somewhere.
So how did AI writing get its foot in the door? Unfortunately, I think it’s because of the widespread decline in the quality of published writing in general. Hold, fellow writers! No need to chuck your Pomodoro timer at my head! Put it down! I don’t blame you! I’m guilty of the same thing! The fault lies not with us, nor with the stars, like in that movie about those really sick kids.
I don’t think there’s been a decline in the number of talented writers available. In fact, I don’t even think that they’re not being hired. Unfortunately, for years now, the purpose of especially online publications seems to be to hire a stable of talented writers and then immediately prohibit them from putting out anything that anyone can enjoy.
That’s because anything of worth, writing-wise, is profit-margin poison for an ad-supported business. When you’re reading something engrossing, poring over each line from your piss-perch on your porcelain throne? That’s only a single pageview! And when you’re scrolling at a snail’s pace, absorbing each word? The C-suite is foaming at the mouth, begging you to send the page downward to the next tranche of ads promising to powerwash your colon with chickpeas, somehow.
Don’t confuse this with an intellectual stand. I’m not punching a wall because people are reading online articles instead of The Odyssey in the original Greek. In fact, right now, I’m remembering articles in Electronic Gaming Monthly by Seanbaby, a man famous for a mohawk dyed in accordance with Pepsi’s logo style guide. Which I hope he knows I say with love, knowing that part of the power of a mohawk is the knowledge that its owner is strong enough to take some shit for it. The aforementioned Mr. Baby and I even share an alma mater of sorts in a website called Cracked. There, though they’re anything but alone in this, content was quickly massaged into the preferred shape of offering to sacrifice at the sky altar of the algorithm gods.
You want to know why every website is filled with listicles? It’s because they perfectly serve the purpose of a peanut butter pill pocket to deliver a shitload of ads. Masses of clearly delineated images produce a surplus of negative space. Space to fill with ads for medication that’s meant to cure drop foot, or that suggest your life is shit because your alarm clock doesn’t cost 200 dollars.
They’re also easily mass-produced. The unfortunate friction point of producing a glut of writing is that, well, it requires a bunch of things worth writing about. If you stuck to producing things that actually need to exist? You’d end up like one of those craftsmen in India that carves individual chess pieces, having to explain to a YouTube documentarian why you deserve to exist at the same time as injection molding.
Drop the content in the bucket and repeat, until the bell rings. What pays the bill is a lot of things to look at, not a few things worth looking at. Then, of course, you have to trick people into thinking they need to read the slop by weaponizing the endlessly sinister “curiosity gap”. Which is how you end up with a browsing experience where every article feels like someone faking an injury in a nearby alley so a group of ads can block the exit once you cross the threshold.
I remember being issued a new pieces-per-day quota that required me to warn that this amount wouldn’t allow me to spellcheck my work, much less review and rewrite. This was an acceptable sacrifice. I’m sure a lot of other, better writers than me have received the same decree. So off to Reddit we go, fingers poised over the screenshot shortcut of Shift+Win+S.
Another thing that’s stuck with me is something I saw one day, mass-screencapping Reddit posts about weird Star Wars lore for my uh, “writing.” It was a single comment, nestled among posts about whoever the fuck Kit Fisto is. It started with something like “Hey, if you’re harvesting this reddit thread for your listicles”. Which was me! What followed was a wish for, and description of, bodily torture so craven it would have Jigsaw filling a composition notebook cover-to-cover in tight cursive.
In the words of 50 Cent, “what he say fuck me for?” We share a common enemy, angry Reddit man. You’re yelling at a Chipotle cashier about the price of your burrito. I don’t want to be here either, but the person who’s responsible only speaks to venture capitalists, outside of maybe occasionally asking first-class flight attendants for scotch with “no ice, for the love of god”. This is just another fight on the factory floor for the winner to feel a rush of power for one moment.
In my experience in corporate-backed creative fields, the whole process feels a bit like executives buying a beautiful bird, clipping its wings, and then going “why the hell was this thing so expensive? It can’t even fly!” Then they replace it with a Furby, because it does all the same stuff, but won’t ask for food. Did you know Furbies were supposedly banned from the Pentagon for fears of them retaining national security secrets and squeaking them out from a closet years later? Anyways. I worry that we’re actively suppressing a generation of talent.
Whether it’s writers forced to gather stories of wedding planners’ worst bridezillas, comedians forced to forgo their jokes in favor of tepid-at-best crowdwork, or artists forced to preface every painting with a lo-fi music backed timelapse of the process, it feels like dark fucking times. Shit, I’ve seen people forced to show themselves throwing pottery in a sports bra just so people will see the finished product.
Luckily, and so this isn’t entirely screams at a cloud, I do think there’s something we can do. That’s to demand, and support if possible, good things. People are still making them, I guarantee you that. If you’re here, you’ve read 1600 words of a fucking newsletter, so you’ve clearly got the stones for it. Build (non-parasocial) connections with creators directly, because it’s a lot harder for capital to edge in on human-to-human support.
These sort of things are appearing, and, in a vote for the continued existence of taste, are surviving. For example, look at DROPOUT, from the ashes of the departed CollegeHumor (and I say that even though they fired me!) On the writing side, worker-owned sites like Defector are putting up content-quality batting averages that are only obtainable when everyone involved gives a shit. I know not everyone’s financially liquid enough to throw money at these things, but if you can, there’s a real reward there. I can tell you it’s a lot better use of your money than paying fifteen dollars a fucking month for a badge on Instagram.
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