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At a panel on AI slop and got this email. This is the cost, making hundreds of thousands of people a day try to decide if they are talking to a real person or not.

So “slop” is the negative externalities imposed on consumers by the imposition of synthetic communications by profit-seeking entities.

A negative externality is a shifting of costs. As the cost of a transactional communication shrinks to zero for a business they are incentivized to massively scale their funnel and so massively increase the time wasted by 99% of the recipients of a message. We only have 24 hours in a day.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative includes the Formula of the Universal Law and the Formula of Humanity. Act as if your choice/act will be repeated by everyone; treat other people as an end not a means. AI is the perfect tool to violate both laws.

First question is wrangling with the fact that in the attention economy - content is now the surplus and attention is the scarcity. Of course content will be devalued.

Related: bsky.app/profile/ling...

Took an hour but the term “socio-technical system” was raised by Jen Weldon at Columbia, god bless.

Chasing AI content optimization is that same “always chase scale” folly that has led us to “Google Zero” today.