tldr: ai slop influences culture by shifting the Overton window, which then feeds back into AI during training
I want to describe a dynamic by which AI generated outputs might push the world to become more and more cartoonish, strange, simple, and generally slop like which I am calling hyperslopification (AI slop + hyperstition). This work is somewhat speculative but I will also try to point to real world examples of where I think this might already be happening. This is a particular instance of the broader concern that AI distorts culture by changing the memetic environment.
Slop is hyperpalatable
The term ‘ai slop’ is generally used to designate ai generated content that is low in quality and produced with little effort, often in large volumes. However I want to emphasise a common property of ai slop which I will call its ‘hyperpalatability’. Hyperpalatable food is engineered to be easy to consume and addictive by including large amounts of salt, fat and sugar; ingredients which we have evolved to crave. AI slop similarly exploits our evolved preferences by producing cultural artefacts that optimise for aesthetic properties like symmetry and legibility as well as more visceral ones like sexiness and cuteness.
Cuter than a real kitten?
This has been a general trend in our culture since well before AI. In particular social media and recommendation algorithms have already altered the memetic environment in a way that selects for cheap manipulation of human attention; clickbait, ragebait, thirst traps, etc. However generative AI pushes this to extreme levels for a number of reasons:
* You get what you measure. Hyperpalatable aesthetics are by definition easy to measure, so they are easy to train AI for. In fact training procedures like RLHF are likely to optimise for these even if it is not being done deliberately or cynically, since they reflect actual human preferences (at least in some sense).
* Increased variance. AI generated images are not restr