George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four | Hacker News Reader

George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

openculture.com

84 pointsdoener59 comments

I'd like to share the most prophetical quote I've read about generative AI:

> Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and crosschecking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only, the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next!

-- Galley Slave, a short story by Isaac Asimov, 1942

Incredibly to see the kind of prophecy Asimov had.

The Wikipedia one always get me. He was like Nostradamus for nerds.

Inspired to come up with these original ideas

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Dune

"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger." - God Emperor of Dune

Hard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.

I'll believe it when I see it

We could have undone wage slavery a long time ago if automation of work was a sufficient condition.

Here’s why I don’t think so. If we look at the milestone efficiency gains over the past century across a broad base of industries, virtually none of those could have been accomplished by contemporary automation technologies. We are only beginning to cross that threshold. It was the sacrifice of our forefathers who brought us there, just as it was the sacrifice of theirs who brought us from dank caves and death in our 30s from curable illness, into the enlightened world.

That's great, but I think Herbert had a vision of this incredible galaxy teeming with truthsayers, human computers, and space travel, and just needed a convenient excuse to explain away the total lack of computing devices.

It was a convenient choice because its so obviously a foreseeable problem with thinking machines. see 'torment nexus'

It's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Roald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.

Roald

Autocorrect error

Grammatizator error

“There are many other little refinements too, Mr Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

“Where?”

“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-theg...

I just read this. Thanks for bringing it up.

They didn't mention my favorite part, the name. "Prolefeed" I've been waiting for someone to pick up the word so people would get more self-conscious about consuming it.

"I read a self-help book. It's really good. Everything works out if you'd just follow the rules."

https://youtu.be/KOiDWGs4JE4?t=28s

wHNston

> and a steady stream of pacifying media

Seems like he also predicted internet brain damage...

I'm old enough to feel "get off my lawn" about this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" - heard this about TV, internet, iPhone in my lifetime.

It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consumption.

"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers."

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

> a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984"

Every damaging invention in isolation isn't a big deal. The big deal is setting precedent and the accumulation.

> not puerile consumption.

I agree, it's more akin to seeing how much sawdust one can put in a rice crispy before someone notices. No one wants to eat sawdust, nor is there a mindless desire to.

A lifetime is not that long though, and I'd argue that TV was the start of a chapter that internet, iphones, etc. are just ever-increasingly addictive and immediate iterations on.

I'm not saying that we didn't have anything like that before tv, or that specific individuals or groups throughout history might not have had something similar, but I do feel TV, and especially its audio-visual nature, really changed something in a way that, say, the printing press never quite did.

EDIT: and to add, my feeling on how many people seem to use LLM's is that in a way it's extra insidious because it's /tailored/, often 'puerile' interaction.

He wasn’t predicting slop; he was describing mass culture, which already existed when he was writing.

Fitting how the author felt compelled to use Gemini to generate an ugly banner for their blog post. An image completely devoid of meaning, that adds nothing to the article except a few kilobytes: slop under any definition.

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