To be alive in our time is to be bombarded from all sides, at all hours of the day and night, with text and images, with sound and information. I am increasingly aware, as I drift ever deeper into my forties, of a growing misalignment between all the things I want to read, and watch, and listen to, and the dwindling time I have in which to do it: the time in my day, and the unreckonable – but decreasing – number of years left to me. I haven’t read Don Quixote or The Man Without Qualities or The Interpretation of Dreams. Nor have I read, or even unwrapped, the last three issues of the London Review of Books, or for that matter most of the articles that are open in tabs on my laptop, and if you sent me an email in the last couple of days I probably haven’t read that either (sorry). I haven’t watched any of the new supposedly must-see television they keep making, and I haven’t listened to any of the podcasts people keep recommending to me. There is too much content, too much culture, too much text – and everyone keeps adding to it all the time! (I realise that I am adding to it, quite literally, as I write.)
There are times when I find myself daydreaming about a technological solution to this problem – some kind of AI brain implant, or perhaps radical life extension. But, so far at least, technology has been adding to the problem rather than making any serious attempt to solve it. The last thirty years or so of technological change has seen an exponential increase in the amount of digital stuff in the world: emails, streaming video, browser games, so forth. (Let’s not besmirch the innocence of these pages by even getting into the infinite proliferation of niche pornography.)
And now, among the various other benefits and nuisances it presents, generative AI is causing a considerable acceleration in the creation of content. Among the most dispiriting recent evidence of this was the announcement, in The Hollywood Reporter, of a new firm called Inception Point AI, which aims, via its Quiet Please podcast network, to flood the market with podcasts conceived, created and hosted by generative AI software. Its chief executive and co-founder is Jeanine Wright, former chief executive of Wondery, a hugely successful American podcast operation. “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI,” she has said, “and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life.” (The use of the word “people” here is unsettling enough, let alone the Frankenstinian implications of a company bringing them “to life”, but this is the sort of puerile Prometheanism that has long appealed to a growing class of Silicon Valley money people.)
The company is still very much in the start-up phase; it has a team of eight people, four of whom are “working with content”. The topics for podcasts are, said the article, selected “with the help of AI, based on Google and social media trends.” The company then launches perhaps five different versions of the podcast, under different titles, to see which, if any, of them might catch on. The podcasts are given titles that are search engine-optimised to an almost parodic degree. Among the more than 4,000 podcasts already available from Quiet Please are: “Garden”, a podcast about gardening; “Snakes”, a podcast about snakes; “Anna Wintour”, a podcast about retired US Vogue editor Anna Wintour; “Chuck Mangione”, a podcast about American jazz flugelhorn legend Chuck Mangione; and “Lawn”, a podcast about lawns. Notably, “Lawn” shares an AI presenter with “Garden” – the indefatigable “Nigel Thistledown”, whose Instagram profile introduces him as a “tweed-wearing garden wizard creating whimsical landscapes.”
Frank McNally: My life as a civil servant in 1980s Dublin
My week in Afghanistan: Girls burst into tears when they learn their education will end
Men’s silent health crisis: ‘I was just worrying, worrying, worrying. I thought I was going to die’
Behind the scenes with Marian Keyes on the set of The Walsh Sisters: ‘I couldn’t be happier ’
The use of Thistledown as the voice of two only very marginally different-seeming slop products is an indication of the business’s unique, if largely theoretical, selling point. Even if “Lawn” only gets a fraction of the number of listeners of “Garden”, the cost of producing it is still essentially zero, as is the effort. Likewise, with “Communism” – presented by the “sharp-tongued, fedora-wearing” Maxwell Tate, whose artificial speaking voice is, unexpectedly, eerily similar to that of former US president Barack Obama. Even if the market for an LLM-generated (and presumably therefore error-ridden) history of communism is minuscule, there is still money to be made from it: in this particular situation, the people who control the means of production no longer have to contend with human labour. The sharp-tongued, fedora-wearing Maxwell Tate may well address this very irony in the series itself, for all I know; I couldn’t get any more than thirty seconds into it. (If “Communism” is a little too radical for your taste, by the way, they’ve got another one called “Socialism”, also presented by Maxwell Tate, who is clearly exactly the Nigel Thistledown-type figure the left has for so long been in need.)
As so often with AI-generated products, the question all of this raises is: who on Earth needs or wants this slop? Wright, as it happens, has taken issue with that term, on behalf of the AI “people” she represents, and the work they do. “I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites,” as she put it. Her invocation of the term “Luddite” is strangely telling here. She is using it in the colloquial sense of a reactionary opposition to technology per se. The actual Luddites were textile workers of the early 19th century who destroyed machinery in specific protest not against technology per se, but against the way in which new machinery was threatening the livelihoods of skilled labourers, and turning out inferior products. These were people, in other words, who at the dawn of modern capitalism saw the tidal wave of slop cresting the distant horizon.
I am not a Luddite, at least not in the colloquial sense. I might even be something of a techno-optimist, in that I believe there must be a technological solution to the problem of all this trash being pumped into our online spaces. In fact, that solution may already exist, in a slightly different form: the filter built into your email client that recognises spam messages. It’s not perfect by any means, but email would be unusable without it. What we need is a slop filter, a technology that recognises AI-produced content and blocks it before it gets anywhere near us. That’s a business idea I could get on board with.
