Yeah, there's plenty of low-effort trash floating around the web these days. Then again, the industrial revolution has resulted lots of physical low-effort trash too. Some of that is somewhat useful, like cheap t-shirts, electronics and power tools, but none of that is actually good. It's not good for the environment or the people using those things.

They all serve some strange purpose I guess. At least people with very low standards still buy those. I certainly don't need a cheap bluetooth speaker that breaks after a month. Many companies still produce e-wasete like that, because people keep buying it.

I can see a similar pattern happening with AI-slop. People click those videos, read those articles, and that produces ad revenue. It's basically the same incentive, and that results in everyone racing towards the bottom. The basic mechanics of the situation haven't changed, even though the technology has. What I see here, is just history repeating itself in the digital realm.

Seams a marker for quality and tells you a lot about the way the item of clothing was made. They can be uncomfortable, and that's why well made clothes reduce the number of seams needed and hides the ones that are unavoidable.

This also applies to shoes. Well made leather shoes have only very few seams and they are definitely not located in annoying places. However cheap shoe manufacturers cut corners here. They use whatever scraps they could find in the trash, and sew them together into an abomination roughly the shape of a shoe.

That's how modern industrial markets work, and we get what we pay for. We've been doing this for such a long time that we don't even know what good clothes and shoes look like. Hobbyists do, but the mass market just ignores quality and gravitates towards any piece of trash that barely gets the job done.

I would argue that generative AI models are going to do the same thing with text, audio and video. Currently, the quality is just atrocious, but it's getting better all the time. Maybe one day, people don't really mind the minor glitches and artefacts in video, because they've been looking at that slop for so many years. Just like the awkward and numerous seams in industrially manufactures clothes, but in digital form.

BTW 3D knitting definitely solves the problem. Too bad, not that many companies are doing it. On the other hand, it doesn't scale as well as the older methods. Economies of scale result in low prices, which result in greater quarterly revenue.