Right now, there is a pervasive panic that Generative AI is flooding the world with “slop”. Critics (or the average unc on X) are crying out that human creativity is officially dead, drowned in a sea of algorithmic garbage.
But before we mourn the loss of human genius, let’s take a walk through history.
In Ancient Greece, the great philosopher Socrates was absolutely terrified of a new, mind-destroying technology. He warned it would destroy human memory and offer only a deceptive “appearance of wisdom”. The written word. Yup – you read it right – Socrates did not care for the act of writing.
Jump to the 16th century: the printing press is thriving, and Swiss biologist Conrad Gessner begs monarchs to regulate the “confusing and harmful abundance of books” because it was too much data for the human mind to handle. In the 18th century, the novel was considered a “moral poison” that caused a literal epidemic called “reading mania”.
In 1859, the poet Charles Baudelaire sneered at photography, blaming the “stupidity of the multitude” for elevating a soulless, mechanical process over true art (I often imagine Baudelaire stuck in hell surrounded by non-stop Instagram feeds – a smile on his face.).
A half-century later, the composer John Philip Sousa warned Congress that the phonograph and its “canned music” would literally cause human vocal cords to devolve (the irony – his own U.S. Marine Band had already recorded 50 highly successful cylinders for the Columbia Records catalog as early as 1890).
What does this “Sisyphean cycle of technology panics” tell us? It reveals that elite (and let’s be honest – mostly sub-ordinary) gatekeepers always panic when a new medium democratizes access. We have a profound, anachronistic nostalgia where we fiercely defend the media of our youth, conveniently forgetting that it was diagnosed as societal poison by the generation before us.
The reality is, AI isn’t creating a new problem of “slop” – it is just exposing a universal truth.
In 1957, sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon got tired of literary critics judging his entire genre by its worst pulp examples. His defense became famously known as Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crud”. And it’s true. Ninety percent of TV shows, books, and products are, and always have been, terrible. In the past, traditional publishers and gallery owners acted as a mandatory filter, hiding the bad 90% in their rejection piles. AI hasn’t magically degraded human creativity; it has simply removed the barrier to entry, meaning the cruddy 90% is no longer languishing in a desk drawer or a garage. It is highly visible to the public.
People worry this flood of slop will break our content platforms. But user-generated content algorithms – like YouTube and Instagram (and definitely X) – are already built for slop. They were explicitly designed to sift through mountains of garbage to elevate what natively appeals to human psychology.
This brings us to the Jevons Paradox. In economics, this paradox states that making a resource cheaper and more efficient to use doesn’t decrease our consumption of it; it explodes demand. When computers gave us the “paperless office,” global paper consumption actually tripled between 1980 and 2000 because printing became so frictionless. Similarly, as AI drastically reduces the friction, time, and cost to create content, we won’t consume less; we will demand and create more than ever before.
So, what happens when you combine Sturgeon’s Law with the Jevons Paradox? You get a massive influx of garbage, but you also reap a corresponding harvest of master craftsmen. Think of the 1980s camcorder boom. Millions of kids gained access to video cameras and made millions of terrible home movies (including yours truly), but lowering that barrier to entry also produced the Duffer Brothers, creators of Stranger Things.
We don’t even have to guess if this outlier effect applies to AI; the math already proves it. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study looked at the book market between 2022 and 2025, the exact window when Large Language Models (LLMs) flooded the internet. Because of AI, the number of new book releases nearly tripled. As expected, the average quality of those books plummeted. It was exactly the “slop” critics feared.
But here is the punchline: because the sheer volume of content skyrocketed, the absolute number of high-quality, valuable books near the top of the distribution actually increased. The massive influx of new creations gave us more throws at the dartboard, resulting in more bullseyes. The study concluded that this AI-fueled boom could actually raise the surplus value that consumers get from books by a quarter to a half.
We shouldn’t be afraid of the slop. Slop is not the death of art; it is the necessary compost from which true art grows. Let the 90% be crud – it always was and always will be. The algorithms will sort it out (or will evolve further), and the 10% of brilliant outliers are going to use AI to create masterpieces we cannot yet even imagine.
[Original thoughts recorded on a DJI Mic Mini while cycling, transcribed and structured using AI, fed into NotebookLM for further research, “written” on Obsidian.]
Footnotes:
1. Socrates and the Threat of the Written Word Socrates’ argument that writing would destroy human memory and offer only a false “appearance of wisdom” is recorded in Plato’s Phaedrus. For further reading on this ancient epistemological panic, see The Critique of Writing in Plato’s Works (Brill) and related analyses.
2. Conrad Gessner and the Printing Press Panic In 1545, Swiss biologist Conrad Gessner warned that the printing press was flooding Europe with a “confusing and harmful abundance of books,” even urging monarchs to regulate the trade to protect the public’s mental processing capacity.
3. The 18th-Century “Reading Mania” and the Novel The modern novel was originally condemned by cultural gatekeepers as “moral poison” that caused a literal epidemic of “reading mania” (or Lesesucht). For context on how fiction sparked outrage and fears of moral decay, see The Media’s First Moral Panic (History Today).
4. Charles Baudelaire’s Critique of Photography In response to the Salon de 1859, French poet Charles Baudelaire attacked photography as a mechanical process devoid of soul, blaming the “stupidity of the multitude” for its rising popularity. See _Baudelaire’s Critique of Photography.
5. John Philip Sousa and the Phonograph In 1906, composer John Philip Sousa warned the U.S. Congress that the phonograph and its “canned music” were “infernal machines” that would ruin musical development and cause human vocal cords to devolve. See the Library of Congress archives: Sousa and the Talking Machine.
6. Sturgeon’s Law The adage “Ninety percent of everything is crud” (now popularly adapted to “crap”) was coined by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon. It first appeared in print in his book review column for Venture Science Fiction in 1957. He formulated it to defend science fiction against critics who judged the entire genre strictly by its worst pulp examples.
7. The Jevons Paradox and the Paperless Office The Jevons Paradox was first described by economist William Stanley Jevons in his 1865 book The Coal Question, where he noted that more efficient steam engines caused Britain’s coal consumption to explode rather than decrease. A modern example is the “paperless office” prediction of the 1980s; because computers made creating and editing documents frictionless, global paper consumption actually tripled between 1980 and 2000.
8. NBER Study on LLMs and the Book Market The data regarding the impact of AI on the book publishing market is drawn from the study AI and the Quantity and Quality of Creative Products: Have LLMs Boosted Creation of Valuable Books? by Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel (National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 34777, January 2026). The researchers found that while AI caused a massive influx of new releases and lowered the average quality, the absolute number of high-quality, valuable books increased, potentially boosting total consumer surplus by a quarter to a half. The paper is available at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34777.