Slop is enough
Capitalism loves inflection points. The optimists see of AI liberating humanity from employment, while the reality suggests your livelihood will be sacrificed on the altar of mediocrity. Just look at Duolingo and Shopify latest endavors, both championing an "AI-first" company where so-called "agents" replace human workers whenever deemed "good enough."
Their relentless AI evangelism is merely hiding the true intent: wherever a machine can substitute human, machine will prevail. Their assessment is simultaneously deceptive and perceptive, deceptive in portraying AI as a business revolution, yet perceptive in recognizing that these rudimentary agentic LLMs will suffice to eliminate millions of positions for one fundamental reason: the majority of our jobs have devolved into mediocrity. This wasn't always the case in technology, but the field has progressively lowered its standards year after year, with the pandemic serving as the primary catalyst for the latest sloppening.
Education reduced to empty form cannot nurture the heart.
But the underlying issue stems from abandoning cultural education as a Western value. Instead, we've opted to dispense raw ideology devoid of any thinking mechanism that we now seek so dearly to integrate to LLMs so that they can be more like us. This sloppening manifested in our lives through every medium.
We witnessed it when animation shifted to 3D, providing slop and poorly designed characters and stories.
We witnessed it when video games all adopted the same game engines, look and feel and lack of narrative stakes, slopping ideology down players’ throats- no nuance, no wit, just mind-numbing dogma that punishes anyone who dares to criticize.
Perhaps most damaging was Netflix's infiltration of our households that has accelerated our collective intellectual atrophy through relentless ideologically charged content parroting as entertainment. Meanwhile, our children's minds are being shaped not by family or tradition but by the algorithms of TikTok and Snapchat.
This slop then infected the workforce through various ideologies that undermined everything, gradually diminishing employee capabilities until AIs could compete with us. Just open the Duolingo app. It's slop software that could be vibe coded in days. The learning mechanics are unremarkable, even the character designs are substandard. This explains why AI will thrive at Duolingo. They produce nothing exceptional yet receive market rewards thanks to this collective lowering of standards and an inflated market.
The harsh reality is that most of our work involves creating forgettable presentations, attending pointless meetings, developing strategies or content that ultimately goes unread. And we accept this output as sufficient. Nothing we do requires genuine expertise, employers celebrate how easily we can be replaced, leaving us without bargaining power. Even within FAANG companies, beyond the small teams working on the latest golden goose (currently GenAI), virtually no one is indispensable.
The past decade and a half hasn't just prepared LLMs to replicate human abilities - it has systematically stripped away human complexity, reshaping us into predictable patterns, not to raise LLMs to our level, but to reduce us to theirs, until the distinction no longer matters.
