[rfv6723]

The anxiety surrounding AI-generated "slop" mirrors the frantic warnings of late 15th-century clerics who viewed the printing press as an engine of spiritual decay. Johannes Trithemius, a prominent Benedictine abbot, famously argued that monk-scribes should not abandon their pens, fearing that printed books were ephemeral, error-ridden toys that would undermine the sanctity of scripture and the discipline of the mind. He believed that the sheer volume of cheap, mechanical texts would drown out genuine wisdom and lead to a permanent decline in the quality of human thought.

History shows he fundamentally misunderstood the human capacity for adaptation. Rather than succumbing to a sea of printed garbage, society developed sophisticated new filters. We invented the modern bibliography, the peer-review process, the concept of a "trusted publisher," and the critical literacy skills required to navigate a world where information was no longer a rare luxury. Humans have an innate drive to seek out signal over noise. Just as the chaos of the early printing era eventually gave way to the Enlightenment, our current struggle with synthetic content will likely trigger a new evolution in how we verify truth and value human insight.

[pndy]

Manuscript could contain handwritten errors and of course there could be misprints due to wrongly selected types but content wasn't generated out of nowhere. Unless we're talking about asemic or automatic writing due to some... "spiritual" influence.

The key here is human thought as you said. Whether these books were written by clerics or printed by the press these were still containing human produced substance. It's not a fair comparison.

[crabsand]

That exact stance (+scribes' financial interests) prevented printing press to be used in the Ottoman Empire widely for more than 200 years

[sigwinch]

I think his legacy is about stegography and cryptography. I think he relied on handwritten volumes and couldn’t adapt his cryptographic techniques.

[crote]

"Generating slop is totally fine because we'll eventually develop anti-slop filters" isn't exactly the most convincing argument, you know.

Besides, your link between the "chaos of the early printing press" and the start of the Enlightenment is very forced. The Greek philosophers did plenty of critical thinking after all, and they had no need for a printing press. I see absolutely zero reason why the current AI bubble will inevitably result in an Enlightenment-like period, nor why AI would be a hard requirement for one.

[threethirtytwo]

The frontiers of mathematics is already incorporating AI and people like Terrance Tao are documenting the progress of AI. At the very least the current best mathematician in the world only does this because he has predicted an opposite conclusion to you.

So when you say zero reason, I have to tell you that your absolutist stance is blindness. There are many reasons why it can happen, and many reasons why it can’t.

[threethirtytwo]

Incredibly valid opinion. Many people disagree but this is an extremely possible future for AI.

There is also a darker future where AI improves to the point where it’s no longer slop. It produces quality code, texts, and books that are better and in a fraction of a second after one misspelled prompt. Given the past trajectory of AI, this is the more likely outcome.

The other outcome is AI flatlines. This is as good as it gets. In which case the future you predict may come to pass.