Comment by mercer

> People can finally put a name on an unease that's been growing inside them for a while now.

I've had some interesting conversations about the pre-AI slop and how the distinction is often not too meaningful. I mean, on some level /knowing/ that the corporate slop was written by a person kind of loses its meaning when one considers the amount of filtering, rules, rewriting, and so on is involved by a string of people who either don't care about what they write or actively dislike it.

A lot of this stuff often had at least flickers of a human soul behind it. I imagine for a lot of the soaps, hallmark movies, and romance novels this might've made some difference, even if just subconsciously recognizing the author(s) and building up some kind of image around the other by yourself or with others.

I'm reminded of some of the truly awful 'worship' songs I grew up with, and how some of the authors (often of course sticking close to the source material) even had a kind of following. some of these songs were just a little 'too' predictable, but others felt pretty much like they were written by AI, except back then none of us imagined that AI could really do this back then.

Or the pastor I spoke to who was convinced that chatgpt had access to his more personal notes, because as an experiment he made it write a sermon, and it (probably? obviously?) extrapolated from the prompt the more specific theology he followed/ascribed to.

I'm not knocking the value of a sermon or song, even if boring and predictable, or perhaps even when AI-written. they often explicitly /don't/ serve the purpose of being novel or new, but I find it super interesting how these aspects of real life are, to a degree, not too hard to replace with AI.

Thankfully for this pastor, most of his value involved human connection, knowing whoever just married, died, got sick, and having his full humanity on display from the pulpit!