Knitting bullshit

5/6/2026 at 1:24:23 PM

Increasingly, my reaction to AI-generated content of basically all types is simply a deep, resonant sadness.

The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb - there is an initial shock of sadness, an initial dose of loss, an initial sense of what has been taken away.

But then for months and years afterwards, the daily occurrence of some other little humdrum experience, and only at the moment of the encounter does one think, "Ah yes, this too is forever changed."

Like sounding the depths of a dark well, where every day you lower the rope a little further, but every day there is nothing to feel but a pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.

by ipsento606

5/6/2026 at 2:03:39 PM

To me it had, in a way, the opposite effect - I started appreciating non-AI content more.

Good art has something that is difficult to reproduce if one isn't already an artist who is just using AI as a medium - it's intentionality.

Take for example Floor796[0]. Every little detail counts and while you could use AI to generate single characters or even the whole thing, you'd inevitably find details which have no reason to be there. You could then remove them manually or modify your prompt or input image so that those you know about won't appear, but AI being AI will keep sneaking in new ones.

The longer your prompt, the more intentional everything becomes, effectively making it the art piece.

[0] https://floor796.com/

by Tade0

5/6/2026 at 4:17:52 PM

I don’t think it’s intentionality.

It’s style.

A lot of people regard technical measures as the signal of quality. The most realistic painting, the most expensive purse, the most technical flip on a skateboard, the most well drawn AI art.

It’s a cheap way to judge quality because you don’t have to understand what makes something good.

AI is really showing this divide.

by harrall

5/6/2026 at 5:54:11 PM

But then some people recognize that technical excellence is not the most important thing, and extend that to assuming that technique does not matter at all. And so we get this constant drip feed of absolutely terrible conceptual art (with an AI-generated artist statement, can't leave that out!) in every single local art scene.

by badc0ffee

5/6/2026 at 5:43:31 PM

If there's anything more tragic than wealth without taste, it is technique without vision

by robot-wrangler

5/6/2026 at 5:56:44 PM

AI might actually help in this regard. Where you may have someone who has good taste, and can create a unique style, but lacks the skill to execute on the technique. Kind of like a song writer that can't play an instrument, but can hum a tune to the band, and articulate subtle changes they want.

Of course, current AI is not even close to that yet, but decoupling creativity from technical ability could actually be a good thing in the long run. Though to be honest, I am generally pessimistic on it.

by dec0dedab0de

5/6/2026 at 5:51:01 PM

And what makes a style good (as objectively as it can get, anyways)? Why would it be the defining factor of what makes art good?

by fluffybucktsnek

5/6/2026 at 3:31:10 PM

Yeah, but you have to realize we are on the losing side of this war. The armies of bullshit now have an incredible advantage that actual art can never have. At least in the past, there was some equilibrium. Bullshit was cheaper to make than art (or any other quality product), but now it has become infinitely cheaper to produce, and much more expensive for us to separate from the bullshit.

Think about this for a moment - it takes a company of 8 people to make 3000 podcast episodes a week. It would take far more than 8 people to listen to that many podcasts. How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff? What happens when it's 30,000 episodes per week? 300,000. What possible hope does art and craft have against an army that is effectively infinite.

We can hope that the cream will rise to the top, but I am not optimistic. I genuinely believe we are watching the end of art and human creativity as it is absolutely drowned is mass slop.

tl;dr - we're fucked.

by santoshalper

5/6/2026 at 4:29:59 PM

>How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff?

Categorize, curate, and share. The war is only for your attention. I have favorite creators now, and they would cease to be favorite if they suddenly started sloppin' it up. The best of them recommended cool things made by other people, who in turn recommended more things, and so on.

If instead you peddle bullshit, it won't take long to be identified as a bullshit vendor, even if you have 1000x the bullshit of the next leading brand.

Not everyone will get the message especially if you mainly consume algorithmic feeds - we all seem to have that relative who thinks you would enjoy being sent an AI Jesus image every other week.

by nancyminusone

5/6/2026 at 8:56:16 PM

The simple answer is every single AI podcast is the chaff. Everything this company makes can just be ignored.

by neaden

5/6/2026 at 9:18:03 PM

All they need to do is keep changing the creator tags. They won't give up without a fight. Are you willing to give up all new content creators?

by StilesCrisis

5/7/2026 at 1:47:41 PM

Already the way I find out about new podcasts is from recommendations from people I know, positive reviews, or from them being associated with a podcast I listen to. For now all of those have meant I haven't been exposed to any AI ones.

by neaden

5/6/2026 at 3:01:06 PM

It feels like I will forever mourn the totally self-inflicted loss of the Internet. I feel like I will never get over it, so much so that I wish I had never experienced its (brief) moment of brilliance. I feel sorry for my younger self for thinking it was here to stay.

by drowntoge

5/6/2026 at 4:35:13 PM

It was a very special time when the Internet was full of people's open, personal gardens. I feel fortunate for having experienced that because it showed me what's out there if I look, and I want to cultivate the pleasure of finding such things and sharing them with people I care about.

by elmomle

5/6/2026 at 8:40:25 PM

Kagi SmallWeb still has a lot of interesting stuff like the old internet

by Melatonic

5/6/2026 at 4:48:17 PM

It's not self-inflicted at all. Users didn't enshittify the sites we used to enjoy.

by nyeah

5/6/2026 at 9:48:03 PM

The saddest part to me was realizing that pretty much no one gives a shit.

I knew that they were plenty of careless people with no taste for truth or quality in the world, but I didn’t realize there were so many of them.

Especially so amongst my friends and family members and coworkers. Here’s someone who’s now sending AI generated messages for daily communication. Here’s someone who’s now using AI generated slop art to promote their work. Here’s someone who turns to ChatGPT for any random question they have. No regard for beauty or truth or personal expression or the quality of expert work, only hooked to the “get this done” machine.

by gyomu

5/6/2026 at 3:03:14 PM

"The growth of AI feels . . . like losing a limb"

Indeed. Figuratively, generatively, and of course, generationally.

by biscuits1

5/6/2026 at 3:10:24 PM

> The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb

Or gaining a new, oddly misshapen and inexplicably placed limb of no apparent purpose or utility.

by MarkusQ

5/6/2026 at 3:26:55 PM

That will randomly and unpredictably try to take over tasks from your other limbs, hijacking your somatosensory system so you can't tell when it's doing so without actively looking at what you're doing.

by BobaFloutist

5/6/2026 at 3:35:15 PM

I think you just described my cat's tail

by dylan604

5/7/2026 at 5:50:03 PM

Alien Hand Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome

by robocat

5/6/2026 at 1:46:17 PM

It seems like Black Mirror's "Joan is Awful" is here, but instead of a quantum computer generating personalized content, we just have an endless parade of meaningless slop.

by mizzao

5/6/2026 at 3:31:37 PM

>an endless parade of meaningless slop

This is, increasingly, the front page of HN. Direct slop is uncommon, but not rare. I skip any headline that mentions AI. But sometimes you get baited, you start reading, and it's about AI anyway. A few days ago there was an article about someone hacking some device, and it was just the author vibe-hacking with AI.

It is not interesting.

I have intense AI fatigue. Make a containment board for AI sloppers. It's so much worse than all the previous fads combined, like blockchains and Rust rewrites. I'm not even anti-AI, but the exposure to it is just overwhelming and unrelenting.

by encom

5/6/2026 at 6:13:15 PM

It reminds me of how movie special effects making-ofs got super boring when most of the work started being done with computers end-to-end.

But with everything.

by funimpoded

5/6/2026 at 6:26:32 PM

> the front page of HN

I think I've "flagged" more links this year than my last 13 years on this site combined. I'm sure it's unproductive and doesn't really do anything, but it makes me feel a touch better. I'm so over the slop I think I'm actually visiting HN markedly less because of it.

On the plus side, there has been a (predictable) uptick in slop-flagging browser extensions over the last few months. Once a good locally-hosted version exists, I think it'll take its rightful place alongside ad blockers for tech-minded folks.

by parliament32

5/6/2026 at 7:31:40 PM

>slop-flagging

I would love something like SponsorBlock for YouTube, but for AI slop. Crowd-flag channels, and banish them from my sight.

by encom

5/6/2026 at 5:23:03 PM

I think at this point the containment board is the entire Internet. I have no idea how, but we all need to "Atlas Shrugged" this shit and start over somewhere else with something else.

by _dwt

5/6/2026 at 8:42:19 PM

Have you lost a limb?

by sambapa

5/6/2026 at 2:40:06 PM

[flagged]

by dontwannahearit

5/6/2026 at 3:48:17 PM

> What have you lost exactly?

Connection to other humans.

Imagine your favorite third place[1], a library, park, bar, etc. The place you regularly go to get connection to people without having to jump through all of the hoops to create and organize an actual event. It's a way to satisfy your innate need for conviviality without requiring much effort or willpower, which are always in finite supply.

You've been going to this place for years. You're a regular. You've made friends with other regulars. It feels good to be a familiar face and to see those familiar faces. A kind of warm sense of safety that we have evolved to experience since we first sat around a fire in prehistoric days. That sense of "Ah, good, I'm here nestled among my tribe."

Now imagine how it feels to walk into that room and discover that half the seats are occupied by mannequins. Each mannequin has a loudspeaker attached to it constantly playing random word salad.

Some of the regulars are still there, maybe. It's hard to see them through all the plastic limbs or hear them through the cacophony of meaningless noise.

How does being in that space make you feel? Now compare it to how you felt before the dead-eyed inanimate bodies showed up. That's what we've all lost.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

by munificent

5/6/2026 at 2:52:41 PM

I’m so intensely sick of this attitude. We are losing things with technology. Important things. Human things.

Looking under a microscope at one specific instance and saying “eh it’s not that bad, you’re overreacting” is disingenuous or at least putting your head in the sand.

by CooCooCaCha

5/6/2026 at 2:55:36 PM

Imagine a library. You go in, grab a book, and start reading.

Imagine the same library, but it's the Unseen University's Library - you go in, grab one of any book ever written, and start reading. You've gained something!

Imagine the library is now the Library of Babel, it contains every possible book that could ever exist - https://libraryofbabel.info/browse.cgi

You've definitely lost something. You'll never hit "random" and find anything of value.

by bombcar

5/6/2026 at 3:06:05 PM

You want human things? Put down the technology and go and connect with some humans.

But yes, the original poster with their allusions to lost limbs and "pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.." is overreacting, depressed or both.

The slop will continue until it is no longer profit-making for someone.

by dontwannahearit

5/6/2026 at 3:31:33 PM

Appeals to individualism and capitalism, why am I not surprised.

by CooCooCaCha

5/6/2026 at 3:36:02 PM

It's worked so well in the past, surely it will work this time.

by santoshalper

5/6/2026 at 3:50:48 PM

The fact that profit motives exist and motivate people isn't an "appeal to capitalism", it's just a statement of reality. The best way to stop slop is to put it out of business. People don't make slop for social prestige.

by t-3

5/6/2026 at 3:38:05 PM

> is overreacting, depressed or both.

even if it is, that is their feelings. your outright dismissal of them is far more sad in my opinion than their feelings. lack of empathy is a truly sad state.

by dylan604

5/6/2026 at 2:46:52 PM

[dead]

by qotgalaxy

5/6/2026 at 1:31:21 PM

The economist in me immediately asks: Where is the financial incentive to do this? Just the same way the programmer would ask what the stack is. Some possibilities:

1) Money laundering - large content farm someone can argue makes xyz in revenue to hide an alternate source of revenue.

2) Ad fraud - leading up podcast charts or SEO results to attract clicks to sell ads. Bot farms could also be making clicks to pretend sell ads as well.

3) Attempt to dominate the niche for sale of knitting products. Or to pretend to dominate it so they can sell their the business later at a larger multiple.

4) Test the waters of a much bigger engine for doing 1-3 above in an innocuous hidden subject, before they do it with elections or some other more profitable field. Regulatory waters as well - seeing what they can get away with.

Feel free to brainstorm more incentives for making something like this.

by dzink

5/6/2026 at 1:44:03 PM

I don't understand your question, are you asking what's the financial incentive to AI-generate thousands of podcasts a week? Isn't it obviously the income from streams and/or ads?

by williamdclt

5/6/2026 at 1:54:46 PM

Did you read the article? Headcount went from 300 to 8, number of podcast per day went up and apparently listenership went up.

by Carp

5/6/2026 at 3:00:03 PM

This only works if there are people willingly listening to crap.

Perhaps there are.

by surgical_fire

5/6/2026 at 3:33:04 PM

Are they? Or do they think they are listening to something real?

I've enjoy reading alt-history at times. However I can only enjoy this when it is clear that this isn't real history. Often one of the more enjoyable parts is authors notes of how real history differs.

I have heard some human written songs that really sounded real and tugged at the heart strings - until I found out it was fiction, and then I was offended. The key here is that it showed someone good (to modern ideals - they all considered themselves good Christians) existed in a timeline where they where we know almost nobody was good.

by bluGill

5/6/2026 at 3:28:56 PM

the bitch of it, though, is that it doesn't only work if people listen to it. it also works if a bunch of AI bots can convincingly fake people listening to it. and, of course, those types of bots exist and have financial incentive to continue faking it, too.

at some point, these two competing interests are going to find out that they're paying each other to stare at each other's dwindling profits, but my bet is that it's going to be a while yet before that wake up call. and it will be an even longer churn into something else because no one is going to admit that they were funneling money into nonsense for years. they're going to "adjust strategies" to "modernize against changing markets" for "new potential growth". all shit that takes a long time to do because it's a half measure aimed at saving face to investors. so it'll work for a long time just based on the momentum of bullshit. =/

by catapart

5/6/2026 at 4:15:22 PM

they said, podcasts had 12 million downloads. 750k weekly at the moment.

They get people listening. And when you download you don't know it will be crap AI slop.

I now get a bunch of this in youtube - just endless drivel about some theme I am interested in. They create so much crap it's hard to see which one is real. I started banning the accounts that are making AI crap, but there are so many now.

by Romario77

5/6/2026 at 2:02:15 PM

I think the question he's asking is this: is it an ad ouroboros, or is there some other (nefarious?) intentionality behind it?

My hot take: porque no los dos?

by thechao

5/7/2026 at 12:13:28 AM

Podcast network is an established and proven business model. You spend money to make episodes, you make money from ads. You make a bunch of different podcasts with a bunch of different target demos to reach a wider range of listeners and this grows your revenue and makes it more consistent. It's not complicated.

The specific incentives for starting a slop network are the promises of increased margins via reduced production costs (don't have to pay any pesky creative types) and more rapid growth via reduced production time (you can theoretically produce an episode in about the time it takes to listen to one, perhaps less).

I explored starting an AI slop network a few years ago. The tech wasn't quite ready at the time. My motivation was far more base: watching numbers go up.

by ytoawwhra92

5/6/2026 at 2:47:44 PM

[dead]

by qotgalaxy

5/6/2026 at 11:04:39 AM

It's scandalous that no-one has yet posted Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon "Bullknitters".

https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/

(or google image search)

by afandian

5/6/2026 at 1:00:28 PM

Related: Four Yorkshiremen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE.

by penguin_booze

5/6/2026 at 1:06:56 PM

Personally I think it's scandalous that the now top comment is an off-topic reference to something tangential to the title, and nothing to do with the article, which isn't really about knitting at all, except for being the hook to which the author was pulled in to the world of AI podcasts, and consequently found their output rather lacking in content.

You could substitute the word knitting for almost any hobby, and the article would read almost the same.

It's an article about the soulless content-free world of AI podcasting, and about how AI output is about validating the emotions of the listener rather than meaningful content.

by xnorswap

5/6/2026 at 1:41:07 PM

That wasn't meant to be the top comment, it was meant to be buried somewhere round the bottom!

I did read the whole article and have some thoughts about it. But they are pessmistic and difficult, so I'd rather share something fun.

My on-topic thoughts are that I just spent a long weekend in good company playing music and chatting. Returning to quotidien life made me think the solution is to get as far away from computers as possible, and back to the in-person interaction that we're evolved for.

A big reason IMHO that we're susceptible to phony bullshit (whether it's knitting podcasts or broadcast propaganda) is that we're not evolved for it, and it misses many of the contextual clues present in in-person interaction for which we are evolved.

by afandian

5/6/2026 at 11:42:13 AM

Wow I’d never have expected Kate Davies to show up on Hacker News. I think it’s important to understand her background a bit when she talks about knitting as a matter of life and death. She was a scholar of 18th century literature before she suffered a stroke young[0]. She focused on knitting as a means of recovery and never looked back. She built a business and a community and attributes a lot of her physical and mental health to knitting.

So while this post hopefully hits a chord for anyone in a creative field she embodies a particular type of person for whom slop is a genuine risk to their being. Not their job; their whole personhood. In a world where slop has chased out the humanity of things and the bullshit machines fill all content what are the chances someone like her could build a second life better than her first?

0: https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-...

by roxolotl

5/6/2026 at 1:38:41 PM

Wild. This kind of empowerment and long lived effort is the type of story we should be sharing.

I'm concerned that we've taken an amazing character like this and turned the world against her for frankly a bet against human intellectual development.

by getpokedagain

5/6/2026 at 3:13:03 PM

> Not their job; their whole personhood

I hate so much that while I read your reply this particularly phrasing was grating to me.

There's nothing wrong with it, and I have no doubts you, whoever you are, wrote it.

What annoys me to death is that a perfectly fine language construct is tarnished to a point that a mere glance reflexively caused me to wince, and I had to actively interpret it as fine.

by surgical_fire

5/6/2026 at 8:09:18 PM

Interesting, sounds like a similar experience to my reading of this reply

The root comment brings insight and value and stakes out a human position. I don’t see a need to snipe from the hedges

by bellorap

5/6/2026 at 9:13:39 PM

I think maybe they were saying that their personal AI slop detector had produced a false positive on "whole personhood", and they felt sad about that? Or perhaps I'm missing it.

by edbaskerville

5/6/2026 at 10:05:32 PM

Correct. Perhaps I originally phrased it poorly?

I am annoyed at my slop detector firing at something completely benign.

by surgical_fire

5/6/2026 at 11:42:53 PM

It’s not just you. I reread it and it really struck me as odd too lol. I wrote it in bed after just having woken up maybe 5min earlier(note to self what does this say about my internet use habits?).

This does make me wonder if consuming AI writing will cause the style to be subconsciously picked up.

by roxolotl

5/7/2026 at 12:05:57 AM

For me it did. I used dashes very often when writing prior to AI, and now I mostly replaced it with semicolon.

I am also actively avoiding the same construct you used (not X; Y). It is particularly annoying as I used this very frequently as a rhetorical tool.

And ultimately, I think this is sad. Communication is now less optimal as one has to evaluate if the other is just regurgitating AI. Ideas are important, but so are their shape.

by surgical_fire

5/6/2026 at 3:03:10 PM

The summary but no content thing is interesting. I’ve seen it in many forms and I’m not sure why it plays out that way. Maybe the summary is tied to the prompt tightly? The rest not?

I saw some bots on Reddit that were very odd in that if anyone asked a question in relation to something like an news article some account would respond with a non answer but sorta summarized bit of the article. If you responded “that’s not really what I asked” you got an even odder response.

This isn’t that strange as people will do that in a way… but i noted it because I saw a flurry of those accounts in Reddit and then they vanished.

by duxup

5/6/2026 at 3:52:44 PM

> The summary but no content thing is interesting. I’ve seen it in many forms and I’m not sure why it plays out that way.

I would guess that it's because the incentives and goals are different.

The point of a summary is to entice a listener to begin the podcast. So it has to offer the promise of interesting depth.

Once they've started listening, all the body of the podcast has to do is be soothing enough to get the user to keep listening until the next ad comes on. It has no need to actually keep the promise unless the listener is paying enough attention to hold it accountable.

by munificent

5/6/2026 at 9:26:06 AM

Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?

by quibono

5/6/2026 at 12:36:04 PM

HN sends tens of thousands of views to AI-farmed articles about why AI is good or why AI is bad. These articles get upvoted to the front page literally every day. They don't say anything interesting, but many of us just like having our existing beliefs recited back to us.

So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down.

There is a huge market for content that makes you feel smart without requiring thinking and makes you busy without requiring work. I'm not not saying it's inherently bad. I'm listening to music on my daily commute and it's the same thing: just enjoyable filler so that you can do something other than getting angry at other drivers. The internet just weaponized the formula, and now AI is the equivalent of nuclear weapons I guess.

by chromacity

5/6/2026 at 3:02:45 PM

How is a listen to a podcast counted?

If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen?

Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.

by surgical_fire

5/7/2026 at 12:21:59 AM

As I understand Spotify et al may do something a bit more sophisticated, but the traditional model for podcast analytics purely tracks downloads, which could very well be your client auto-downloading a subscribed episode you never play. I don't think anyone actually has visibility of "listens". And the traditional model for ad sales is a creator (or an agent on their behalf) emailing a brand "Hey, we make this podcast which gets X monthly downloads, want to buy an ad read?" I think they usually point to iTunes store rankings to somewhat support these claims but again, iTunes just tracks downloads. (Obviously, this is all rife for fraud.)

by ghostly_s

5/7/2026 at 12:21:55 AM

In some ways it doesn't really matter because once you've got enough data points you'll know what percentage of views result in an ad click (or whatever) and then you can figure out how many views you need to hit your revenue targets.

by ytoawwhra92

5/6/2026 at 9:54:04 AM

No, but to misinform people you have two main strategies: limiting through tailored scarcity and dilute in extra-generic overabundance. Don’t get it wrong: both can be combined and even can sometime overlap.

It doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Equally saturating all channels, metrics and indicator is enough to create hindrance so preventing relevant information to spread in meaningful time.

Attention is all you need, so distraction is all that will be given.

by psychoslave

5/6/2026 at 12:42:19 PM

Also, fracturing audiences to infinity.

by ikr678

5/6/2026 at 12:00:24 PM

I listened to a podcast a while back (human authored I'm pretty sure) about low-quality gutter level streamer content and how popular it is, speaking of personalities like asmongold and a vast number of even worse imitators.

This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LARPing as one) telling you about their boogers and then being racist and then playing video games for 6 hours.

But it's wildly popular. Millions of people stream this kind of shit for hours every day.

There's a lot of people out there who just want to numb their brains, and there seems to be no floor. You can just keep making it dumber. The stuff people stream (and doom scroll) on the Internet makes 1980s daytime soaps look like high art from a lost golden age.

So it's not at all surprising that millions of people listen to low-quality un-curated AI slop podcasts.

I actually unsubbed from the podcast I heard. Meta discussion of crap like this isn't much better than the content itself. Keep driving. Do not look at the car accident.

I had kind of an epiphany like that in the last year. The Information Age means information is free. It costs $0 and is produced to infinity. That means you are not missing anything. Your attention is actually 100% yours, and if you choose to ignore the car wreck that's fine. There are infinity car wrecks. There are infinity everything. Keep driving.

by api

5/6/2026 at 3:47:09 PM

The problem is I want to live in the "correct information age" - that qualifier is hard to find. I suspect that correct will cost money. Unfortunately I don't know how to pay for it. Many of the major publishers are also using AI with questionable fact checking. Where I most need correct information is my local small town news, and there isn't even a newspaper anymore. (there is the nearby big city newspaper, but they don't cover my local issues well)

by bluGill

5/7/2026 at 10:40:06 AM

The correct Information Age is the one you get when you let your prefrontal cortex play DJ and pick your media based on what will enrich your life or teach you something.

If you let your brain stem drive you’ll spend your life scrolling political rage bait and slop.

Whether the slop is made by humans or machines doesn’t much matter. I kind of think the AI thing is a red herring, though AI does make it possible to make a lot of slop. So maybe AI is the thing that forces the issue.

by api

5/6/2026 at 1:50:58 PM

One of the real costs of the end game attention economy is that when your "car" crashes, noone is going to stop to help. When the market you engage in gets swallowed up, everyone will buy the swill that outcompetes you on perceived surface level value. Communities get fractured. Organizations that used to be community pillars (church) become self serving. All these things create a positive feedback loop of intellectual degradation.

by alphawhisky

5/6/2026 at 4:08:35 PM

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

--H. L. Mencken (or at least attributed so.)

by compiler-guy

5/6/2026 at 9:22:24 PM

The vast majority of people tuning into those kinds of slop streams are not really active listeners. It's more akin to turning on the radio while you work/clean/perform some other task that doesn't require strict focus or attention, with the added benefit that you can personally interact with the streamer (chat) when you have attention to spare. But I'd wager most viewers never directly interact or even pay much active attention to the stream at all.

I wouldn't be surprised if the same dynamic is playing out with these AI slop podcasts.

by tyg13

5/6/2026 at 11:38:03 AM

By McHealy's logic, we ought not be concerned about that. After all, it's low-stakes content.

by ryukoposting

5/6/2026 at 12:28:09 PM

My podcast app downloads way more podcast episodes than I actually listen to.

by jrmg

5/6/2026 at 3:35:48 PM

I occasionally put on a (human-made) podcast for the word-sounds rather than the content. I can imagine others do the same without caring whether it is human-made.

by Zarathustra30

5/6/2026 at 7:34:31 PM

If the sonic quality of a human voice is what you're seeking, then I imagine a generated voice will still be less appealing, no?

by justzisguyuknow

5/6/2026 at 11:58:51 PM

It's reminding me of twitter. I occasionally open it, half of the content I see is AI garbage (and by that I mean, poor quality AI generated stuff that is obviously AI), and 95% of the replies are bots responses, which aren't even AI based (most of the time not it's garbage, unrelated text)

by charles_f

5/7/2026 at 6:11:17 AM

They have 4k podcasts releasing 3k+ episodes per week, so that's ~250 listening per episode. That's an achievable number with organic traffic.

https://www.inceptionpoint.ai

by bulubulu

5/6/2026 at 12:25:26 PM

Other bots?

Dead Internet Theory.

AI produced, AI downloaded. No humans in the loop.

by FrustratedMonky

5/6/2026 at 2:11:38 PM

There was one of those "memes" a few years ago that is just a screenshot of someone's Twitter post that was essentially:

"My wife is a teacher, she used AI to help create an assignment, all the kids used AI to complete it, and now she's using AI to grade it. Nobody learned anything, nobody really did anything. What's happening?"

by pc86

5/6/2026 at 4:01:08 PM

Being the devil's advocate, it sounds like no one involved see any value in that exchange, therefore they don't care.

In that sense AI slop is a symptom, not a disease. But perhaps also a catalyst.

I really wonder if there is a sort of silver lining here, and in the long term low value activities will be filtered out of society. Though that borders on the AI maximalist view which I don't fully agree with.

Of course the glaring question is what value even is.

by dalmo3

5/6/2026 at 4:50:32 PM

"silver lining"

agree. if internet is so filled with slop. people will move away from it, start to read books, walk, hang out with each other again?

by FrustratedMonky

5/6/2026 at 6:19:34 PM

not when all the world capital is pushed into that bubble while eventually eroding the freedom to do all these things

can't move away from internet when you can't earn money without it, and all the services require you to participate

can't read books if no one is going to be publishing those, after they get out-competed by cheap endless slop

no point in walking when cities are built for cars and businesses, and public spaces continue to dwindle and be defunded

can't hang out when you're too tired trying to survive

by WhrRTheBaboons

5/7/2026 at 2:18:36 PM

There are absolutely people "trying to survive" but nobody reading HN falls into that category.

by pc86

5/6/2026 at 10:23:33 AM

Or maybe Ms. McHealy was simply lying.

by mjd

5/6/2026 at 4:25:14 PM

> All of the images in this post were generated by an ai in response to the simple two-word prompt “lovely knitting”

Touché.

by divbzero

5/6/2026 at 11:17:27 AM

> one of the most pernicious things about this particular kind of bullshit is the way it casts any form of critical scrutiny as a terrible failure of sensibility.

What a great line. And you'll probably notice this technique being used by very skilled bullshitters and master manipulators: any request for rigor or scrutiny is met by something like genteel condescension. You're treated as if you've committed a breach of etiquette, and that's one of the reasons the technique is powerful -- you're likely to feel embarrassed and, following that, to back off.

by Michelangelo11

5/6/2026 at 4:37:04 PM

Great point. This happens on forums too. For example if Kate opposes knitting bullshit, a common strategy is to characterize Kate as 'hostile', 'overheated', 'overreacting', etc. Kate's actual argument doesn't need to be addressed. We just rule that Kate isn't posting content, she's causing conflict or experiencing an unfortunate emotional state.

This strategy also indirectly helps overworked moderators by penalizing disagreement, which in turn discourages flame wars.

Kate's critics can even say they support Kate. They just want to help her deal with her emotional overload.

by nyeah

5/6/2026 at 12:29:23 PM

I like how the pictures got more and more sloporific through the essay.

It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a mountain of slop. In theory, recommendation algorithms ought to surface the best stuff, but that doesn't seem to align with incentives. Sad.

by tlb

5/6/2026 at 1:32:28 PM

Yes, I noticed and appreciated the sloporific (great word!) quality, too :) I stopped midway for a sec to try and figure out an image, then eventually realized they were just getting more nonsensical on purpose.

by Michelangelo11

5/6/2026 at 12:54:29 PM

Or even worse, it gets fed back into the AI slop machine

by onemoresoop

5/6/2026 at 1:43:22 PM

Their dialogue on "substituting truth and validity with a register of emotional validation" is pretty prevalent across the entirety of US culture right now. The first thing that comes to mind for me are Christian groups that do a lot of celebrating during services or events with absolutely no goodwill, volunteering, or donating at all. They're real good at making you feel righteous, but awful at actualizing it. Hate the hollowing out of traditions that used to make communities and people great.

by alphawhisky

5/6/2026 at 9:38:34 AM

I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.

by frereubu

5/6/2026 at 10:24:12 AM

At the start of Good Omens, there’s a scene where demons are sharing their recent misdeeds. A couple of them are sharing “classic” demon stuff like killing and possessing, but Crowley (the protagonist demon) shares more modern evil deeds, such as creating traffic jams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens

I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.

by latexr

5/6/2026 at 11:33:13 AM

It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of really intense suffering.

by kombookcha

5/6/2026 at 12:20:16 PM

I thought it was that he altered planning documents and even went and moved physical markings to make the M25 the shape of the ancient evil sigril Odegra (this is from memory; I just read it a lot as a teenager) so every angry drive round it powers that sigil.

by philipallstar

5/6/2026 at 11:39:54 AM

Yes, I think you’re right. And if I recall correctly, near the end he’s trying to get somewhere but gets stuck in traffic by the same problem he caused.

by latexr

5/6/2026 at 2:02:06 PM

In all fairness, he gets stuck trying to do something good, which is not the standard "evil trapped by its own design" moral.

by summa_tech

5/6/2026 at 11:45:30 AM

Ha, that's right! I forgot about that bit.

Man. I do miss Terry Pratchett.

by kombookcha

5/6/2026 at 12:29:54 PM

Whoever decided adding silly audio effects to an operating system is surely one of these lesser devils. Just think of how many people have been aggravated by a colleague's laptop when it "wakes up" every day, or an inappropriate notification sound during a presentation or something. On any desktop PC I interact with I do my bit by disabling all sound effects before I continue.

by globular-toast

5/6/2026 at 1:37:54 PM

The real genius was whoever decided to add fake typing sounds to virtual keyboards on touch screens.

by Maken

5/6/2026 at 2:25:37 PM

Blessedly everyone around me has disabled these, I had forgotten how enraged that makes me. Even though I don't think physical keyboards bother me at all.

by plagiarist

5/6/2026 at 1:37:52 PM

https://youtu.be/M0S3a32RzEo with David Tennant as Crowley.

It's a well done scene that is properly faithful to the original.

by shagie

5/6/2026 at 10:27:38 PM

I think Good Omens may have been influenced by the 1960s version of Bedazzled. In that, Peter Cook's version of the Devil spends much of his time creating petty annoyances such as scratching vinyl records and putting them back on shelves, breaking parking meters so drivers get fined, and ripping the last pages out of Agatha Christie whodunnits etc. Definitely a touch of Douglas Adams in there as well.

by nephihaha

5/6/2026 at 10:17:08 AM

For a long time I thought that the AdSense business model was ultimately doomed because I assumed that people hate ads as much as I do. It turns out I was just wrong about what most people are willing to put up with.

by siddboots

5/6/2026 at 10:29:07 AM

I remember visiting a friend over a decade ago, and for some reason I had to use their computer for a bit. I was immediately thrown aback by all the ads everywhere and installed an ad blocker before anything else. They were very grateful, but the part that surprised me was they were annoyed by the ads but never thought to look for some way around it. It never even crossed their minds it could be done or to search for it.

by latexr

5/6/2026 at 10:46:54 AM

All human progress in history has been due to a VERY small handful of people who think “this is bullshit, things could be better”.

The vast majority of people accept what they see as the way things are and it never occurs to them that things could be different.

by dmd

5/6/2026 at 12:32:58 PM

Similarly, when my partner moved in I told her about the network-level adblocker and she kinda scoffed at it saying ads don't bother her. A few years later she started complaining that when she's out of the house she gets ads.

by globular-toast

5/6/2026 at 4:01:05 PM

It's always absolutely shocking using a regular person's computer. How can they live like this? I have lived in this ad-free bubble for so long that I forget that's not the real world. If I had to live without adblockers, I don't think I'd ever visit the internet.

by thevillagechief

5/6/2026 at 1:11:32 PM

I really doubt it's going to die out.

I think a lot of the value in these AI Podcasts is just the self-validation of the listener. It really doesn't matter to the listener if there's nothing between Egyptian socks and Revelry because the point was to feel good not to learn.

But also because I've had a long standing pet peeve with news articles that include random ass stock footage in articles. If humans can get away with include a picture of _any_ ship when talking about a specific ship (that may have never been in the harbor the picture shows) then why does the AI need to be correct?

by lesuorac

5/6/2026 at 1:34:27 PM

[dead]

by hasteg

5/6/2026 at 10:11:04 AM

I'm afraid it'll lead to a weird music-ification of content.

Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition.

AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention.

Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.

by nilirl

5/6/2026 at 10:21:52 AM

It's definitely the sort of thing that Crowley from Good Omens would be working on.

by pjc50

5/6/2026 at 12:08:04 PM

Just like Big Tobacco moved onto greener pastures in the developing world, Big Slop is not targeting specifically us, but the billions of new internet users who connected over the past decade:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS

There's this (now old) meme called "Italian brainrot" - AI generated characters with vaguely Italian-sounding names like Bombardiro Crocodilo (note the incorrect spelling of the Italian word for crocodile).

One character stands out - Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Not only does it not sound Italian at all, that last word rang a bell.

Sahur (or Suhur) is the meal eaten before dawn during Ramadan.

After some digging I discovered this whole category originated in Indonesia. The country experienced an absolute explosion in the number of internet users in recent years and is home to internet phenomena which spread globally, but few in the west seem to realise that.

by Tade0

5/6/2026 at 9:26:10 PM

That's how characters are named in "Steal a Brainrot" , a Roblox game.

by sharadov

5/6/2026 at 2:30:08 PM

Boomers love slop. Even when they know it’s ai (and it can be increasingly difficult to tell even for people who don’t struggle to send an email) they love it almost as much as they love political ragebait, and they love political ragebait more than their own families. My ancient grandpa is on some facebook groups and they share bottom of the barrel ai videos and images all day. If it can be consumed with zero effort, it’s great. They couldn’t care less about whether any care of effort was involved in its creation, whether it has any value whatsoever, whether it’s made up bullshit. Not a whit.

They also have money and can vote, so there will be an endless avalanche of slop being generated every single day, enough to bury organic content ten times over.

by revolvingthrow

5/6/2026 at 4:01:51 PM

Eventually they will all die, and then the upcoming Gen-Z and -Alpha will save the world with their well-documented refined tastes for artisanal, purely human short-form video slop.

by mwigdahl

5/8/2026 at 11:43:18 AM

WWE has been a successful business model for a long time now, and shows no signs of dying out.

I haven't listened to those podcasts, but from Kate's description the recipe is the same as WWE. They appeal to the senses using only bullshit. The outcome is preordained, they are selling the hype only, the reality doesn't matter.

There is clearly customer base for this sort of thing that isn't going away. Amazingly it appeals to all age groups: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jN2Jxp_o4OtLZl4HuK2jWAtmUyy...

It works so well the USA has president who sold himself to the voters using this very same model.

by rstuart4133

5/6/2026 at 3:23:11 PM

Unfortunately, I think it is here to stay. But humans are very adaptable; I think things may play out fine.

See, I have some hobbies. You probably have yours too. The thing about hobbies, is that in many ways they are niche.

Of course, a lot of people enjoy running, but very few enjoy taking it seriously, delving into it beyond an occasional thing, to use it as an example. Replace running with any activity that may be approached as a hobby and that can be slopified.

And as any niche thing, there will be a separation of masses that consume it as slop, and those that engage with the real thing. They don't cancel each other out, just coexist as different things entirely.

by surgical_fire

5/6/2026 at 10:24:57 AM

Yeah, people will reflexively filter out the slop, eventually, but they'll do it by leaving the places that have been rendered worthless by its persistent presence.

The particular type of innovator ghoul that's enabled by generative AI dreams of filling the entire internet with bullshit content. Aggregators (media and content) should be actively pushing them out for their own long-term survival, IMO.

by Lalabadie

5/12/2026 at 5:59:50 PM

This is a great post, but am I the only person who thinks the AI-generated images are brilliant? They are haunting and disturbing in a good-art kind of way -- if I saw them in a gallery I would think the artist has real talent. I'd certainly think they were better, and more interesting, than most other modern art I see, and there are many artists who try to unnerve the viewer in exactly this way and fail. Maybe I just have bad taste. But I'd love to know exactly which AI the author used to generate them. It certainly wasn't frontier models. Midjourney, maybe, but I don't see how you'd get those images from Midjourney without adding the adjectives "unnerving" or "surreal" or something.

by incidentist

5/6/2026 at 2:18:30 PM

I didn't have the words to explain to my mother why those AI health/advice/story/etc videos she shares are harmful.

> While a liar displays an underlying respect for the truth in the very act of intentionally distorting it, “the essence of bullshit”, Frankfurt writes “is not that it is false but that it is phony.” For Frankfurt, then, bullshit, is discourse from which incidental matters like truth and reality have been completely hollowed out and replaced by performance and simulation.

She would often say "but I happen to know that some the underlying information is true." The answer is the videos are phony, even when part of it happens to be true.

by firefoxd

5/6/2026 at 1:15:10 PM

I can absolutely recommend the book On Bullshit, it's a tiny read and makes an excellent gift. Kate's article summarizes it very well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

This reddit comment puts it perfectly:

"What’s it about? Frankfurt tries (successfully) to define bullshit (rather academically). In short, a bullshit artist is solely focused on persuasion and making an impression, not caring about truth. Paradoxically, bullshit can be true.

What makes it bullshit is how it is created - shoddily, hastily and without regard for fine work. A gifted liar does their thing carefully so that the truth cannot be found out. A bullshit artist just flings it out, overwhelming skepticism with sheer volume, until something sticks with the audience."

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1pidpb2/on_bullshit_...

An 1980s take on something that has taken over our 2020s digital airwaves, indeed.

by telesilla

5/6/2026 at 2:05:14 PM

I'm from Texas and we use bullshit & tall-telling as an entertainment art (this is my background; I do t think it's specific!). This definition of bullshit is spot on; I'm pretty proud of my ability to bullshit-for-entertainment, so AI bullshit really grinds my gears... it's so bad.

by thechao

5/6/2026 at 9:48:18 AM

I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion.

I'm specifically thinking of a print magazine that was designed to make you feel like you are a smart reader of science articles, without any useful information about the actual science or technology.

by praptak

5/6/2026 at 10:39:42 AM

Yes, the article acknowledges this in the first paragraph by citing Harry Frankfurt’s „On Bullshit“ (1986). Of course bullshit (as well as even more insidious misinformation/propaganda) have always been around, but the incredible advances in its production and dissemination are worth considering. At some point, sheer quantity turns into its own quality. Indeed I would argue these issues have always been underconsidered. The article is a kind of inoculation against bullshit that every generation requires again and again. People aren’t born nearly skeptical enough, and the game keeps ever changing.

I actually don’t think the article is sufficiently vehement in calling out just how brain-frying this is. And how destructive on a societal level. The razor’s edge between being too uncritical and too cynical is hella narrow.

by wvbdmp

5/6/2026 at 10:32:22 AM

> I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion.

Even if that were true (which I don’t think it is, this is a different kind of worthless content), you most definitely don’t remember it at this scale, and that’s a major point.

by latexr

5/6/2026 at 6:41:45 PM

> but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes

Put differently-- it matters so deeply that the genre itself will inevitably become an unfathomably sad parody of what it could otherwise be.

by jancsika

5/6/2026 at 2:58:06 PM

There's something innate about AI generated contents that my instincts somehow knows these aren't creations by humans.

I can't seem to state exact properties but they are hollow, out-of-norm, or as the author describes it -- bullshit

by jameson

5/6/2026 at 11:57:01 AM

Great article, thanks for sharing.

I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing.

I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull office work and back breaking physical labor, but not the things that are actually enjoyable: sharing with each other, entertaining each other, making art. I imagined a lively world of live performance and creation, since all subsistence work had been taken care of. Instead we might end up in the world of fifteen million merits.

It seems people don't mind letting their minds be hacked by machines that can create the form of what they find enjoyable, if not the substance. But I guess there's always been slop and the public for it. To imagine actual people wasting their limited time on Earth listening to these GPT logorrhea podcasts is truly depressing. The unchemical soma.

What are we even supposed to spend our days doing in this bright future of the AI champions'? Stop automating away the things that give people purpose, tackle real problems instead.

by MITSardine

5/6/2026 at 12:13:54 PM

The incentives are at odds. In this capitalist landscape, you create podcasts and blogs (or have them created) to attract an audience which then attracts those fat advertising dollars.

by jagged-chisel

5/6/2026 at 12:16:37 PM

Ironically, these are both incredibly common, LLM-able takes:

Lament: Oh why did we automate art?

Answer: Capitalism.

by philipallstar

5/6/2026 at 12:28:55 PM

It's superficially true, currently. We've had generative AI for a few years and people are using it to make a quick buck. But even if the world had been taken over by communism, or if the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea had got imperial ambitions and now we all lived in a gift economy, people would still be using generative AI to gain attention and status. This will work until it wears thin. Thinner.

by card_zero

5/6/2026 at 12:26:58 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

5/6/2026 at 4:27:18 PM

I think AI is the final nail in the coffin of meaningless slop that started pervading our lives after covid.

I see people tiring of this brain rot, especially Gen Z, there are more offline events - music festivals, day time raves, running events, people are appreciating more things analog - LP records, cassettes, younger people getting turned off by social media.

by sharadov

5/6/2026 at 10:08:28 PM

the baking world has the same problem. when i search any baking recipe i just get ai generated recipes with photos that dont match the instructions.

by coffee_and_code

5/7/2026 at 7:51:02 AM

Some of those AI-generated images are deeply disturbing with their disjointed body parts, but the 1950s vibes are just too endearing.

by classified

5/6/2026 at 9:35:45 PM

Did anyone else read this article and try to spot the differences between the first two photos? (appearing before and after the title)

by giwook

5/7/2026 at 9:58:15 PM

does anyone else’s eyes just glaze over once they spot AI? there are MILLIONS of high quality public domain illustration, clipart, €5 illustration packs on etsy etc etc. It just never looks good and I assume your content is also AI generated so I ignore it

by johannesberlin

5/7/2026 at 12:09:24 AM

I used claude recently to generate a booklet about a system I had to ramp up on, and which is using technology I don't know. It was pretty interesting to read, especially because a) it was tailored to what I needed, b) didn't have to do the research myself, I had most of the information I needed to at least understand the system[^1]. Nevertheless, it was a very good bootstrap resource.

But if I find an article that was obviously AI generated, I hate it. The podcasts I enjoy all have in common a great host personality, either funny, or very insightful, or have a particularly nice voice. I can't imagine listening to slop like that.

I'm wondering if this is a bit the same pivot as TV -> youtube, media is similar but usage is different. Rather than finding a TV channel you like, you find videos on the exact topic you need -> rather than subscribing to a pod about a subject you're interested in, you generate the content you need at a given moment. New media that comes as a replacement, but as something new. So, not in this garbage form at all.

[^1]: I gather that in the long run, this might be slightly detrimental because i have the information i need, and ONLY the information I need, not the information that would be useful in the future when adding to it.

by charles_f

5/6/2026 at 1:21:55 PM

it's really disheartening that so much youtube content is now AI generated.

by trgn

5/6/2026 at 9:05:13 PM

At least they don't get many views. Not sure why the system suggests them? Maybe they could have an "AI crap" feedback button to warn others?

by tim333

5/6/2026 at 10:20:16 PM

I have reported some of it to YouTube. No idea if anything will come of it. A lot of fake C.S. Lewis and Carl Jung content for some reason. It bears no resemblance to things they actually said.

by nephihaha

5/7/2026 at 10:43:01 AM

A problem with reporting it is the AI producers can churn out thousands or millions of the things. They need some sort of automated or semi automated way of dealing with it I guess.

by tim333

5/7/2026 at 9:45:54 PM

They do, but I don't know how to do it. I truly despise seeing some video supposedly quoting from a famous historical figure and which turns out to be AI.

I saw a video of Irish quotations the other day. Among these great Irishmen were Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill. (I believe Churchill had family connections to Ireland but he would never have called himself Irish, let alone Einstein.)

by nephihaha

5/6/2026 at 9:02:43 PM

I really thought the photos were real as i was reading. Wow

by skeptrune

5/6/2026 at 9:53:45 AM

Interestingly, Inception AI seem to have pivoted from content slop for "gardening, [...] knitting, cooking" - or "things we can afford to be wrong" - to "AI Immigration Drafting Software for Law Firms": https://www.inceptionai.co/

I'm somewhat curious how that'll work out. Hint: I'm not.

EDIT: My bad, wrong company, it's "Inception Point AI": https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/

by whilenot-dev

5/6/2026 at 10:02:03 AM

There's also https://www.inceptionlabs.ai - it's not confusing at all.

by donaldihunter

5/6/2026 at 3:50:31 PM

If the kind of AI slop the article talks about entertains/infuriates/depresses you and you want more, you will definitely like the "kroshay" subreddit: http://reddit.com/r/kroshay

by munificent

5/6/2026 at 8:43:49 AM

Why does this site want to access apps and services on my local network?

On topic, I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out. At this moment I'm leaning towards just banning this shit, but maybe there is a better way?

by globular-toast

5/6/2026 at 8:58:14 AM

We can already see the market in action. Increasingly people are more hostile to online content and influencers, except for the few people they follow, just like everyone was already defensive against unsolicited email. Authenticity will become valuable in a sea of slop, and making high budget productions (think Mr Beast) will be worth nothing since it can be easily faked and hard to distinguish.

by potatototoo99

5/6/2026 at 10:39:11 AM

> I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out

Unlikely to do a better job than it did with anything else.

by AlecSchueler

5/6/2026 at 8:58:36 AM

[dead]

by huflungdung

5/7/2026 at 6:01:23 PM

What a masterpiece, this article.

BTW, if it's not already there, I encourage voting "Slop" as the Word of the Year.

Along with its corollary: the "Slop Factory"

by aanet

5/7/2026 at 3:27:49 AM

> No – knitting bullshit bothers me

This is a great article. The presence of this single emdash threw me off for a bit though!

by chr15m

5/6/2026 at 10:14:27 AM

[dead]

by aigenluser

5/6/2026 at 8:13:41 AM

[flagged]

by eduction

5/6/2026 at 11:53:13 AM

Maybe. But at least she gave a shit enough to actually write something you didn’t like.

The sloplings don’t even bother.

by coffeefirst

5/6/2026 at 8:53:47 AM

Not taking away the right to your opinion, but I couldn't disagree more; I found it an excellent sociological article. One, it takes the formal concept of "bullshit" and applies it to knitting in a very methodical and strict manner. I found it novel and convincing, and the examples were great; not contrived or forced at all. IMO it was much better than many academic books or articles; an immediate share.

Two, the turns of logic are clearly laid out, in a conversational way, which would make it easy to stick a wrench in and form a polemic if you found any of her arguments or logical implications specious. That said, that does make the article quite long. But then, it is anything other than "elliptical", which I think you used as "runs in circles and repeats itself often", while it actually means "omits parts and thus is difficult to understand" (like the ellipsis sign: …).

Also: what the heck is wrong with that podcast farm founder. I hope they have a bad year.

by Igrom

5/6/2026 at 8:36:00 AM

Yeah, well good thing that LLMs are good at summarizing articles, unlike generating believable knitting images.

by phoronixrly

5/6/2026 at 9:08:49 AM

I was a couple of images in before I sussed it. Bullshit images, but pleasing enough to look at. Without the images, it would have either been a big wall of text, which would have put me off reading, though I did give up about 25% of the way through after sussing the images and thus the incoherence in the argument. The images bring something to the article. They were cheap/quick to generate. The increase the potential payoff (more reader) without significantly increasing the cost. Without the images, the payoff(readers) would likely have been lower, below the cost of actually writing the article. Same goes for a history of knitting podcast or that video. Production costs would not be worth it for a very niche viewership.

by ivankelly

5/6/2026 at 9:46:59 AM

Reading that made me feel like you wanted to be contrarian from the get-go and dismiss the article with the least effort possible. The whole point of the images is that they're low-effort AI slop, it's part of what she's trying to point to when someone is generating unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting.

by frereubu

5/6/2026 at 11:15:52 AM

I came in indifferent but it doesn’t take much to make me give up on an article linked on hacker news. I use it as bubblegum while waiting for a compile/prompt, intent ally for stuff that can be dropped easily. I saw her disclaimer at the end. My point was that the slop images make a more appealing article than if they were absent

by ivankelly

5/6/2026 at 9:48:46 AM

So you're saying you can spot AI generated bullshit, but not spot a deliberate and hilarious contrivance that the author uses to reinforce their point?

by Slow_Dog

5/7/2026 at 1:54:54 PM

I may have different perception facilities in the brain, but to me the images in the article are horrifying. Such bad, Frankenstein-level, criminal butchering of absolutely everything!

by aakresearch

5/6/2026 at 9:36:24 AM

The AI images were deliberate and part of the narrative. Ie, you can generate slop with zero effort.

from TFA: "All of the images in this post were generated by an ai in response to the simple two-word prompt “lovely knitting”

Edit: ps: Kate Davies is an actual creator who has been creating knitting patterns for years.

by josh_s

5/6/2026 at 11:17:12 AM

Yes, I saw. By giving up I meant I skimmed to the end. The images improve the article

by ivankelly

5/6/2026 at 9:11:13 AM

You only had to reach the second paragraph to find the example of an 8-person company that uses AI to generate “about 3000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities.”

by antonvs

5/6/2026 at 11:11:18 AM

For someone complaining about slop, I found this unreadable.

by tmountain

5/6/2026 at 9:20:36 AM

TL;DR: there are brainrot farms with help from AI.

But I saw this one coming three or four years ago.

Actually, I've been listening to AI-generated brainrot music. I prefer it to some human-generated brainrot music (there's "I Hate Boys" from Christina Aguilera. Sorry if you are a fan).

Brainrot serves a specific social purpose: relieving stress, incoherently winning elections. It's a kind of drug that dulls the dangerous part of the brain while leaving the he-is-a-good-tool and she-is-blonde brain hemispheres in working order.

In fact, I do believe that if there were to be an uprising in a couple of decades against AI, and the human side were to rise victorious, the aftermath's social order would be studiously anti-AI and anti-science, but they would make a carve-out for AI brainrot (yes, I published a short fiction story with that premise, because I'm brainrot-vers).

by dsign

5/6/2026 at 9:41:19 AM

Are you serious when you connect anti-AI sentiment to anti-science sentiment?

To me, they are opposite sentiments, and my experience discussing AI with others supports this. The most pro-AI people I meet are very far removed from science, and my research colleagues are definitely more critical of AI than not.

by tovej

5/6/2026 at 10:37:27 AM

AI's tendency to emit unsourced, untrue statements with authority is about the most unscientific thing you can get.

AI is scientism: presenting science-flavoured things as a cultural marker.

by pjc50

5/6/2026 at 10:17:19 PM

Unfortunately there is a lot of cargo cult science around. I am not just referring to alternative viewpoints (which vary in validity), but even things from mainstream outlets masquerading as mainstream science.

One such example was businesses claiming physical cash was unhygienic while promoting dirty touchscreens for ordering. Real science has indicated that many of these touchscreens are covered in bacteria if they are not cleaned regularly.

The Daily Mail has been telling us that the Yellowstone supervolcano is about to blow for nearly thirty years now at least. Maybe one day it will, but hasn't yet.

by nephihaha

5/7/2026 at 9:52:35 AM

> The Daily Mail has been telling us that the Yellowstone supervolcano is about to blow for nearly thirty years now at least.

That's the Daily Mail, though. They platformed Andrew Wakefield, a misrepresentation of science that has a massive body count.

A more serious question for Silicon Valley is the San Andreas fault.

by pjc50

5/7/2026 at 9:33:38 PM

I would argue that the heavy handed censorship we saw in the early 2020s fuels the likes of Andrew Wakefield though. There was plenty of cargo cult science during that period, notably the U-turn on masks (in early 2020 people were being told they were ineffective) and many others. I suspect that was down to supply and demand. There were plenty of other unscientific ideas out there, and not all from the anti-side. People respect ideas more when they come from people with power. Allowing Amazon and pizza delivery access to everyone's door was not good epidemic control by any metric. I could specify other things.

Freedom of expression is important because it is not just members of the great unwasjed who promote ridiculous "science".

Yes, I agree about San Andreas. A problem for all California.

by nephihaha

5/6/2026 at 12:14:46 PM

> Are you serious when you connect anti-AI sentiment to anti-science sentiment?

I don’t believe that the current state of things represents peak-AI problems. AI is for now weak both in its capability and its impact, and also just new. Speculatively, if things go really bad, in a couple of decades there will be a huge swath of population without jobs nor high-flying education. They, perhaps rightly, will blame AI for the situation, but they’ll also, perhaps rightly, blame capital and the “snobbish elite” that is today and in the near future propping AI. That “snobbish elite” is well-paid engineers and researchers. That’s because people tend to like to have somebody to blame for their problems. But even without making it about bad guys, the heart of the thing that is pouring billions into AI is a relentless ethos of profit deriving from progress and disruption. You can’t stop AI without stabbing that heart.

by dsign

5/6/2026 at 4:15:23 PM

Calling current AI "weak in its capability" is very disconnected from the reality. Their capabilities in many areas and on many tasks are incredibly strong. The disconnect seems to come from completely unrealistic expectations, e.g. imagining the AI as a sort of omniscient oracle which should never make mistakes.

by antonvs

5/6/2026 at 12:28:24 PM

I think he is making the point that scientist built the AI.

The whole "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should,"

by FrustratedMonky

5/6/2026 at 9:52:22 AM

ummmm, WOW!, hey that clicks your brainrot/drug description is good. making a choice for zero human content and therfore interaction.

the full suite of options would include perfectly artificial scents. personaly, I am way over in the analog/organic direction, but I get the need to disconect from the "whatever this is™" that passes for a society. the question remains for AI scaling to meet the demands and desires society has always placed on indivuals

the audible exasperated noise comming from the person in line with me, seeing me pull out cash, thereby breaking there own perfect little automated world, mearly by bieng subjected to witnessing such a primitive ritual, not behind me I might add, the person leaving in front of me, is the prime example of someone who will violently reject AI and the rest when it inevitably fails to "fix" everything

by metalman

5/6/2026 at 12:39:57 PM

I feel like the alt captions for the images, although diligent and thorough, don't really capture the most important aspects.

by card_zero

5/7/2026 at 9:54:29 AM

That got downvoted. But alt images are for inclusivity, for people who can't see the images. Only one of these says "surreal", the rest of them would lead you to believe that they are normal images. So it's performative inclusivity that actually excludes people. It would have been better to say "this AI generated image of the act of knitting is accidentally bizarre in a subtle way" as the alt text for every image.

by card_zero

5/7/2026 at 4:40:41 PM

[dead]

by buildsjets

5/6/2026 at 10:19:14 AM

I like the blog but the premise of the blog is an engineering/epistemological perspective on the craft. The writer clearly cares more about the process, technique and history more than the feeling and validation.

It could be, that a big part of the the future of hobby's and entertainment in this way is the feeling and validation over the actual performance. Or it can be that a massive amount of people find their value in this content.

by augment_me

5/6/2026 at 10:35:46 AM

So .. I think we need to ask a deceptively simple question here, which is: is knitting real?

I'll add in an aside to this, which is not only are there fake knitting podcasts there are fake knitting and crochet patterns, which is a problem because people get a substantial way through making them only to discover that they don't work. In some cases the giveaway is that the supposed final image isn't physically possible, like the images in this article, but the fakers can use a real stolen image and just spam a pattern underneath it.

So: what is the knitting that is real? It has to be the use of your hands, needles, and yarn to produce a physical object, right?

The podcasts work towards something else. The identity of "being a knitter". This is a form of "hobby" that was already not unusual, that of discussing a thing without ever bothering to actually do it. Photographers are especially bad at this: too many lenses, not enough photographs. They've also got comprehensively run over by AI, because you can just generate the photographs now. Same for "authors".

But ultimately all these pleasant sensations aren't backed by a connection to the real. If you're going to talk about the history of knitting, shouldn't it be the real, evidenced history? As done by real (usually) women? Otherwise you're just knitting a pleasant fantasy for yourself.

The AI approach is "wireheading": the logical conclusion of all of that would be to find a means of inserting a wire in your head that provides constant pleasant sensations. Achieving happiness through a constant feed of generated images is less effective, but it's the same order of things.

(see also: authenticity in food, which could easily turn into another ten thousand words)

by pjc50

5/6/2026 at 11:44:29 AM

I'd also say a few things, if knitting takes a long time consider how long it takes to make a good clear pattern so that others can replicate it.

People who make patterns are already dealing with a saturated market. This includes historical/vintage patterns, which for many years patterns were primarily given away freely to incentivize yarn sales, or dominated by publishers. It wasn't until recently (internet, etsy, ravelry) when designers actually had the means to sell directly to consumers. People making an effort to produce usable patterns are now being dwarfed by AI nonsense in the speed of their output. It was already a difficult market. That everybodys images of real objects (along with AI generated ones) are being used to peddle and market patterns that will never work can be really demotivating.

One last thing is how many of the 8 people in this podcast company are actually generating slop and how many are actually just doing marketing?

by ratmice

5/6/2026 at 10:44:08 AM

I am with you until you make this assumption:

> But ultimately all these pleasant sensations aren't backed by a connection to the real. If you're going to talk about the history of knitting, shouldn't it be the real, evidenced history? As done by real (usually) women? Otherwise you're just knitting a pleasant fantasy for yourself.

If the real is the feeling you get from listening to the podcast or identifying with a subculture, then that is the real for that person. Factual, grounded information is just one take. If it was not this way, we would have much less myths, religions, etc historically.

People will feel the same degree of joy and completion when the final word of the podcast is read like you feel when you finish a really complex piece of work.

by augment_me

5/6/2026 at 11:39:59 AM

If you genuinely believe this, there is no point to doing anything at all except heroin. Every moment that you aren't dedicating to being on heroin or getting more heroin, to heroinmaxx if you will, is a net loss.

'But what if I run out though' I hear you ask? Simply finish off on a truly heroic dose and sail into oblivion on a wave of bliss that's much better than all your relationships and hopes and dreams. It's real for you, right? If it makes your friends sad, they could just do some heroin about it. More real than real!

Do not willingly become a lotus eater.

by kombookcha

5/6/2026 at 12:02:17 PM

Look, I get your comparison and while extreme, it's funny. I just have very little faith in that the average person cares this deeply about the physically grounded reality. It's kind of a luxury of the well-off to be able to sit and think about what content to engage with when you just want to relax after a 8 hour shift followed by picking up kids, getting groceries, etc. If someone sees an AI-video that makes them happy or laugh, they send it to their friend who also laughs about it, that's their reality.

We happen to have time to argue about the philosophy about direction of the ontology of information at the downvoted bottom of a HN thread today, most people dont.

by augment_me

5/6/2026 at 10:29:31 AM

The idea that we could create a world where 'a big part of the future of hobbies and entertainment' is people listening to meaningless words made up by machines that help them feel good about themselves sounds horrifying. How could anybody feel ok about that? What would it say about the society we've built?

by ossopite

5/6/2026 at 10:39:43 AM

It would say that society changes, and people who were not used to a new world get upset about it, as it has always been throughout the entire history of humanity.

We were used to having psychologists and doctors in person, now the most common form is to have it through apps, and the younger generation does not care, it's in fact more efficient to get a prescription that you like than to spend time going places and having in-person meetings. But older generation finds it hollowing out and horrifying.

You need to accept that society moves on, and it can look different from your perspective.

by augment_me

5/6/2026 at 10:53:10 AM

A looooot of assumptions here. We have yet to see any of these brave new ideas actually work.

Therapy has never been more available, yet mental health is through the basement.

I’m also not seeing any evidence that young people are the driving force behind turning the world to shit. Every Gen Z person I know craves authenticity, connection, and meaningful work. All of this is the opposite.

by simonask

5/6/2026 at 11:08:48 AM

It's interesting how every time this argument is made, its about subjective experiences of 'craving'. If this was the objective reality, we would have a majority of Gen Z engaged in movements, social groups and other concepts that would help them fulfill their 'cravings'.

However, it seems to not be the case, it seems like they prefer to spend their free time to doomscroll, or sit at home, and engage more in parasocial relationships that perhaps can be more on their terms, on their timeframes, and with their opinions.

by augment_me

5/6/2026 at 11:38:32 AM

That’s one explanation. The other explanation is that young people feel powerless to change anything, and that they are hooked against their will on deliberately addictive ad delivery platforms.

The more alarming conclusion here happens to be backed by a lot of science, unfortunately, so it’s not easy to dismiss.

by simonask

5/6/2026 at 10:53:42 AM

The problem is, who is moving “society on” and what is their agenda.

I don’t think it’s healthy to encourage an attitude to just accept all change without any sort of reflection or push back.

by doesnt_know

5/6/2026 at 10:56:04 AM

> the younger generation does not care, [...] more efficient to get a prescription that you like [through apps]

Absolutely

> people listening to meaningless words made up by machines that help them feel good about themselves sounds horrifying

Yes

> Every ... person ... craves authenticity, connection, and meaningful work.

Right

> to find a means of inserting a wire in your head that provides constant pleasant sensations.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1955-06866-001

> Factual, grounded information is just one take.

Absolutely

by genewitch

5/6/2026 at 10:50:39 AM

You could justify basically anything with that logic. Change isn't always about progress.

by danparsonson

5/6/2026 at 10:54:30 AM

In this case, the user is deciding that they choose what progress is. I am saying, that people who use the tool and value the utility of it decide what is progress. If people listen to the podcast, or use doctors in the phone because it provides them any value, it will be a change and a perceived progress for them.

If the generated podcasts did not bring any value to the users, such as validation, or engagement, they would not use them, and there would be no change.

by augment_me

5/6/2026 at 11:31:13 PM

> If the generated podcasts did not bring any value to the users, such as validation, or engagement, they would not use them, and there would be no change.

Ever heard of heroin?

by danparsonson

5/6/2026 at 11:15:42 AM

"But how does the collapse of truth and meaning in society affect you personally?"

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2565163-smugjak-but-how-does...

by like_any_other

5/6/2026 at 11:32:21 AM

Your meaning and your truth, not necessarily other peoples who find their meaning and truth in other things.

Go to China, or Congo and you will find that the public might hold a different version of some truths than you do.

We had religions dominating the world order for thousands of years, which projected their versions of the truth onto their societies.

If we would extrapolate that to today and to your opinion, it would be that everyone in the middle ages actually had it all figured out, they knew that the religious texts about splitting oceans or the moon were fake, and were all just playing along with it for the social structure.

Maybe it just happens that the LLM-generated stuff is the next thing in this iteration.

by augment_me

5/6/2026 at 11:59:04 AM

> Your meaning and your truth, not necessarily other peoples who find their meaning and truth in other things.

The makers of those AI podcasts explicitly stated they were unconcerned with whether their content was factual, so this is not comparable to people that actually thought they were right. But if you're arguing that listeners of those podcasts will believe that made-up slop is truth, that that's the "their truth" you're talking about, then yes, that is exactly what I meant by "collapse of truth".

by like_any_other

5/6/2026 at 10:45:55 AM

Can't wear feelings and validation...

by ratmice

5/6/2026 at 10:49:35 AM

If you only care about the material and physical utility of the product, you can order the sweater from AliExpress for 5% of the cost and no time spent.

by augment_me

5/6/2026 at 10:07:20 PM

Knitting is enjoyable for many people and can even be a form of stress relief. AliExpress is just more consumption.

by nephihaha

5/7/2026 at 8:38:16 AM

The same way that the AI generated podcast about knitting, or engaging in consumption is enjoyable for many people and a form of stress relief, which was the point that the comment above was criticizing.

So the conclusion is that the utility of the activity is subjective, and if most people spend their time listening to AI factually incorrect podcasts about knitting and enjoying it, it's no different than knitting yourself and enjoying it. The blog was poor in this disambiguation, and pushed a more Aristotole-like ontological view of what is meaningful, which is more common view in engineering/hard-science dominated fields.

by augment_me

5/7/2026 at 9:12:43 AM

They are not the same. One is a passive thing (viewing) and the other is active (physical creation). We should not mistake one for the other. It is like the difference between listening to music and making it.

by nephihaha

5/8/2026 at 10:50:33 PM

It is fine though if people who don't knit enjoy knitting podcasts, but this is not that. Somewhere between the producer/consumer relationship there should exist some actual knitting. Otherwise (in cases like this) it's just plain exploitation.

by ratmice

5/7/2026 at 9:50:59 AM

That's completely your subjective opinion that ignores reality. If people feel like they are participating in something, or they feel like their identity is based on something they consume passively, it's as valid as the physical thing.

If people did not feel good from passive consumption, no-one would be listening, following or looking at things, people would just make and create all the time, which is obviously not true.

If what you say is true, there would be no value from AI-generating blogs in question, or AI-generated movies/youtube films. Yet both have millions of downloads, views and listens, as the article mentions.

by augment_me

5/7/2026 at 9:38:03 PM

Reality involves physical objects you can hold in your hands, not abstract experiences. Abstract experiences are subjective not objective most of the time.

Knitting is not just entertainment, it's a means to produce useful things as well as artistic projects.

Many people are either lazy or have been discouraged from creativity by a consumer society and the education system. I've watched plenty of online content. I have nothing from it but feelings (the very subjective opinion you talk about), and very occasionally a tiny bit of new information. Knitting creates clothing which can be used to keep out the cold (objective) and so on. In fact this very winter, I wore things my friends knitted me. Gloves, hat, socks, snood, scarves... They served a practical function beyond entertainment or just looking good.

by nephihaha

5/6/2026 at 10:56:10 AM

Seriously? You can't get the feeling of satisfaction of wearing something, or having someone wear something you made from AliExpress. My point is your sense of feeling and validation is extremely distorted if you have no knitted material to show for it?

by ratmice

5/6/2026 at 11:01:02 AM

Completely subjective take by you with similar epistemology around value as the blog author.

People might not care. I might identify as a runner because I bought a little jacket, expensive shoes, and wide-purple-tinted sunglasses, do I have to run? Not necessarily if the objects and my identity gives me the feeling of completion and satisfaction.

If your premise was true for all people, and the sense would be distorted, we would not see these phenomena, and people wouldn't listen or engage with AI-content. But the biological reality and the path of least resistance seems to prove us otherwise.

by augment_me