#Tag · bonfire.cafe

"Garbage In Garbage Out" applies to a lot of things.

🥧 Pie.
🐕 Puppies.
🏛️ Politicians.

But this post is about generative AI.

We've already reached the point where the internet is more bot than human, and AI slop trained on human creativity is growing exponentially (along with its power requirements).

You see, generative AI has two main features that make it particularly effective at producing garbage: It has a high output volume and it doesn't give a fuck if it's factually wrong (sounds like most politicians and marketers actually 🤔).

So, to put this in lay-terms...

AI is like your new puppy. You feed it a nice diet of curated posts, it does cute-stupid things that are fun to post pictures of. One day you decide Mr. Sprinkles is ready to be out of the kennel when you're not home. You leave for several hours and return home to find that Mr. Sprinkles has been hoovering down everything in the bathroom waste bin. Not only that, but at some point the lil' rascal ran into the bedroom to hork up half-digested tampons and tissues on your duvet.

You look on in horror as you realize that the waste bin must've been emptied the moment you left the house, and grotesque puppy hork is littered around *everywhere*.

But it doesn't stop there. You hear slurping noises and turn around just in time to see Mr. Sprinkles happily recycling one of the previous piles of puppy puke. You stifle a gasp as you cover your mouth. How long has this cycle been going on? How many times has that tissue gone through the puppy—two, three, a hundred? At this point it's long-since been rendered into homogeneous slop (though you think you recognize a kibble or two and the edge of a Tampax wrapper).

Alright, now imagine it's not just one puppy—it's an exponentially replicating litter of dalmatian puppies with IBS. And it's not just one waste bin—it's the known universe.

Eventually *everything* will be amorphous puppy hork.

#ELI5 #AI #GIGO #GrayGoo #Graphic #PuppyHork #ShortStory #LongPost