Companies produce trash / people want trash
Terence Eden wrote a good article about how most people don't care about quality, in response to a genre of article about how quality is declining. It's a rich, long-running vein of discourse, the spiritual successor of discussions about how "pop music" is rotting our brains. Or see Neil Postman's warnings about a vast descent into triviality caused by TV culture.
Thinking about how companies want to produce AI slop and trash and people want to consume AI slop and trash leads me directly into the void, so I'll note some of the other stuff involved:
- All art has both an interior language and an exterior language. In the interior, there are in-jokes and a passion for tiny details. There's "music for musicians," for people who will notice odd time signatures, and films that only make sense to film buffs. There are architectural details that are universally noticed by architects and fans that fly unnoticed by everyone else. Arts have their 'practical purposes' of raw entertainment, and then they have this underlying detail that delights the snob.
- Companies want to create slop, but most humans hate creating slop. Journalists don't like writing listicles or quizzes. Software engineers don't like implementing dark patterns, unless they're exceptionally cash-motivated. People who create quality stuff are driven to do so by non-economic factors, by a love of their craft.
- "Appreciating good art and design" is a privilege: it chiefly requires time and money. Netflix is famously competing with sleep, not HBO. Its shows are explicitly designed for people who want something to fall asleep to, or have playing while they cook dinner. People don't have lifestyles where they are going to theaters for two hours of focused cinema. The cheapening of things that used to be quality is in many ways a side effect of the skyrocketing costs of housing and healthcare, and our continued failure to create more leisure time despite increasing GDP.
There's plenty of reason to despair. But, as Terence notes, there always has been. There's always been a plethora of bad movies and books and everything.
But, some people will continue to create things of quality, and others will continue to appreciate that. For both economic and non-economic reasons.