Slop online — low-quality, generic, bland, shallow, unreliable, attention-seeking, mass-produced content — isn’t new. Humans have been making it for as long as the internet has existed, because attention is the only valuable resource online. But AI amplifies this problem by orders of magnitude, and Kurzgesagt has made a video that dives into why this isn’t great.

If current trends continue, it’s not that far fetched that cheap slop content, stuff just good enough, will soak up the majority of human attention. It could make us dumber, less informed, our attention spans even worse, increase political divides and make us neglect real human interaction. If AI eats the majority of the attention pie, channels like ours will become unfeasible or forced to downsize or use AI themselves to be able to compete. We don’t want to play this game.

That doesn’t mean that they want to be Luddites and not use AI at all. In the last-act of their narrative, they promise that they will use AI as a tool in their toolbox like the align tool in Adobe Illustrator or as a better Google search, but the creativity and integrity in their video is still theirs. They promise that “Kurzgesagt is made by humans, for humans, and will remain that way.”

Made by humans, for humans. I love this idea. It matches how I’ve been using AI. When I write these posts, for example, I ask a LLM to rate and review my posts and make suggestions, but it’s me doing the writing. Em-dashes and all.