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What's left to say<br>Author: Iris Meredith<br>Date published: 2026-05-21<br>Well, that was unpleasant.<br>My primary experience of the world at the moment seems to be exhaustion. I'm exhausted at the world and the people leading us, I'm exhausted at the way in which all of our social interactions seem to reduce to a kind of bleak superficiality (hence the networking article of a week-and-a-half ago, which was needlessly mean-spirited and for which I apologise). I'm exhausted by the fact that even people who should and claim to know better fall into that mode of interaction, and I'm exhausted by the fact that there increasingly seems to be no space in the world for those of us who have values beyond the dollar, the click, the like or the engagement statistics. I'm exhausted by the constant undercurrent of superficial anger in everything: not the kind of anger that leads to righting injustice, but the kind that leads to you quietly seething as you look for more things to make you angry. And I'm exhausted by the fact that attempting to be moderate, temperate and level-headed in this world seems to be a highway towards invisibility and irrelevance. Hell, even the great luminaries have to piledrive people to get eyes on their work: even in this blog I feel consistent pressure to channel anger to get readers, even though I'm not good at it and when I do it comes out with the kind of real venom that puts people off.<br>All this is to say that I think that perhaps we were lying to ourselves when we worried about AI and its social impacts, not because we said that the technology is bad and has negative consequences (it does), but because of what we told ourselves: we criticise the technology because it's an affront to human dignity and creativity and damages our ability to create art, write or otherwise be human. I think that that's probably why a lot of us got into writing criticism of LLMs, but while that may be the case, I can't help but see that many of the critics, including many luminaries in the field, seem to have prioritised hatred of LLMs over love for that which they threaten. They don't create much any more: they don't write things other than essays on LLMs, they don't make art or music, they don't even seem to write code or build systems much. And when they do, much of their output is sub-par. They've almost turned LLM criticism into an industry, producing page upon page of critique and making money from it. In the words of Contrapoints, lightly paraphrased, "they don't want to stop the damage that LLMs do, they want to endlessly critique LLMs". And in doing so, they commit many of the same sins that they accurately point out in the LLM world.<br>A society that would create both LLMs and the LLM criticism industry is one that's deeply sick in so many ways that it's difficult to count. It's not, in the end, that the AI creates slop that nobody wanted in the first place but that we've now developed an addiction to. No, we were in the business of consuming and producing slop for a very long time. We loved the stuff: business reports that nobody read, infographics that looked pretty (or even ones that didn't look very pretty and had downright sloppy design), youtube video essays that were just a person reading out a wikipedia article, SEO-calibrated business blogs that are completely vacuous and an endless supply of social media content. As much as we might say that we want challenging content that expands our horizons, broadens our minds and helps us grow, when faced with the choice between consuming something difficult or sticking our faces in the trough, we tend to stick our faces in the trough. It's for this reason, perhaps, that so many LLM critics, in turning their well-deserved ire upon the technology, have fallen into the production of slop themselves: they simply tend to do it manually rather than programmatically. Perhaps this was inevitable: it certainly seems in my experience that it's basically impossible to succeed at all in this society without making some slop, and even people who say they dislike slop, by their revealed preferences, will consume it over something more challenging.<br>Just look at the pressures on your average content creator. Even the phrase "content creator" speaks volumes: we aren't artists, writers or musicians, but people whose job it is to create a steady stream of stuff that captures the attention of the people who consume it so that our captive audiences grow and some of them send us money 1. In that kind of situation, and with the kinds of margins that we work on, there is a very strong pressure to create a lot of stuff (which necessarily means sacrifices in depth or quality: I have maybe one really in-depth essay in me a week, along with maybe something lighter if I'm up for it and not too stressed), and to create stuff...