AI Content & The Social Contract

AI Content & the Social Contract

Mar 5, 2026

Ai

Blog

Why I Blog and Why You Read

Blogging is a lot of work, you can tell by how few updates there are to this site, and how many of my images come along with the body text “Nothing here yet, enjoy the pretty pictures.” AI promises to make everything easy. I can use AI to write a blurb about a photo, or a blog entry in a few seconds and upload it here in no time. No sweat equity on my part, hell, if I can’t come up with an idea for a blog post, I could just ask the AI, it can do everything. I’d feel so productive, I could sling out blog post each day. Hell, I’m an engineer, I could make a cron job go fetch a list of blog post ideas from AI each morning, have AI rank the suggestions and then have AI write a blog post for the day, submit it here and move on. I could probably even vibe code it in a few minutes.

And you Dear Reader, you don’t even have to read my blog anymore, you can have an AI digest it for you. Summarize all my hard work (or not hard work) into an easy to consume sentence or two you can skim, move on, and forget. But you’ll feel productive (yeah, I read that astrophotography dude’s blog!).

We’ll both feel productive, oh so productive. And maybe the high of psuedoproductivity is fulfilling for a while. I’ll go home, tell my partner all about how awesome my blog is going and how I’m making so much content, and my readers, well, you’ll probably not go tell anybody anything about my blog. You’ll probably tell a friend about how you wrote an OpenClaw agent that goes and reads the news for you and digests it, and how amazing it is. You’ll tell you friend about Ralph Wiggum loops, and they’ll misunderstand it and think it’s Peter Wiggin loops. What’s the difference between a dim witted Simpson’s character and a genius megalomaniac from Ender’s Game? After all, LLMs don’t have a monopoly on “hallucinations”.

Kronk, the O.G. Himbo

But all of this isn’t the point. It’s all empty calories, it’s information junk food. It’s the ultraprocessed foods you buy at the gas station that you know probably isn’t good for you, but you keep eating because it’s so damn tasty, even though you never really feel full from eating it. It’s that new productivity technique that you spent two weeks setting up and never used. It’s the tool shaped object. It’s that mind mapping app that you spend ages developing a taxonomy for and then never use. It’s that vacuous himbo you pick up at the bar and regret in the morning.

This isn’t why I blog. This isn’t why you read. When I write a non-astrophotography blog, I write because I have something to share, some thought, some idea, something meaningful. When I write an astrophotography post, I have something to share, I want to share my image I spent days collecting data for, and days editing, but I also want to share the wonder I feel looking at the cosmos. I want to share knowledge and the joy of discovery. I don’t know why you read, but I suspect it’s because you, too, seek fulfillment by growing your wonder at the universe we live in. That, or you’re a relative, and you’re reading out of obligation (Hi brother!).

Injecting AI into this relationship just cheapens everything. If I write with AI, I’m not sharing anything meaningful with you, and if you consume this with AI, what are you getting out of it? I truly believe that the future of the internet is small enclaves, curated by humans, by and for humans. But that’s another blog post.

The Social Contract

What I feel reading AI Slop

But the only place AI can be in use isn’t just by me writing this blog, or you reading this blog. No, AI is everywhere. Slop proliferates google’s search results, slop appears on the top of the search results now, if you scroll down and click into any of the links, it’s probably all slop. It’s all empty, empty wasteland of saying nothing, but doing so with a lot of words and tokens. There is nothing more infuriating in googling the manufacturer recommended torque for setting a cannondale synapse handlebars and having to wade through mountains of words all telling you absolutely nothing. Page after page presenting itself with a title promising an answer, and paragraph after paragraph of prose, written by AI, with no information besides generic, junk food information.

This is dishonest.

This is wrong.

Get me my pitchfork.

If you are writing “content” and asking me to read it, it damn well better have something behind it besides SEO spam and AI slop. You are stealing time from me. You owe me a debt, and there isn’t a way to collect. If web3 had ever got off the ground, you’d have stolen money too. All this slop, you put no...