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A significant chunk of the U.S. economy is tied up in making calculators that hallucinate. The part that isn’t is devoted to building high-tech bombs and missiles for a war nobody wants. 

The people in charge of that war are promising precision and speed while sleepwalking into another Middle East quagmire and blowing up elementary schools. They’ve turned some part of their own decision-making over to those lying AIs, relying on the unknowability of their inner workings to mask their own incompetence.

If cloud computing has given us anything, it’s this innovative new way to pass the buck.  The finger-pointing gets decentralized and spread around just long enough for the accusations to fade away. In this kind of environment, it makes sense that people are looking for something they can control, something human. Personally, I’ve found it in a cooperative online satire of AI chatbots and image generators.

“Your AI Slop Bores Me” is an ingeniously simple experiment in interconnectivity. Real-life users ask questions or request pictures from an “AI.” Those requests are delivered to other users, who have a little over a minute to say something helpful or draw an image using sub-MS Paint-level tools. 

In order to make requests for doodles, advice, fanfiction or whatever else, you have to earn credits — and to do that you have to answer someone else’s query. User credits max out at 10, forcing folks who just want to crack wise and draw pictures to keep on handling the churn of incoming requests. In using it for about an hour, I was delighted by the  amateurish attempts to meet my requests and absorbed by the tiny canvas in my own failed attempts to impress strangers with touchpad doodles. 

Occasionally, the game turns truly remarkable, a reminder of the latent talent out there in the bored masses. Whoever drew me an incredibly detailed sketch of Prince, or a line drawing of Mulder and Scully in just 70 seconds, is a true artist. Whoever received my best attempt at Laika the dog deserves an apology. 

As AI creeps its way into everything, making previously miraculous innovations unusable and spreading its miserable slop ever wider,  it’s a worthwhile act of resistance to waste a little time reaching out to each other.   

What do you think? Will people continue to find ways to push back against AI encroachment on creativity? Sound off in the comments.

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