Notes and links - 2 August 2026
"Slop wins because it conforms to neat narrative arcs that fulfill our desires for cohesive stories: At crime scenes, children make the best witnesses because they simply report back what they saw rather than editorializing into a natural story arc. The adult brain is hardwired to eliminate cognitive dissonance by effectively hallucinating events that didn’t happen to make our memories fit into a tidy narrative.
Does that sound like any of the AI tools you know? In many ways, a tragic flaw of LLMs is that they are even more allergic to cognitive dissonance than people are, hence the hallucination problem being such a tough one to squash completely. Moreover, any time there is even mild tension or paradoxical sentiment in an idea, models go out of their way to call it out ( “that’s the real sticking point”) and try to crush it when the more intellectually honest tactic would be to simply let the tensions be.
Insufferable vernacular tics aside, this makes AI writing more “comfortable” to read, especially in the passive consumption mindset that, well let’s face it, most people are in most of the time."
Also:
"But my guess on the biggest challenge is that good writing is fundamentally anti-consensus and I'm not sure that's a problem the models can really solve. As soon as the models all agree on a turn of phrase or style, it becomes "slop" and can't really be used by humans anymore. As opposed to code, where (for the most part) a good answer is a good answer (you can verify the code works), the quality of writing is subject to other writing that exists around it."
People love to suggest more, they need suggest less...
"A collection of 2025 studies published in Communications Psychology looked at additive versus subtractive treatments for mental health struggles and found that participants consistently recommended additive solutions, like meditating and exercising, more than subtractive ones (eg quitting smoking and limiting alcohol). They also rated additive solutions as more “feasible and effective”, even when the measurably easier and more efficient fix came from the opposite approach. The researchers determined that people tend to get more additive as they age. Even ChatGPT advice is biased towards additive solutions, which it recommends quickly and confidently, even when they don’t best serve the user. Furthermore, participants were more likely to accept additive mental health advice for themselves and recommend it to strangers; the only people to whom participants naturally suggested subtractive advice were close friends."
In the Age of AI, the Analog Restaurant Feels Radical
Some restaurants are leaning into handmade touches, as AI-generated food photos and flyers become commonplace
Bettina Makalintal
