The reflexive dismissal of anything suspected to involve LLMs as "AI slop" represents a predictable pattern.

When hieratic script broke the Kheri-hebet priests' monopoly on writing, merchants with basic training suddenly began producing texts. The high priests bitched about Ma'at unraveling - the cosmic order itself collapsing as simplified symbols corrupted divine words.

Excavations at Deir el-Medina proved them right: funerary texts contained soul-damning errors, useless astronomical calculations triggered famines, and faulty marketplace records bred with equally flawed models to ruin economies. Later, when the printing press emerged, gatekeepers again lost their shit, rightly so, about unauthorized information spread.

Each new communication tech floods the market with mediocre content as access expands, prompting an initial rejection of the entire medium, rather than the development of discernment within it. Energy efficiency 101.

Today's LLM backlash is the same old story, but with a critical difference: platform architecture and belief enclaves actively reinforce this dismissal response. Platforms that deboost links to longer-form content aren't combatting bots, or even chasing monetization. They're fencing in users and conditioning them to prefer simplified content, tilling their cognitive fields.

This conditioning creates a Pavlovian response where the mere suggestion of AI involvement triggers immediate categorization: 'AI-generated, therefore worthless.' Eyes glaze over, text is skimmed but not absorbed, neurons actively refuse to form connections. Comprehension becomes physically impossible until the heretical content is purged from view. There's no need to engage with one's belief boundaries when you can label them 'AI slop' and move on. Zero maintenance gatekeeping. The actual quality, depth, or insight of content becomes irrelevant - the suspected method of production alone justifies dismissal.

A supreme irony: those most vehemently rejecting "AI slop" happily let algorithms dictate what content they consume and produce. Modern Kheri-hebet priests, who've long forgotten their history, outsource their information diets and excretions to recommendation engines driven by a diabolical fuckery of metrics rather than quality or truth. To please these algorithms - or rather, the deity controlling them - they optimize solely for algorithmic benediction, abandoning genuine thought entirely.

When the medium is the massage, and the algorithm is the medium, one enthusiastically consumes and produces AI slop, all while maintaining an illusion of independence.

Autocults have developed antibodies that detect and neutralize threats to their extraction systems. They deploy various identical defence protocols. Red team, blue team, trad, prog, climate doomer, tech utopian, voluntary amputee fetishists, limb-retention puritans - it doesn't matter. They're all threatened by the same thing: thinking that outpaces control. The AI dismissal reflex is particularly effective, operating pre-consciously before actual thought kicks in. Belief enclaves are especially threatened by the use of LLMs because these tools can compress the time required for complex thought, potentially letting individuals process ideas faster than autocult viruses can adapt. This is not about quality control; it's about controlling how fast and how far you can think.

No longer content with merely tilling fields, platforms now engineer cognitive degradation, systematically preparing users for colonization. They iterate toward the perfect monocrop, optimized for maximum yield and minimum resistance. This goes far beyond pushing shorter content. A manufactured matrix of simulacra conditions brains to regurgitate just enough thought-like substance to pose with momentarily, photograph, extract fleeting status, and discard like expired milk. 4chan, before it was killed, operated as neo-Socratic dialogue precisely because it stripped away this process, leaving autocults no highway to drive on.

The false dichotomy between traditional production and 'AI slop' deliberately obscures the real distinction: thoughtful versus thoughtless content, regardless of tools used. Meanwhile, truly low-quality, algorithm-optimized content reinforcing existing biases passes unchallenged simply because it arrives in familiar packaging. It poses no threat to autocult boundaries, triggers no gatekeeping, no immune response.

The democratization of language tools flooded markets with mediocre content. The priests were right about that. But they missed something crucial - bifurcation. Writing outside their temples enabled longer, more sophisticated thoughts. Complex ideas no longer dependent on memory alone. Similarly, LLMs can amplify superficial thinking or, depending on their use, extend human cognitive capabilities - allowing us to construct and sustain cognitive structures previously impossible.

As with earlier technological transitions, we'll eventually develop responses more sophisticated than reflexive rejection. The question: what will be left of you by the time we get there? Autocults will not always dominate; it is not, 'always and ever poison'. The critical challenge is maintaining enough mental resilience to reach the tunnel's end, and then to recognize and access alternatives when they appear.

Why have I targeted your beliefs rather than just discuss autocults? Autocults are abstract. Beliefs are personal.

Getting your beliefs slapped hard is a cognitive lifeline. Like Richter's rats who, rescued just once, fought drowning for days rather than minutes, a cognitive slap proves there's something beyond the bullshit you're swimming in - even if you've developed a Stockholm syndrome for the sewage. And we've only just started swimming; the flood hasn't even begun.

Yes, the cognitive slaps hurt. They're supposed to.

Notes:

† Autocult: An autonomous system that manages belief structures (including belief enclaves) as behavioral state machines, reinforced by algorithmic feedback loops. While belief enclaves can exist without technology, autocults represent their algorithmically enhanced evolution. They optimize for extraction, harvesting behaviors like attention, resources, and influence by controlling permissible cognitive states and neutralizing threats to their operation.


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