AI is slop. Humans are sloppier.

Andrej Karpathy recently declared the current state of AI as “slop.” He fails to consider that humans are even sloppier.

The average office worker human is a slop machine: bullshit decks, bullshit emails, bullshit analysis, bullshit coffee and lunch breaks. It’s all performative, paper shuffling.

You might say, “But Geoff, AIs can hallucinate.”

So what? And you think humans don’t? I didn’t realize that humans have perfect memory, never make assumptions, don’t have egos, and, of course, never make up excuses to cover their own ass?

And we haven’t even discussed cost yet. Human-generated slop is expensive because keeping humans happy and alive is expensive. AI-generated slop is cheap and will only get cheaper. Nation-states, hyperscalers, and foundational labs are subsidizing all our tokens.

I understand where Karpathy is coming from. He has taste and is a purist. I agree with his view that current SOTA architecture feels incomplete and perhaps un-elegant. At minimum, SOTA is clearly not how the human brain is architected.

But those are research questions. This is irrelevant to the ~90% of economic work output and trillions of dollars worth of labor that is slop. In fact, these ~90% of people stomach and/or hate their 9-5 jobs because they know they’re just grinding out piles of cheap slop.

Embrace the slop. The world runs on it. Let AI mass-produce it. They’re better at it anyways. And then as humans let’s try to do more beautiful things with our time.