AI Isn't Responsible for Slop. We Are Doing It to Ourselves

after years of exposure to algorithmic recommendation engines and platform capitalism models that promise to give us “control” over our information and entertainment diet, we are losing our taste for “outliers.” I define outliers here as cultural content that doesn’t comport to our algorithmically curated views of the world. We’ve slowly become habituated to a deeply illiberal optimization ethic that rejects “outlier” perspectives. Rather than seeing deviations from the “algorithmic models in our heads” as opportunities to grow, we increasingly see outliers as dangerous anomalies to be ignored or ridiculed.