Slop

Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame bun.

If you were alive in 1974, you know that. But how many sesame seeds?

Nope. Not rhetorical. I have this friend, Becky. Oh, to be clear, when I say, “friend,” I mean a person who occasionally texts me a question like, “My family is going to be in town next week. Can we stay with you?” I point this out because, recently, I wrote about having no friends and then got deluged with emails… deluged being two. One email that said, “Yes you do” and also asked if he could come by for lunch. The other email pointed out that the internal inconsistencies in my story that said I went to coffee with friends. So, from now on when I say “friends” that’s what I mean. Anyway… my friend Becky is a commercial photographer. When she and her family stayed with me a few years back while she was in town from Philly to shoot an ad she told me **the** sesame seed story.

There are very specific rules that govern the things we see in ads on TV. Like the number of sesame seeds adhered to a shellacked bun that that sits atop the patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, etc. She talked about TV ads because Becky’s family’s visit was a few years back. Before YouTube was big enough to have its own NFL rights package.

McDonalds would love to show you a burger covered in so much sesame your burger would taste like tahini. But those darn regulators force people like Becky to make their pictures look just like the real thing. Well, no, not Coke-level Real Thing. The real McCoy you’d get if you ordered a Big Mac at a McDonalds in Narnia.

Becky’s crew had to tweezer on the exact number of perfect sesame specimens at the ideal spacing… on a perfectly shellacked bun… of ideal gloss. The lettuce had to be replaced between each shoot to remove the more wilty leaves. The same goes for the patties, bread and other accoutrements.

But that wasn’t the best part of the story. After a long day of processing food, Becky came home — to my place — complaining about the “kids” on her team who edited the pics who quote KIDS… PFFT. KIDS TODAY HAVE IT EASY. THEY DON’T KNOW HOW HARD IT WAS TO EDIT PICTURES BACK IN THE DAY. BEFORE PHOTOSHOP DID ALL THE WORK unquote.

Ah yes good. You know it’s going to be a fun rant when you read phrases like “Kids today have it easy” and “Back in the day”.

Becky was droning on about the intricacies of having to manually dodge and burn negatives while I fixed her an after-work cocktail while her husband was stretched out on my couch from a hard day of stretching out on my couch. I nodded. No idea what dodge meant and what burn was in this context. She continued… NOW ALL THESE KIDS HAVE TO DO IS CLICK DODGE OR BURN IN PHOTOSHOP AND, VOILA, SPOTS ARE BRIGHTER OR DARKER. Like she couldn’t say brighten or darken. She continued to continue, “It took me hours. It takes them seconds.”

She was just pissed that she had had to do all the work manually. What’s interesting about that stuff and well worth the Kirkland brand vodka I used in her martini was SHE DIDN’T INVALIDATE THE PICTURES THE KIDS’ TOOLS EXPEDITED.

Google, on the other hand, is invalidating videos on YouTube. In the way they can: NO MONEY FOR AI VIDEOS. They’re cracking down on AI “slop.”

It’s not just Tech Crunch and Google. Here, former LinkedIn influential person turned irrelevant poster on X, Tom Goodwin, derides the value of AI content, “I’m not exactly some aficionado but the moment I find out a video is entirely AI generated, it immediately has no value to me. I just don’t care. For whatever reason, regardless of how imaginative it is, somehow the meaning vanishes.”

Set aside the curious modern sentiment that the source of content can negate it’s value. Like in math it would be 100 points for something really smart times 0 because it came from Charles equals ZILCH. NADA. SQUAT. Instead, take a moment to dissect this detail, “…a video is entirely AI generated…”. Entirely? Did AI just wake up from a fever dream and had something so important to convey that it had to prompt a fork to carve a glyph in unforged lump of mashed potatoes? No. Of course not.

AI IS NOT BLESSED WITH A DIVINE SPARK TO CREATE.
AI IS JUST THE NEXT TOOL FOR CREATORS.

This is a question a lot of people seem to be asking in same repetitive way:

IF THIS IS AI, DO I CARE?

I’ve caught myself asking it and trying to answer it. For myself and for others. And, after trying and trying the only answer that started to make sense was Becky’s answer. I can lament that a generation of creators has new tools but I’m not going to invalidate the work.

If the work is invalid, Becky’s pictures of fanciful Big Macs would be invalid. But they’re not. They haven’t been for decades. Artful? Sure. Idealistic? Yep. Optimized? Certainly. Convenient? Engineered? Intended to dupe us? Hells yah. Becky’s works are ads. They’re supposed to be all of those things. But invalid? … no. :-(

Not when they were manually dodged and burned. Not when Photoshop dodged and burned them.

Let’s consider what’s at stake for YouTube.

Yesterday, their biggest producer, Mr. Beast said, “AI could threaten creators’ livelihoods, calling it ‘scary times’ for the industry.” Maybe YouTube is clamping down the AI because it needs to protect their big producers.

YouTube would be fine if Mr. Beast made a Big Mac car, dressed up like Ronald McDonald, drove it down a highway and had cops on standby to chase him. And filmed it. And his team of tech savvy kids used video editing software to make it movie quality. That would be ok?

But… if I prompted my favorite AI to create a video of Ronald McDonald driving a Big Mac car being chased by cops that would be a flaggable offense? Tom Goodwin would poo-poo it as valueless. Because… AI.

Google has drawn a line in the sand. They’re going to de-monetize artful videos that a person used AI to engineer? Intended for us to enjoy? Optimized by YouTube’s algorithm to find us in a convenient, idealistic app? So… let me get this straight… Google doesn’t… want us… to enjoy… YouTube? They want us to go somewhere else to consume videos propelled by the advanced dodging and burning tools available to humanity in easy to use AI? No. That can’t be right.

I’d be left to share the AI-aided creation I made for the enjoyment of people who crash on my couch (“Friends”) as text messages. That sounds positively Nokia-era dated. Like having to tap the number 5 three times to get the first “l” in “lol” dated.

Thankfully the good folks at OpenAI have my thumb’s best interest at heart. They created an app we can download that’s engineered to be an ideal and convenient way to share our uber idealistic artful creations. It’s called SORA. And just this weekend it took the top spot in the App Store.

But when it comes to policing AI Google is being duplicitous.

Remember just three years ago when one of the Kardashians complained that videos on Instagram were killing engagement for her still pictures? And Instagram walked back some of their changes. Until…. until Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, reversed their course reversal and pivoted to video because they realized PEOPLE WANT VIDEO. Now, videos are an integral part of Instagram. Because you can’t deny people what they want. Not forever anyway.

Two weeks ago, YouTube’s Global Head of Product and Commercialization for YouTube Shorts, Sejal Shah, posted that YouTube would use imagication or imagineering or some other made up word to convey the idea of turning ideas into videos into money. He posted it on LinkedIn. That post is gone. It will come back.

Because…

Social has a big problem. Fewer people are creating stuff and people are spending less time on social media. A study published last week found that social media use peaked in 2022.

YouTube needs content. Lots of it. Ideally, compelling. Big Mac compelling. Eventually, unapologetically, slop will do.

As they say:

ONE MAN’S SLOPPY JOE
IS ANOTHER MAN’S BIG MAC.

See?