I Just Found It All Really Fake Before As Well

I get the sense that I feel far less affronted by AI slop than some (or possibly many) of you do. I don't like AI slop, but I don't feel as viscerally annoyed about it as many people do, and it struck me that one possible reason is: I just found very large parts of the intellectual world to be incredibly fake and bad before, too.

E.g. for absolutely years now, I have basically distrusted every social science result until proven otherwise. I have sat through countless experiences of people lecturing me about stuff based on putative social science findings, and most of the time the person hadn't read the actual study and didn't understand what the study was doing, and on the occasions when I read the actual studies or papers I'd see 7 obvious flaws immediately, such that I now default to assuming that a given social science result is probably an artifact until proven otherwise.

If people replace "authoritatively citing a study they don't actually understand but which supports their desired beliefs" with "getting an LLM to generate an argument that they haven't actually read but which supports their desired beliefs".... I don't know, I just personally find it hard to feel any more affronted.

Similarly, I have for years been annoyed at the prevalence of undisclosed ghost writing in books and newspapers. There's also a running joke where celebrities say of their own memoirs "I've heard it's a great book I haven't actually read it!" I thought this was Bad, and should not have been allowed, but it was. If ~everyone now has an undisclosed ghost writer, isn't that just democratization of what was already there before?

I could go on and on and on. I have been to seminars and dinner parties where I talked to people and was pretty sure I could identify the exact articles and blogposts they were regurgitating to me, but if I tried to engage with them on the actual topics they were supposedly discussing there was no There there. I'm no Will Hunting but in my own small way I've had a million less-specific, less-fantastic versions of his interaction with the pretentious grad student who just regurgitates stuff from books:

Wood "drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth." You got that from Vickers, 'Work in Essex County,' page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter?

I'm not saying any of these things is good! The slop was bad before, and it's bad now. But I have long ago (mostly) surrendered to quietism about how fake and empty most collections of words are. I do understand the argument that a precipitous decline in the cost of slop-generation will lead to a meteoric increase in the total volume of slop generated, and therefore be worse. But I just struggle to be emotionally bothered by it, and I wonder if that's correlated to how bad I thought everything was before. Therefore, my question for you: how annoyed are you by AI slop? And how fake did you think everything was beforehand?