- Essays about AI slop, and how this endangers objective truth;
- Trump is tearing down the East Wing of the White House, after he said he wouldn’t;
- Responses to Trump’s poop video;
- Paul Krugman on Trump’s loss of touch with reality;
- How to deal with everyday religious platitudes;
- Short items about how believers twist the Bible, and the Constitution, to their ends; and how those Young Republicans stiffed a NY hotel restaurant bill.. just as Trump has done.
I’ve heard this word, referring to certain gratuitous examples of AI-generated video, a few times. But today comes not one but two thoughtful essays on the subject. (Not to mention Trump’s puerile video a few days ago, to which the world might also apply.)
\
NY Times, guest essay by Bobbie Johnson, 19 Oct 2025: What Is Sora Slop For, Exactly?
It opens,
You’re probably familiar with the feeling that comes from seeing the latest technological advancement and wondering why. Why did somebody make this?
I’ve experienced plenty of these moments in 25 years reporting on technology, but I’ve also learned that the disenchantments caused by banal “innovations” can be worth enduring in exchange for breakthroughs and genuine glimpses of the future.
So I didn’t know what to expect when I opened Sora, OpenAI’s new app that delivers a never-ending feed of brief videos generated by artificial intelligence. It looks a lot like TikTok or Instagram’s Reels, except every single pixel, every sound is fake — generated by users typing instructions to Sora’s A.I.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s leader, had proclaimed it “the most powerful imagination engine ever built.” The truth is that using it made me want to run, screaming, into the ocean.
(As if fake news isn’t bad enough.)
At a time when we are surrounded by fakes and fabrications, Sora seems precisely designed to further erode the idea of objective truth. It is a jackhammer that demolishes the barrier between the real and the unreal. No new product has ever left me feeling so pessimistic.
She gives examples, and offers historical parallels. She plays around with the app a bit. Then deletes it from her phone.
\
The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, 20 Oct 2025: A Tool That Crushes Creativity, subtitled “AI slop is winning.”
The prompts read like tiny, abstract poems.
“A brutal storm off the coastal cliff. The clouds are formed into tubular formations and lightning strikes are never ending.”
I scroll; another appears:
“A male figure formed of gentle fire, his outline glowing with soft embers, approaches a female figure shaped from flowing water, her form glistening with ripples and fine mist. They move toward one another with calm grace, meeting in a warm embrace.”
The scenes come to life before my eyes in the form of AI-generated video. In the first clip, clumsy lightning cascades out of a cloud and moves across the water and into my feed. In the second, sexless, glowing people weep and hug in my timeline. The videos pop up instantly—before my brain has had time to picture the prompts using my own imagination, as if the act of dreaming has been rendered obsolete, inefficient.
I am experiencing Vibes, a new social network nested within the Meta AI app—except it’s devoid of any actual people. This is a place where users can create an account and ask the company’s large language model to illustrate their ideas. The resulting videos are then presented, seemingly at random, to others in a TikTok-style feed. (OpenAI’s more recent Sora 2 app is very similar.) The images are sleek and ultra-processed—a realer-than-real aesthetic that has become the house style of most generative-AI art. Each video, on its own, is a digital curio, the value of which drops to zero after the initial view. In aggregate, they take on an overwhelming, almost narcotic effect. They are contextless, stupefying, and, most important, never-ending. Each successive clip is both effortlessly consumable and wholly unsatisfying.
And then he mentions the Trump video. And other Trump videos.
The comments on all of these videos are always roughly the same, informed by the observation that AI videos are becoming difficult to distinguish from actual film: We’re cooked.
This is how it feels to live in the golden age of slop, a catchall word used to describe the spammy quality of easy-to-generate AI material. I’ve begun to think of it as the digital equivalent of an invasive species.
He goes on to discuss slop rip-off books, code slop, workslop.
I’ve never played with these apps, but have seen AI slop in Facebook posts, especially in images of National Parks with improbably deep depths of focus, and long straight highways in the foreground leading to, given the perspective, impossibly enormous snow-capped mountains in the distance. You learn to recognize, and dismiss them.
The founders of these tools, like Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen, talk about enabling a revolution in creativity, so that ordinary people with no technical or artistic talent can create dazzling new “entertainment” just by describing it into their AI bot. And soon the AIs will learn how to create visuals that look less spectacular and therefore more plausibly realistic.
\
But I think the implications for this go to the comment about eroding “the idea of objective truth.” With social media easily spreading conspiracy theories and fake news, it’s bad enough already. But “seeing is believing.” It’s no longer reasonable to say “pics or it didn’t happen.” Because anyone can *manufacture* the pics.
(Think of this applying to the inculcation of children to religion. See, Bobby, here’s Jesus right here on my phone, and he’s answering your questions in real time!)
The ultimate consequence, perhaps sooner rather than later, will be that all but the most gullible people will learn to distrust *everything*.
Well, no. What will be left is the social contrast, the systems of trust we build up with people we know and institutions we’ve learned to rely on. Whatever will be left of the “constitution of knowledge” (Rauch) that Trump and his team haven’t managed to destroy before they disappear forever. As they will.
\\\
Current events. Trump is tearing down a part of the White House he’d promised not to touch, in deference to his grandiose ballroom.
Did anyone “approve” this? Building commissions, city planners? No; Trump is a king, remember, he said so right there in his poop video. And apparently there are no publicly available architectural plans for this new ballroom.
Washington Post, 21 Oct 2025: White House expands East Wing demolition as critics decry Trump overreach, subtitled “Much of the structure was torn down Tuesday to make way for President Donald Trump’s planned ballroom, despite complaints about the project’s lack of transparency.”
A demolition job that began Monday with the disappearance of the White House’s eastern entrance advanced Tuesday with the destruction of much of the East Wing, according to a photograph obtained by The Washington Post and two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the scene.
Photos of construction teams knocking down parts of the East Wing, first revealed by The Washington Post on Monday, shocked preservationists, raised questions about White House overreach and lack of transparency, and sparked complaints from Democrats that President Donald Trump was damaging “The People’s House” to pursue a personal priority.
\\\
Reactions to Trump’s poop video.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 21 Oct 2025: Donald Trump’s “No Kings” sewage video is no joke, subtitled “Trump’s scatological video shows his contempt for democracy”
In a functioning democracy, massive public protests would send a loud, clear signal to the president and his party that they need to recalibrate their positions and behavior to maintain support and avoid being voted out of office, or at least to do a better job of persuading the public to join their side.
But America is no longer a functioning democracy. Norms about legitimacy and governance increasingly do not apply. Trump is an aspiring autocrat who is rapidly expanding and consolidating his power. He views public opinion as largely invalid, embracing instead a maximalist view of presidential power and authority where he is the personal embodiment of the state. The vox populi, the chorus of public opinion, should be silent and ignored unless it is praising him and his MAGA movement.
\
The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, 20 Oct 2025: Why Trump Turned to the Sewer, subtitled “The president’s disturbing, excremental propaganda campaign”
Her point is that Trump wanted to separate the protesters from his followers.
The point was not subtle: Trump wanted to mock and smear millions of Americans, literally depicting them covered in excrement, precisely so that none of his own supporters would want to join them.
(Do you really think he thought it that far through? I think he was just expressing hatred.)
It’s an old pattern:
For those using the oldest tools in the authoritarian playbook, the nature of the smear is unimportant. What matters is the intention behind it: Don’t answer your critics. Don’t argue with them. Don’t let them win over anyone else. Describe them as dangerous radicals even when they wear frog costumes. Imply, without evidence, that they were bribed to speak out, because there can’t possibly be any sincere idealists who criticize the Party and its Leader out of a genuine desire to help other Americans. Dump AI-generated sewage on their heads to discourage anyone else from joining them. And if they keep coming out, make the messages even harsher.
\
NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 20 Oct 2025: Trump Posted a Video of Himself Dumping Excrement on Our Cities. It’s a Glimpse of His Deepest Drives.
It is not at this point surprising that Trump holds half the country in contempt, or that he treats urban America as a group of restive colonies to be brutally subdued. This is a man who told the military it should use our cities as “training grounds” for foreign operations, and who has sent both troops and federal agents to terrorize Los Angeles and other cities. The president’s attempts to demote the residents of blue America from citizens to subjects have become so routine they barely make headlines anymore.
What’s curious, then, is not Trump’s eagerness to degrade us, but his uncontrollable urge to defile himself and his office. Most national leaders, after all, do not willingly associate themselves with diarrhea. Scatological attacks are usually the province of outsiders trying to cut the powerful down to size. (French farmers, for example, have vented their fury at ruling authorities by dumping piles of manure in front of government buildings.) Rulers, by contrast, tend to jealously guard their dignity. But not Trump.
\
Is this what you wanted, Trump voters? Do you really hate half the country as mad-king Trump does?
\
This ties Trump back to AI.
Paul Krugman, 21 Oct 2025: Donald Trump Has Lost Touch With Reality, subtitled “And it’s getting worse. When will we acknowledge the obvious?”
The other day I learned a new term: “AI sycophancy,” also sometimes called “chatbot sycophancy.”
I already knew about the phenomenon, having read stories about how Large Language Models flatter their users, telling them what they want to hear, assuring them that they’re always right. This self-reinforcement hooks into psychological vulnerabilities, potentially leading users to believe in their own brilliance, while shortcutting attempts by other human beings to insert some reality sense. A growing body of research shows that the use of generative AI – like social media but worse – is often damaging to users’ mental health. In the worst cases chatbot sycophancy has led to self-harm – even, allegedly, suicide.
But the way chatbots play with your mind isn’t new. Sycophancy has been sending people into delusional spirals and destructive behavior for millennia. In the past, however, sycophancy was reserved for the rich and powerful. AI’s innovation is to democratize the experience.
And then,
On Sunday, the day after millions of Americans marched in the massive No Kings Day protests, Trump dismissed them:
The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective and the people were whacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country.
Does Trump actually believe that? I suspect that he does. In the grip of delusion, a powerful person will dismiss and destroy anything that challenges their self-aggrandizing alternate reality. This explains why there is no one in Trump’s inner circle who dares to tell him that his poll numbers are, indeed, very bad; or that it’s a bad look to commute George Santos’ prison sentence for fraud and identity theft. When people try to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he gets angry. A Credible sources say that Pam Bondi was reluctant to charge former FBI director James Comey given the flimsiness of the case. However, Trump made clear that this was non-negotiable — it was Comey or her. So Bondi saw to it that Comey was duly charged.
\\\
On another theme entirely.
The Atlantic, James Parker, 7 Oct 2025: Dear James: I’m Tired of the Religious Platitudes, subtitled “Does this make me a bad person?”
A Q&A column.
Dear James,
Am I a bad person for being weary of people talking about God as if everyone else in the conversation believes in their particular deity? I’m thinking of declarations such as “God moves in mysterious ways,” and “God has a plan for all of us,” and the countless other religious platitudes that people trot out.
He makes this valuable secondary point.
As an atheist, I certainly don’t assume that everyone I’m speaking with shares my nonbelief. When someone asks why something particular happened to them, for instance, I don’t say, “Everything that happens to us is a consequence of a combination of factors and decisions that are sometimes in our control and sometimes not.” And I don’t do it because I know it would probably be considered rude.
I’m not going to quote the answer; I’ll give mine. First it’s cultural. You hear that talk in the South; you don’t hear it in Bay Area. In multicultural areas, you learn not to assume that everyone you meet shares your beliefs, scruples, and prejudices. (About religion, science, politics, or anything else.) I learned that at a very early age. People who say “bless you” have either never learned that, or live in a monocultural area where they can get away with that presumption. That said, at my job years ago at Rocketdyne, we had a secretary, or administrator, who did say repeatedly that “everything happens for a reason,” and I have a sister who seems to truly think that famous people die in threes.
So my answer: yes it would probably be rude to challenge such talk. Instead, you just re-evaluate such people as being not very bright. They are working at a different level of human intellect, and are surely happy in their lives, lives that make sense to them. Mentally pat them on the head, and go about your business.
\\\
Short items.
- Friendly Atheist, 21 Oct 2025: How megachurches twist the Bible to defend billionaires and wealth inequality, subtitled “A new paper looks at a decade’s worth of sermons to discover how pastors reframe poverty to protect the wealthy” — Ironically, people have a tendency to defer to this or that sacred document, but then tend to act in ways counter that document. A paradox.
- Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 20 Oct 2025: Shane Vaughn Claims The Constitution Was Designed To Make Trump A King — And… another example. Humans seem not able to overcome their base, tribal, cultish, human nature.
- AlterNet, 21 Oct 2025: Young Republicans busted for racist chat stiffed NY hotel on booze, food bill after ‘lavish’ party — This is not a surprise; Trump does this all the time. To some extent, conservatives like these are amoral.
