I often hear people talk about how someone’s decision to use AI-generated content is going to backfire because AI-generated content, as we all know, is slop, and people will be disgusted and turn away.
This is wrong. People dislike the idea of AI-generated content. But when you don’t tell them it’s AI-generated, people love AI slop. Sure, maybe you and your friends hate AI-generated content1. However, you2 and your circle are quite unrepresentative.
In studies where participants aren’t told whether something was made by a human or an AI, people generally rate the AI-generated version as about as good as or better than the human-generated version. This has been found for poetry, jokes, short stories, and visual art.
The poetry results are particularly illustrative. Participants couldn’t reliably distinguish AI-generated poems from poems by famous poets, and rated the AI poems higher in overall quality. Every one of the five AI poems was rated more highly than every one of the five human poems. In another study, ChatGPT-3.5’s jokes were rated as funnier than jokes written by ordinary people, while its satirical headlines were rated about as funny as headlines from The Onion. For short stories, researchers found no significant difference in human-rated creativity between human- and AI-written stories. And in one visual-art experiment, participants significantly preferred DALL·E 2 images to human-made artworks.
What seems to hurt AI-generated content isn’t the quality of the content itself, but people knowing or believing that it’s AI-generated. In the poetry study, the exact same poems received lower ratings when participants were told they were AI-generated rather than human-written. A 2024 study of visual art found something similar: participants generally preferred the AI-generated images on their actual merits, but rated images less favorably the more strongly they believed those images had been generated by AI.
And some of these studies are from up to two years ago, ancient by AI standards. We should expect current models to perform much better.
A framework for thinking about “taste” that I think is apt is laid out in “High Culture and Hyperstimulus”: what separates low culture from high culture is not that low culture consists of hyperstimuli, since the same is true of high culture, but that low culture consists of solved hyperstimuli, while high culture consists of unsolved hyperstimuli.
A Playboy centerfold is an obvious example of tasteless low culture, seemingly because it presents the hyperstimulus of a naked body. But Renaissance nudes also contain naked bodies and are considered high culture. Why are alcoholics considered distasteful while sommeliers are considered sophisticated? Why is K-pop disposable mass culture while symphonies are high culture? Each of these cases involves roughly the same kind of underlying reward, so what makes one vulgar while the other is respectable?
The answer, on this framework, is whether the hyperstimulus is solved, whether we know how to produce it reliably on demand.
The alcoholic is indiscriminating in the alcohol he consumes, provided it gets him drunk, while the sommelier focuses on subtle flavors such as the notes that (supposedly) tell you where the grapes grew and under what conditions. It’s harder to mass-produce these subtle characteristics, or so the sommeliers say, than to make some kind of alcohol that can get any fool drunk. Anyone can go on the internet and look at naked bodies, but to view a Renaissance nude in a museum, you have to pretend to know something about various historical artists and movements. K-pop is famous for having a solved formula that allows producers to manufacture predictable hits.
This also explains the barber pole of culture. A particular form of art starts out as ineffable, with no one quite sure what the secret is behind it and only a blessed few able to pull it off. But as people figure out the formula, it becomes solved and, inevitably, low culture.
You can see how this poses a problem for AI-generated content: it is the epitome of low culture. Any kind of art it can produce has, almost by definition, been solved so completely that a machine can churn out effectively infinite content on demand.
Perhaps if the user is heavily involved in the creation process, then that particular piece of art might not be so low culture. But I expect that, in practice, we’ll always be a little suspicious that the “artist” was not as involved as they claim, like the person who says they wrote most of their 10,000-word essay when in reality they wrote three bullet points and asked Claude to expand on their thoughts.
I also think some of this is a mixture of preference falsification and people being bad at knowing their own preferences.
The high-status thing to say in these circles is that, of course, while AI may be better than most creators in a technical sense, it’s missing that spark that is the reason we consume the work of the top 1% of creators. Or that we value human provenance3 so much that we’d actually prefer to consume genuinely kinda terrible human-made content over better AI-generated content.
I think this is mostly posturing and self-deception.
When people know they’re looking at AI-generated work, they may dislike what it represents, dislike the production process, dislike the social implications, or simply believe that liking it reflects badly on their taste. But when you strip away the label and ask them to judge the thing itself, the evidence so far suggests that their preferences lean the opposite way.
At least, you say you hate the content you can tell is AI-generated. By the way, how good are you actually at telling when content is AI-generated? Sure, you can spot the obvious cases, but what about the more subtle ones? ↩
I feel comfortable making some assumptions about the kind of person likely to read this, such as that you’re much more knowledgeable about and exposed to AI than the general population. ↩
Did that word make you fear that an AI wrote this? ↩