The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition: through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations.
Stick with me and I promise I’ll loop this back to luxury and tie it up with a nice bow.
A classic science fiction trope is the idea of testing things that appear to be human to determine if they truly are. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the more recent Star Trek: Picard had their Changelings, shapeshifters imitating humans who could only be detected through an invasive or otherwise unpleasant test. John Carpenter’s The Thing had its alien that assimilated people, detectable by testing whether a blood sample would react to pain. Battlestar Galactica had its Cylons and Blade Runner its replicants, both types of androids that could, at their best, fool nearly anyone—raising questions of morality around what it means to be human and what we do or don’t owe something that’s apparently as intelligent and sensitive as we are.
Image: Warner Bros.
AI slop and AI sludge
We’re not even close to the level of Cylons and replicants yet, but we’re in the age of AI, and that means we’re in the age of AI slop, which Wikipedia defines as “digital content made with generative artificial intelligence that is perceived as lacking in effort, quality, or meaning, and produced in high volume as clickbait to gain advantage in the attention economy, or earn money”. It’s a founding principle of this newsletter to never use AI to write it, not because I’m a Luddite—far from it—but because I hope and believe that people still value stories. Stories about people, told by people.
A key challenge posed by AI slop is that generative AI is getting better literally by the month, week, and even by the day. So a tool that might have produced something that was obviously AI-generated six months or a year ago might produce something difficult to distinguish from anthropogenic (human-generated) today. That’s not a challenge for the people using AI to create content to distribute. From their standpoint, it’s just what they want. But it’s a challenge for the rest of us. When an internet source says, in effect, ‘You can trust me when I say that humans created this’, how will we be able to trust anything if it’s difficult or impossible for us to tell the anthropogenic from the AI-generated?
And if we’re going to talk about AI slop, we have to at least mention AI sludge. I think of it as what happens when there’s so much AI slop that it builds up in layers that make everything more difficult. We’ve been training AIs on anthropogenic content; what will happen if the Internet becomes covered in AI sludge, and new AI models train on the results of previous models? “Nothing good”, as the robot CASE says in Interstellar.
As consumers, AI-generated content is competing for our attention, and it’s winning that battle more and more all the time. We’re surrounded by content that is mostly or even completely untouched by human minds or hands. Short of observing the creation process, can any of us know that what we’re paying for actually came from a human? The best answer I can come up with at the moment is, “It’s difficult.”
Masked man: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Vizzini: Wait ‘til I get going! Where was I?
Masked man: Australia.
Vizzini: Yes, Australia!
Wait ‘til I get going! Where was I? Luxury. Yes, luxury!
AI and the luxury creative process
However any of us may feel about it, luxury itself exists in the age of AI—and of AI slop and AI sludge. What’s to stop someone from—as an example—taking a set of silk scarf designs from Hermès, using that corpus to train an AI engine, using that engine to generate ‘new’ designs, sending those designs to a factory in a low-cost country, printing scarves on cheap silk entirely without human intervention, calling the results artisanal luxury, and marking them up by a factor of 10, 20, even 40? In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is happening right now. One reason I wouldn’t be surprised is that I just did it myself—the first steps up through generating ‘new’ designs—and it took me five minutes:
AI-generated ‘new’ scarf design. Please don’t do this for real.
Don’t like that colorway? This took another thirty seconds:
Another AI-generated ‘new’ scarf design. Again, please don’t do this for real. If one of you sees this and starts up a scarf business using AI-generated designs, I’m going to be very disappointed.
I showed these images to someone who is a fan of Hermès scarves. Their reaction was, “If I saw that design in a boutique, I wouldn’t be displeased. I’d be intrigued.”
Think of the hundreds and thousands of hours that must go into designing a scarf. The ideation and exploration. The sketching, drawing, and painting. The selection and testing of varying color palettes. The cycles of feedback and iteration.
Five minutes.
Does this scare you? It scares me.
But we could also see it as an opportunity. And crises often make for great opportunities. What is that opportunity?
