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The Pope is right. AI kills meritocracy and will condemn us to a future of Soviet-style slop
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/25/artificial-intelligence-is-a-tool-for-cheaters-breaks-merit/Learning and working is hard, so why bother, when it’s so easy to fake it? Thanks to generative AI, it has never been easier to pretend to have done some work. But we don’t need a crystal ball to predict the consequences. The honest and the diligent lose out, while the lazy and the dishonest get rewarded. But what are the consequences for society of making things easier for cheats and grifters, and more difficult for the talented and hard-working to be recognised?
Pope Leo XIV recently spoke poetically about the soul crushing effect of replacing human made art with machine-generated AI slop. “Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative”, he told an audience of film makers.
The Vatican has also expressed thoughtful concerns about tools that are primarily useful for fraud. “Much widespread deception is no trivial matter; it strikes at the core of humanity, dismantling the foundational trust on which societies are built.”
A new economics paper from researchers at Ivy League schools Dartmouth College and Princeton called Making Talk Cheap, confirms as much. They examined the consequences of job applicants using AI to help give them a hand. Since it is fundamentally little more than a text generator, AI can churn out professional looking cover letters. But when all applications look the same, employers hire far fewer high-ability workers and more low-ability workers, concludes Dartmouth professor Paul Novosad, commenting on the research.
-snip-
Pope Leo XIV recently spoke poetically about the soul crushing effect of replacing human made art with machine-generated AI slop. “Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative”, he told an audience of film makers.
The Vatican has also expressed thoughtful concerns about tools that are primarily useful for fraud. “Much widespread deception is no trivial matter; it strikes at the core of humanity, dismantling the foundational trust on which societies are built.”
A new economics paper from researchers at Ivy League schools Dartmouth College and Princeton called Making Talk Cheap, confirms as much. They examined the consequences of job applicants using AI to help give them a hand. Since it is fundamentally little more than a text generator, AI can churn out professional looking cover letters. But when all applications look the same, employers hire far fewer high-ability workers and more low-ability workers, concludes Dartmouth professor Paul Novosad, commenting on the research.
-snip-
The columnist, who did columns for and was executive editor of British IT magazine The Register for decades, goes on to nail generative AI as "little more than a pastiche-maker, a faker, an industrial scale generator of slop" that has given us "a powerful tool for deceiving a spouse, a colleague or an employer."
He points out that "with the global economy on the brink of a crash because of the AI bubble" we need to ask if "a tool for cheating those around us [is] really what we needed."
How insane it would be to wreck the world's economy so students can cheat their way through school without learning anything, talentless wannabes can pretend they can write well or create visual art or music, and AI users of all types can try to fool others into thinking they have knowledge and abilities they don't have.
I saw one AI user on X whining the other day about the possibility that AI output might be labeled as such. He said that might be acceptable for those using free versions of AI tools, but paying customers like himself shouldn't have to have "their work" labeled AI.
Because, after all, fraud and pretense were always the main selling points of genAI.
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https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/466025/ai-jobs-chatgpt-agi
We need to AGI-proof American democracy
(if we can hold on to it)
Oligarchy.
---------------------
When it's all slop, we'll actually want authentic expression.
screensnap. No more at the site.
IN BOTH CASES, WE HAVE TO MAKE DECISIONS
In the past, decisions have been mostly wrong.
IMO, better thinking, better politics, and taxing/exiling/eating the rich will help enormously.
We just have to demand more than garbage in all aspects of life.
We need to AGI-proof American democracy
(if we can hold on to it)
To economists like Erik Brynjolfsson and Daron Acemoglu, part of the answer is encouraging the development of artificial intelligence that augments labor rather than replacing it. AI tools could plausibly lift wages by making workers more productive. In theory, such innovations could safeguard laborers’ economic leverage and promote a more equitable model of growth. Unfortunately, in this account, the tech industry’s obsession with AGI has inclined it to focus overwhelmingly on labor-automating machines, rather than the labor-augmenting variety.
Brynjolfsson and Acemoglu contend that the government exacerbates this tendency by taxing capital at a lower rate than labor, thereby incentivizing automation. But they also see a role for entrepreneurs to develop the labor-augmenting technologies that large labs are neglecting. This is what Drago and Laine have sought to do with their own startup.
If AGI ever becomes technically feasible, however, the economic incentives to adopt it will be overwhelming; Well-intentioned entrepreneurs are unlikely to beat it back. In that scenario, our best bet for fending off techno-feudalism will be institutional reform.
The more equitably we distribute capital ownership before AGI devalues human labor, the less oligarchic a fully automated economy is liable to be. And the more democratically accountable we make our government, the better ordinary people’s chances of constraining elites through the exercise of political power, even as their economic leverage erodes.
Brynjolfsson and Acemoglu contend that the government exacerbates this tendency by taxing capital at a lower rate than labor, thereby incentivizing automation. But they also see a role for entrepreneurs to develop the labor-augmenting technologies that large labs are neglecting. This is what Drago and Laine have sought to do with their own startup.
If AGI ever becomes technically feasible, however, the economic incentives to adopt it will be overwhelming; Well-intentioned entrepreneurs are unlikely to beat it back. In that scenario, our best bet for fending off techno-feudalism will be institutional reform.
The more equitably we distribute capital ownership before AGI devalues human labor, the less oligarchic a fully automated economy is liable to be. And the more democratically accountable we make our government, the better ordinary people’s chances of constraining elites through the exercise of political power, even as their economic leverage erodes.
Oligarchy.
---------------------
When it's all slop, we'll actually want authentic expression.
screensnap. No more at the site.
IN BOTH CASES, WE HAVE TO MAKE DECISIONS
In the past, decisions have been mostly wrong.
IMO, better thinking, better politics, and taxing/exiling/eating the rich will help enormously.
We just have to demand more than garbage in all aspects of life.