Excursus: AI slop

  Center head: Ladies. There is one thing in the Erd books we haven’t discussed yet. I’m thinking about the art, if that is the name for it.

  Left head: I believe Erd sims are currently referring to this as AI slop.

  Right head: There were extensive debates about this after the first book. You remember, right?

  Left head: Yeah.

  Right head: A consensus formed that the AI art was not like the text. In the sense that, you know, the Great Renegade was not behind it.

  Center head: Right. The Erd author generated this on his own, just for fun maybe or because he thought it looked good. Or because he wanted illustrations for the text, which of course he thought he had authored.

  Left head: Or for any other reason. With some exceptions, obviously, Confluence people are not usually very interested in sim art, because everything the sims make is seen as derivative of our art.

  Center head: That’s what’s interesting, don’t you think? There’s a neat parallel, because the sims look at AI stuff as slop and we look at sim stuff as slop.

  Left head: So there are two levels of slop. The poor sims, not knowing that they are sims and not knowing that their whole reality is an artificial construction, could not possibly hope to realize that everything they create is merely a reflection and reproduction of the creations of the civilization that runs them as a simulation. Does it matter?

  Center head: I don’t think so. But it’s interesting to observe our sims running their own simulations. In some ways they are not so different from us, and I think it could be argued that their AI technology represents their closest resemblance in this regard.

  Right head: I see your point. By achieving the capability to simulate language and art, they are taking a step closer to us. They are becoming more like us. Our artificial constructs have started to produce their own artificial constructs.

  Left head: In some ways an interesting capability, sure, but like their art is derivative of our art, so is their capability to simulate art derivative of our capability to simulate. All they have is the ability to make simulated slop versions of their simulated slop art.

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  Center head: You are right as always, but when a baby takes it first step, you don’t compare the step itself to what an adult could do and criticize it for being deficient in that light. You celebrate the baby step because it represents the beginning of something.

  Right head: Right. And in this sense, their ability to make simulated slop versions of simulated slop art –

  Left head: Metaslop!

  Right head: Yeah, sure. So my point is that their metaslop in the books is art, of sorts. It is something that you can meaningfully appreciate and which connects to a world outside itself. Not so much the individual images in and of themselves, perhaps, but the overall project. There is a certain beauty, a certain appropriateness, to their inclusion in the Erd books, because these books already bridge the gap between our worlds, right?

  Center head: Ah, I see it now. So happy to have raised this subject.

  Right head: The most important aspect of our relationship – I mean between the Confluence and the Erd sim – is that we are running the simulation and they are in the simulation. The Erd books bridge that because they speak about us, the simulators, from a position situated inside the simulation.

  Left head: Which is transgressive and illegal.

  Right head: Correct, assuming that one of us is behind it. Renegade-ish, one might say. But here the transgression, the movement between realities, is the point. The sims have books that speak about our world –

  Center head: And which also say that their world has the potential to become like our world. To emerge as a magical dimension.

  Right head: Exactly, that’s another bridge. And it’s happening as we speak, and the books that are the nexus of all this is filled with metaslop, which is the baby step of their ability to run simulations.

  Center head: It’s all coming together. In its weird way, it fits.

  Left head: Huh. When you say it like that it’s kinda neat, yeah. The metaslop in the books is art because the fact of it being derivative represents how everything in the Erd sim is derivative and thereby illustrates not the actual scenes taking place –

  Right head: It almost never looks like our world at all.

  Left head: Yes. What makes it art is not that it illustrates what’s happening in the books in a local sense – specific scenes with specific people – but that it does illustrate what’s happening in the books in a global sense. I didn’t see that before now.

  Center head: Glad to have you onboard.

  Left head: Um, yeah, but this is all from our point of view, of course. Knowing what Confluence people know about simulations enables us to recognize the metaslop in these Erd books as art. It does not work so well from their perspective.

  Right head: Hmm, good point. And if we go with the consensus, the Erd author made this metaslop – if ‘make’ is the right word for it – without input from anyone in the Confluence. In other words, without knowing what we know.

  Center head: Nice mindbender. Without knowing what we know, he made stuff that can only be seen as art when you know what we know.

  Left head: Like accidental art or found art, I guess.

  Center head: Strange. Well, anyone for some slop to eat? Weird philosophy talks always leave me hungry.