The stagnation has been happening, AI is just its latest iteration/scapegoat.
tbh the LLMs have accelerated a trend that was already well underway, cultural stagnation set in a while ago.
It feels like a lot of people are stuck around 2004-2006. I think like you said the stagnation had long been underway, but that might be when it died officially.
Honestly I’d go so far as to say that society has been living in the hollowed out corpse of the 80s. I don’t think the west ever fully culturally recovered from the mass privatization and deregulation boom. It all became a race to strip everything that was already there down for parts and sell it back over and over and over until there’s nothing left.
TikTok was the first bit of new culture injected into our dying system in over a decade, but they quickly put a stop to that.
Some good movies came out last year. No Other Choice, Sinners, One Battle After Another. I don’t think the west has fallen billions must die
It feels like a lot of people are stuck around 2004-2006
Not nearly enough gray-brown military shooters that serve as thinly veiled propaganda for the war on terror
Actually, I take that back, there are more than enough. There were more than enough after they made the first one
I miss when shooter games were about killing Nazis. Or when you were explicitly playing a Soviet soldier and it was… a good portrayal by Western standards. (And even bad portrayals of the Red Army’s role in the Great Patriotic War still meant you got to kill Nazis.) Hell, the original Wolfenstein was better than 00s war-on-terror muck.
Idk if the 2000s focus is stagnation though. Its just the nostalgia cycle.
The current cultural trendsetters grew up then, same as it was the 90s previously
have you seen the vid about AI from the yt channel unlearning economics? he did a pretty good deep dive into how AI is just the next step and hasnt even really accelerated it all that much
This article sucks. It’s wild speculation about the future of culture “proven” by a paper where they tried repeatedly using a text-to-image model to generate an image then an image-description model to generate a description then feeding that into the text-to-image model.
I agree. I hate AI slop as much as the next person but you get the same phenomena if you save a jpeg over and over. Lossy algos gonna loss and the same can be said of converging on training data.
The more interesting takeaway are some of the other comments in this thread: cultural stagnation/death in America was a fixture long before AI slop.
cultural stagnation/death in America was a fixture long before AI slop.
Marvel movies and star wars being the most obvious examples
did you watch that recent unlearning economics vid about AI? goes pretty in depth to this phenomenon
no i only watch old soviet movies
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are modern Western communists that are actually like that. I’ve run into a lot of Soviet obsession and general being stuck in the Cold War.
But yeah, a lot of modern media sucks and the Soviets did make good stuff.
unlearning economics is at the very least a communist sympathizerso if you ever find yourself lost on youtube i promise it wouldnt be too painful if you check it out! although i was very disappointed that he brought up cybernetics in the vid and didnt bring up project cybersyn or even a marxist cybernetic advocate like cockshott but eh it’s still a good vidapparently he wont even describe himself as leftist, which as much as i hate the term if you wont describe yourself as an outright communist/socialist but still wont say you’re a leftist is kinda sus
Is that the guy who explicitly said he’s not a leftist?
oh really? that kinda sucks. i havent agreed with everything ive heard on there but i thought he was further left than that. how has he described himself?
“Hey, we need a large photo to encapsulate an article about how AI leads to cultural stagnation and death of creativity. Oh I know, how about a photo of some random Asian chick waiting in some sterile-looking elevator to invoke the Orient’s proclivity towards rote memorization and inability to imagine life that is worth living?”
well they were talking about elevator music, and most people in the world are literally from Asia; is it really wrong to use that image?
They could just use the AI slop collage found in the article that’s a lot more eye-catching and actually relevant to the article instead of some generic photo of some random Asian chick in a sterile elevator. It’s like how every single article about Covid has to have a photo of some Asian person in a mask even when the article has nothing to do with Asia.
Regression-to-the-mean machine regresses to the mean
