The Value of Slop, by Alexandre Oliva
Economists of alignments as diverse as Adam Smith's, David Ricardo's and Karl Marx's have written at length about how the natural trade value of commodities is the sum total of the amount of human labor needed to make them from scratch, i.e., including the labor needed to make the materials that go into them, and an ideal fraction of the labor that goes into making machines needed to make them efficiently.
If you ponder deeply about it, this even makes sense: if someone could make something by performing that amount of labor, time in which one could instead work and get paid the market value of that amount of labor, why would anyone pay more than that for the thing? And, if it costs that much labor to make it, why would anyone sell it for less? That's why the value tends to that amount.
Now, some publishers and other service providers are resorting to LLM-generated bullshit that takes seconds of labor to make, and offering it to the public as if it had any sort of value, as if that made any economic sense.
It doesn't. Slop is worthless. Not only because it's bullshit, but because it takes mere seconds of labor to make.
Even if you take into account the ideal fraction of the socially-useful labor that went into making the machines, a minuscle fraction of even a huge amount is still worthless. And how much labor is in that huge amount, really? The human labor that goes into making those machines is not so much, really. It's mostly clouds of smoke, black mirrors and sloppy labor.
So blong, █
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