We're moving towards Borges' "Library of Babel," an infinite library that contains every possible book, including countless volumes of gibberish. But what this looks like in reality is so much more insidious than meaningless jumbles of letters. AI Slop looks all too real.

An emerging problem is that actual books are being printed which are generated (fully or partially) by LLMs. We don't have hard and fast numbers on this yet but we know this is a problem with eBooks on the Amazon Kindle store. But there are also the equally problematic references by AI chatbots to imaginary sources. As 404 Media reports, these phantom books are cited in answers by various chatbots often enough, to the point where actual people are convinced they should be able to check them out of real libraries. It's a kind of ironic turn that someone who takes the shortcut of trusting an AI chatbot for information feels the need to trundle down to their public library and harangue a poor librarian about getting a physical copy of a theoretical book.

We're only a few thousand Espresso book printing machines hooked up to the latest GPT models away from actually generating that "book" on demand.

Speaking of AI Slop, I watched this Kurzgesagt video with my kids the other night. It's excellent.

But even better (or just as good) is their "sources and further reading" page (which I didn't realize they did for each of their videos — great that they do this):

Sources - AI Slop
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
AI Slop