Everyone knows the problems of AI Slop, but I am exhausted by AI Schlock

For quite a few years, I wrote a fairly substantive piece on various subjects on LinkedIn at least once or twice a week. Recently, I have written  hardly anything. My creative juices for writing on LinkedIn seemed to dry up. I have been trying to understand why. I think it is because of the massive wave of writing about AI. AI Slop refers to the profusion of low-quality, unwanted content generated by AI. I am using this post to coin the term AI Schlock, to refer to a different problem. That is the profusion of low-quality, unwanted commentary written by humans about AI. (Whether they use AI to write or not.) Schlock is a Yiddish word meaning cheap, shoddy, poorly made, trashy stuff. It seems like almost everyone in the world now believes they are an expert on AI, both on the supply side (what it is, how it is made, etc.) and the demand side (how it is/ should be used, how it will affect society, employment etc.) The truth is there are only a relatively small number of people who are expert in, or who have real experience with, the most current types of AI being discussed (generative, agentic, etc.) And almost no one is really expert on the demand side – that is an emerging, highly uncertain field.  Just for example, my friend Benedetto Conversano recently talked to me about the low quality of most writing about whether AI will replace human jobs. The profusion of AI Schlock makes it hard to find the good stuff. Don’t get me wrong – it is good and fine for everyone to be able to voice their opinion, even if they have no/ limited experience and knowledge. It is less fine for people to delude themselves or others about how well-informed their thoughts are. It also seems less fine for everyone to repeat what everyone else is saying without adding any new value. A lot of things are changing in the world at the moment. But a few perennial truths are not. Truths like ‘less is more’ and the old Sun Tzu adage about the importance of knowing yourself as well as your audience. (He actually said enemy, but you know what I mean.) Let’s all avoid the tragedy of the intellectual commons, and try to make less of a mess in the struggle to understand and co-evolve with AI. #unthink #unask #unlearn