Slopwar: The Blitz
This is pissing me off bigly.
I love WWII US Bombers. If you saw Greyhound with Tom Hanks, there’s a scene where the new sonarman says, with a look of wonder on his face, “I hear collapsing bulkheads”, when they made their first U-boat kill. I was really curious about this sound and after a LONG hunt, I found that this channel had a sonobuoy video that contained an actual sample of a sinking U-boat.
Today the channel took the battle right to The Enemy - there have been a wave of historical focused channels spewing AI slop, and he’s not having it. Neither am I. Any channel created after 2024 is probably shit and I’m blocking them.
This hits close to home. My very first substantive experience with ChatGPT was having it try to identify an interwar cruiser from a grainier than normal photo. Interwar denotes the period between WWI and WWI. There were a lot of ships labeled cruiser in those years, but this word is understood to mean midsized ships, typically faster than anything else on the water, able to operate independently at long range. They were originally built as commerce raiders, meant to prowl the seas, seizing enemy merchantmen as prizes. By the end of WWII the outlines of what they were to become were already apparent. The big guns were gone, instead they were air war focused, accompanying and defending aircraft carriers from waves of enemy planes.
So I am a well read layperson on this topic and this is from memory. The cruiser in question was Japanese, but ChatGPT assured me that it was
An Iowa class, which is a battleship, three or four times heavier than most cruisers.
That it was armed with eight 16” guns, when our largest cruisers had 8” guns, and that it had a total of eight in four turrets. The Iowas have nine guns in three turrets, six forward, three rear.
That the second turret was lower than the first. While that did happen in older designs, the Iowas, and every other U.S. battleship by WWII, had superfiring guns - the second is behind and above the first, to maximize forward firepower.
That the low second turret was meant to facilitate depressing the guns to hit nearby targets. The idea that battleships fight close quarters with their main battery is crazypants; they all had extensive secondary batteries for handling torpedo boats and other small attackers. The closest recorded encounter between battleships was 9,200 yards.
Right away this set the tone for me - I assume I’m getting bullshit.
Simulacra:
This is taken from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. I would say that this historical slop is at stage three. The slop is based on Wikipedia entries and historic images, but like my experience with the mysterious cruiser, what is produced is plausible, but quite disconnected from reality.
This is economically disastrous for WWII US Bombers. Yesterday I spent ninety minutes on Constellation Cancellation, an 1800 word piece on the U.S. Navy’s latest acquisition debacle. The deeply detailed, historically accurate videos he produces require research and production that takes weeks. The AI sloperations are churning out three dozen shitbombs a week, and their target demographic - basically old dudes who like military stuff, are the least likely to be media literate enough to catch this.
WWIIUSB estimates the automated shitpipes are making on the order of $5k - $20k/month. I am clearly in the wrong business …
I’ll offer a personal observation here - if you relentlessly ban automated shite (I do), and you spend time every day looking for your own interests, even if they’re as broad as mine, the combination of blocks and insistence on quality mean you’ll run out of content. I like animal documentaries, but there’s only just so much out there on big cats, or primates, before you start running into cut up voiceovers of the original.
Conclusion:
This issue is just such a hydra, I’m going to stop myself before this is a 3,800 word screed. If I were to continue I’d have to cover …
Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” ethos.
The effect slop will have on the already saturated pornography business.
How AI “conversations” are going to effect human communication.
The harm done to human cognition and creativity.
Supply chain issues affecting semiconductor production.
Climate and energy concerns related to AI.
Why Fluff Warrior is the best office assistant a guy could want, despite how often she chooses violence.
And that’s just a quick review while someone is here lobbying for more wet food in the middle of the night.
Admire your technical nicety.