We’ve been hearing a lot about AI. AI in our video games. AI in our Super Bowl ads. AI in our murder drones. While it’s taken a back seat to some of the other discourses, we also hear a lot about AI taking our jobs. Even if AI doesn’t seem to be especially sophisticated enough to even displace a fry cook, it hasn’t stopped many corporations from salivating at staff reductions to come. So for once, enjoy reversing the new social order. Take AI’s job with a neat new browser game popping off over the weekend.
In Mihir Maroju’s your ai slop bores me, you’re connected with thousands of other users looking for art, answers and inspiration. Before you can ask anything of others, you must “larp as AI.” Delivering written or drawn answers to pressing questions and prompts with only 60 seconds on the clock. Each answer, well-advised or otherwise, earns you a token, which you can then spend on requests to other players.
Need music recommendations? Wondering if that leftover chili is still safe to consume? Send these curiosities into the void, it’s about as productive as hitting up a language learning model trained off Reddit posts. Now you get to be in the driver’s seat, displacing AI and offering hastily rendered, haphazardly delivered advice. With that added human touch, of course.
Whether it’s the cute human connection or a matter of pride, your ai slop bores me has become a weekend phenomenon (the server for it seems to be a little crunched as well; if the “larp” tab fails to connect, try switching between it and the “human” one). I’ve asked where air comes from (“the sky”) and been asked what I think of Genshin Impact’s Arlecchino (having a streak of black hair like that must feel like that one annoying fiber from your scarf refusing to go away no matter how hard you blow at it).
The fact of the matter is this cute little game isn’t entirely unlike how many AI services actually function. While the sales pitch remains that these increasingly sophisticated machines are garnering intelligence (and according to some futurists, sentience), the truth remains that a lot of it relies on farms and firms of manual labor in countries where wages are cheap and workers are easily exploitable. Much of the economy is hinged on AI being as fantastical as the CEOs peddling it say it is, even if that means cheating a bit to get some showpieces on to the floor.
