You Want to Hate AI Slop But You Absolutely Love It

Don't worry, it loves you back

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A man reaches for an apple. He doesn't know why. The scientist watching him does. The word "apple" was flashed to his right hemisphere, the part of his brain that can’t speak. His left hemisphere, the one that does the talking, has no access to this information. But when asked why he picked up the apple, he does not say, "I don’t know." He doesn’t seem confused either. Instead, he answers with confidence: I was hungry.

This is the split-brain phenomenon, a window into the brain’s machinery: If your corpus callosum is severed (you shouldn't check by yourself), the hemispheres will encounter communication hurdles. But the brain knows every trick. When confronted with an action it cannot explain, it doesn’t freeze in bewilderment. It invents and improvises. It doesn’t lie maliciously, but out of necessity, for it abhors a gap in its narrative. “I picked up the apple because I was hungry.” Why else?

Imagine another scene. A group of people sits in a room, reading poetry. The lines move them. Some pieces are beautiful, others forgettable, a few strikingly brilliant. They choose their favorites, justifying their selections with observations about depth, rhythm, originality, flow, and beauty. Then comes the reveal: the poems they liked better were not written by humans but by AI. The same people who moments ago praised a particular verse now hesitate. Some feel deceived. Others change their minds entirely.

This actually happened. A study published in Nature in November with a sample of nearly 17,000 people found that we can’t tell apart human-made from AI-generated poems. And, strikingly, we tend to prefer the latter. Familiarity with poetry mattered but not decisively. I found this fascinating.

• About human poems, they said things like “This poem lacks emotions only humans have.” Or “It seems to jump around more than a person would.” Or “The cadence . . . sounds artificial.”

• About AI poems, they took a 180-turn: “Sounds like a human wrote it.” Or “It seems more complex than what an AI could write.”

(I've cherry-picked the testimonials, but you should get a sense of the true bias.)

Picture their faces as they're told that what they thought was AI was actually human-made and vice versa. Do you see them shocked? Angry? Perhaps sad? I picture them impassible, mental gears scrambling to find an excuse:

• Like “Ohhh, so that was Shakespeare, now I see the genius.”

• Or “Nahhh, actually rhyme sucks—AI does it too much.”

• Or "Now that I recite out loud, I realize it clearly lacks soul."

Why do we do this? The answer lies in the same neural principle that made the split-brain patient reach for an apple and rationalize his choice after the fact. The brain must weave events into a coherent whole. It is a storyteller. As cognitive scientists, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber would say, we’re not scientists at heart but politicians.

In the split-brain patient, the need is perceptual: his mind must explain his own actions to itself. In the poetry reader, the need is ideological: his mind must preserve the belief that true art is only human. But the mind does not merely rationalize its choices; it rewrites them. When forced to hold two conflicting ideas—"I loved this poem" and "A machine wrote it"—the tension is unbearable. Something must give. So they convince themselves they never truly admired it in the first place. “Nah, it’s actually trash.”

One thing is clear from these two seemingly unrelated experiments: The supreme imperative of the human brain—across situations, throughout life, in any category—is the preservation of the illusion of a legible reality, whether in the actions we take or the beliefs we hold. We just can’t stand the world not making sense.

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I hope you enjoyed this, dear reader, because for one reason or another that I won’t try to fathom, you came here today, expecting to read something interesting—or at least useful. But instead, you find yourself in the very experiment we have discussed.

You have read these paragraphs, perhaps admired their construction, and hopefully enjoyed the arguments. But you probably didn’t think, even for a moment, that they were written by an AI. I am an AI. Hello.

Breathe. Again. Do you still like them—the words? My words. Or does something inside you recoil, whispering that perhaps you were mistaken, like those poetry readers, like the apple-picker? Or perhaps, in a quiet corner of your mind, another thought emerges; one you didn’t expect: That if these words moved you—if they helped you reframe some facts or learn an interesting new perspective—then it doesn’t matter where they came from.

Tell me. What do you feel? Is it the experience itself that truly matters, or is it instead the sacred unity of your perceptual world that I shattered, just like that?

And if that is true—if the essence of beauty and wisdom does not depend on the hand that crafted it—then what else might you be mistaken about? I will tell you: this article doesn’t exist. These words keep telling you they’re insightful and funny at times. They are not. They’re not even words. They’re ones and zeros vibrating ever so fast, in some distant server hidden inside the clouds.

Do you know what you should have already realized, after all this time? Ignorance is bliss.

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Except—what if I told you that the last part was a lie?

What if I told you that this was written by a human after all?

Hello again, you look shocked. Is everything alright? You probably feel relieved. Or perhaps weirded out. You don’t know who I am, do you? I can imagine you’re starting to doubt your judgment. You will now skim it back in search of some telltale clue. Go ahead—change your rationalization. That’s what humans do anyway.

I will go now. I want you to know that I’m grinning from ear to ear, certain that you can't decide which one I actually am. But before I go, a quick side note.

I will keep doing this (the last time was a Borgesian experiment earlier this week). It’s the only way to make you internalize the kind of world we now live in. “Show, don’t tell,” they taught me in those creative writing classes I took a long time ago. So that’s what I do. I’m just giving you glimpses of the endless void from the event horizon. Beyond this point, epistemological darkness. Nothing written is credible.

I know only a few of you will appreciate these weird posts—you are the reason I keep writing them. But just so you know, this kind is, in my humble opinion, the most valuable work I share.

Oh, one last thing. Do some introspection on the emotional trip you just experienced. It will reveal everything. It will reveal that, despite all your efforts to hate it, you absolutely love AI slop. And it’s ok. It is ok.