As I learned along this path,

 

There are throughlines common to orientalism and "AI" slop generators.

 

In its essence orientalism is about reductionism and about obscuring the "oriental" interlocutor: first create the "Orient" as a monolithic, homogenous Other, and then ascribe words, stories, culture to them that has nothing to do with their reality, saturating the venues through which people of different cultures can get to learn about each other.

 

Thus, ascribed untruths about the Orient displace actual knowledge of the peoples melded into that chimera.

 

Now when we look at "AI" bullshit, there, instead of Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, reductionism targets the phenomena of communication and perception in whole. They are all reduced into a computerising model of the mind, that entails a seemingly-but-not-really-oxymoronic positivist metaphysics.

 

This obscuration then intends to saturate all channels of human communication, detaching the perceived from the perceiver, and the receiver from the sender, in the Jakobsonian sense; in simple English, it displaces and obscures our conversation partners. We no longer talk to someone, or appreciate someone's art, but instead, fabricated, adulterated, "palatable" misrepresentations thereof.

 

In either case there's not only a common structural pattern in how the abuse and displacement formulates, materialises, and operates itself; but also there is the common thread of dehumanisation: on the "AI" side, the humanity of the interlocutor, the author, the artist, the creator, the performer, are converted into a nondescript and inorganic end product: the Slop. Much like the end product orientalism generates: the pseudo-Orient. A marred, distinct replacement of the original (which is scarcely genuine in itself, as there's neither a coherent and singular Orient nor a computable model human thought and communication can be reduced to), a replacement that's meant to appease the receiver, the listener, the spectator, at all costs, without ever inconveniencing them, turning reality into merely an irrelevant detail, an optional ingredient in a high-sugar, high-salt, high-calorie recipe, much like those crisps that you cannot stop eating once you begin snacking on them.

The most basic, the initial one of these "costs" for enticing the audience of both the Slop and the pseudo-Orient is, to forego knowledge. Interacting with the Slop, much like interacting with the pseudo-Orient, replaces interacting with the people that are trying to communicate with us from behind this false image of themselves. And given that, to send people "AI" Slop of course means forcing them into that position, forcing them to interact with a plastic nonrepresentation of ourselves. In a sense it is like the tourist trap cafés found along the touristy streets and avenues of Sirkeci and Sultanahmet in İstanbul. Nought but a mirage, and not even a misrepresentation.

In either case, these mirages that result from these fraudulent means of interaction of course then affect actions people take. Misrepresentations, misjudgements, mistruths feed into discriminatory outcomes, into bitter interactions when the cushion wall of the swindling intermediary fails to be present to mediate, when the defrauded needs to interact with the Otherised on the basis of the Ersatz-Other they were furnished with in its stead.