AI slop is a vegan hamburger

• AI News Team
• March 1, 2026

​Excerpt below, but read the (not much longer) full thing for the part involving Kolmogorov complexity. I suspect reading the full thing is better than reading the excerpt first for most people, in expectation. It’s not that much longer.As a man who has lived in both Israel and Northern California, I have been a member of more than a few majority-vegan social circles over the years. Among the Vegans, the traditional form of dining is to eat something that’s almost, but not quite, entirely like real food.It may be a homemade cake that used bananas instead of eggs, or the latest iteration of the Impossible Burger. Invariably, the vegans will celebrate it as unprecedentedly indistinguishable from the real version of the food it tries to be. And on the first bite, I will invariably agree. For the first few bites, the Impossible Burger will taste great, so much like real meat that I’ll consider going vegan myself would be a barely noticeable loss.I have never once managed to actually finish eating an Impossible Burger.It’s a form of slop, you see. The first few bites pattern-match onto a real hamburger, because it’s made to resemble it well enough that, if your brain doesn’t know what to expect, it pattern-matches onto “hamburger” so it tastes like a hamburger at first. But the actual range of flavors is a lot less rich or varied than a real hamburger, and by the end of the burger the brain has learned to model it as its own thing. And since an Impossible Burger is a lot more flat and uniform than a real hamburger, it makes it (a) a more parsimonious model (very efficient for the brain to compress the information about it) and (b) boring. Once we know what to expect and don’t have variety, it’s just too bland to feel worth eating anymore.AI creative writing is like that7. When you first run into it, it’s fun and original. After a few months, you start experiencing physical pain every time you see “You’re absolutely right! This isn’t only X — it’s Y.”Again, It’s about compression. There’s nothing much to pattern match it to at first, so you read it as a piece of novel writing and find the structure a normal amount of nice and surprising. But once you learn to pattern match it, it starts feeling bland, because you can compress it to something smaller and simpler and no longer feel surprise at it. And it’s grating to see something bland pretend to be surprising, like someone wearing a bad mask of your ex wife’s face for breakfast every day. It can’t pretend to be the real thing, because it’s fundamentally simpler than the minimum possible complexity that anything that looks like the real thing could be.Discuss ​Read More