Bending Spoons Buys AOL: What We Know and Why This Bizarre Deal Makes Zero Sense

So, This Is How the Internet Ends: Not With a Bang, But With AI-Generated Slop

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Let’s just call it what it is: slop.

We’re drowning in it. A thick, gray, flavorless sludge of AI-generated content that’s burying the internet we once knew. You can feel it every time you search for something now. Go ahead, try it. Look up a recipe for lasagna, or a review for a new pair of headphones, or god forbid, a simple "how-to" guide for fixing a leaky faucet.

What you get is a digital landfill. Page after page of articles that feel… off. The words are all technically correct, arranged in grammatically sound sentences. But there’s no soul. No spark. It’s the uncanny valley of text, written by a machine that learned to mimic human writing by scraping a trillion web pages and has absolutely nothing to say. You can almost smell the ozone and hear the hum of the server farm as you read the dead-eyed, plastic prose. It’s content designed not to inform or entertain, but simply to exist. To occupy space. To trick an algorithm into giving it a sliver of your attention.

It’s infuriating. No, ‘infuriating’ doesn’t do it justice—it’s a soul-crushing digital blight. This isn't the promise of the information superhighway we were sold back in the 90s. This is a traffic jam of ghost cars driven by no one, going nowhere. And we’re all stuck in it.

The Algorithm's Vomit

I spent an hour the other day trying to find a genuine, human opinion on a new video game. The first ten results were all variations of the same regurgitated feature list, padded with generic phrases like "stunning visuals" and "immersive gameplay." They all had that same sterile, slightly-too-formal tone. You know the one. It’s like listening to a GPS navigator try to tell a joke.

These aren't articles; they're SEO Mad Libs. They’re built on a cynical framework: identify a high-traffic keyword, feed it to a large language model, and vomit out 800 words that hit all the right notes for Google's crawlers but offer zero value to an actual human brain. The people churning this stuff out don't care about quality, or truth, or helping you. They care about ad revenue from clicks. That’s it. It’s the infinite monkey theorem, except the monkeys have been replaced by GPUs and they ain't writing Shakespeare.

And the scariest part? The feedback loop. What happens when these AI models, in their next cycle of learning, start training on the very slop they themselves generated? What happens when the internet becomes a closed system of AIs talking to other AIs, endlessly recycling the same soulless, derivative garbage? Are we just building a digital snake eating its own tail until there’s nothing left but the digestive tract? It feels like we are, and frankly, nobody in charge seems to even notice, let alone care.

The Empty Promise of 'Democratization'

Now, the Silicon Valley prophets—the ones with the pristine white sneakers and the billion-dollar valuations—will tell you this is a good thing. They’ll use a word that makes my skin crawl: “democratization.” They’ll stand on a stage, bathed in soft lighting, and say things like, "We're democratizing creativity, empowering anyone to become a content creator."

Give me a break.

This isn't democratization; it's industrialization. It’s the replacement of craftsmanship with the assembly line. It’s like replacing every unique, hand-built restaurant in a city with a single, global chain that serves only gray, nutrient-rich paste. Sure, everyone gets to "eat," but the joy, the culture, the very flavor of the experience is gone. They sell it as a revolution, but really... it's just about making content cheaper and faster, quality be damned.

This whole thing reminds me of my so-called "smart" TV, which spends more time showing me ads and harvesting my data than it does letting me watch something. It's the same empty promise. A layer of technological complexity that solves a problem that never existed, while actively making the experience worse. And for what? So some VC fund can hit its quarterly target? Offcourse it is.

Then again, who am I to complain? Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at a cloud. Maybe this frictionless, soulless, hyper-efficient digital world is what everyone secretly wants. A world where you never have to read a challenging sentence or an original thought. A world where every answer is instantly available, even if it’s bland, generic, and possibly just plain wrong. Maybe I'm the dinosaur, and the AI-slop asteroid is just nature taking its course.

But I don't think so. I think we’re losing something precious. We’re trading the messy, vibrant, unpredictable chaos of human expression for the cold, sterile order of the machine. And I have to ask: is that a price we’re really willing to pay?

It's Just Digital Landfill

At the end of the day, that's all this is. We're not building a new library of Alexandria. We're just creating the world's largest, most sophisticated, and most mind-numbingly boring garbage dump. And we’re paying for the privilege of living in it.