To me this feels like analogue for sentience, consciousness & intelligence. Our attempts at dissecting the mind. Which is the "true" us? Knowledge? Wisdom? The humanity of our experience?
It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions.
But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up.
> an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars.
High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed.
TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop.
Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.
I created a personal philosophy of code awfulness because back in 2012 I worked in a code base that was so bad it completely baffled all my attempts to categorize it.
This and thus is why code is bad. Oh wait a second. They're doing something terrible that's completely orthogonal to the sum total of awfulness encounter so far.
The best (worst?) one was a demonstration mode that the product had. Functions would call functions, one after the other until like 50 calls deep you would wind up where you started. Why didn't the stack blow up? Because they would at seemingly random launch a new thread and abandon the existing stack. This was the main loop.
Simply describing the mess was enough to convince the client to let us rewrite the feature wholesale.
Anyway the point is the same as yours. Slop code is a thing long before our current scenario.