She worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department

So I read 1984 again. I'm not going to write about the story because it's done to death. Except for one thing: in the world of Oceania, all human creativity has been replaced by machines. It's the world we're creating now.

I know it's cliche to point at elements of society and say "That's Orwellean!" but this is truly Orwellean!

We are supposedly witnessing Large Language Model AI Slop ursurping human creativity in the arts. Human created written text, visual art, music are all being pushed to the wayside by AI. And while Orwell's fiction department was more mechanical than modern GPUs, it's the same thing.

The world of Oceania has eradicated human creativity. Any truly creative spark would be unorthodox and Thoughtcrime. Yet the state still needed to release into the world books, music, and art for the Proles. This of course, is done by machines.

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

The big AI companies have the same view of artistic output - it's all just commodity content to be generated. It's why we have so much AI slop. It's why Spotify's CEO recently said people don't like making music, and your playlists are being infiltrated by AI generated music. Sam Altman can market ChatGPT5 as having a PhD level knowledge, without understanding that the benefit of the PhD is learning how to think and solve problems, not being able to recall facts.

In Orwell's world, eliminating human creativity was just another element of maintaining control. If the plots of books are approved by the party, and the machines just iterating on a few themes, there's no chance of a dangerous idea gaining traction. The LLM model training and configuration also limits and controls the kinds of ideas that can be expressed through the model. Big Tech can start to control the range of thought and expression.

The biggest difference is that in our world, there's no real motivation beyond Number Go Up (and eliminating jobs). But these models do have large biases and these do affect the kinds of output they can generate. Just ask Mecha Hitler.

In the meantime, the practical result is we're being bombarded with crap.

What could we build instead?

In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery.

You have to wonder whether the billions being pumped into Large Language Models is the best way to spend this money. The Party didn't care - it wasn't trying to improve anything in society other than the efficient maintenance of control. We however, could be striving for something much better.

Anyway, George Orwell's 1984 - Five stars. Keep an eye on this author, might be going somewhere.