조지 오웰, 1984년에서 'AI 쓰레기'의 등장을 예언하다

--> The best free cultural & educational media on the web --> --> --> Online Courses Certificates Degrees & Mini-Degrees --> Audio Books Movies Languages --> Podcasts Textbooks --> K-12 K-12 --> eBooks Languages Donate --> --> Apr 16 --> Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)">How George Orwell Predicted the Rise of “AI Slop” in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) in Books , Literature , Technology | April 16th, 2026 3 Comments --> --> We’ve lived but a few years so far into the age when arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can pro­duce con­vinc­ing sto­ries, songs, essays, poems, nov­els, and even films. For many of us, these recent­ly imple­ment­ed func­tions have already come to feel nec­es­sary in our dai­ly life, but it may sur­prise us to con­sid­er how many peo­ple had long assumed that com­put­ers could already per­form them. That belief sure­ly owes in part to the roles played by effec­tive­ly sen­tient machines in pop­u­lar fic­tions since at least the ear­ly decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Revis­it­ing George Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four , we even find a device very much like today’s large lan­guage mod­els in use at the Min­istry of Truth, the employ­er of pro­tag­o­nist Win­ston Smith. With­in the Min­istry is “a whole chain of sep­a­rate depart­ments deal­ing with pro­le­tar­i­an lit­er­a­ture, music, dra­ma, and enter­tain­ment gen­er­al­ly. Here were pro­duced rub­bishy news­pa­pers con­tain­ing almost noth­ing except sport, crime and astrol­o­gy, sen­sa­tion­al five-cent nov­el­ettes, films ooz­ing with sex, and sen­ti­men­tal songs which were com­posed entire­ly by mechan­i­cal means on a spe­cial kind of kalei­do­scope known as a ver­si­fi­ca­tor.” Much lat­er in the nov­el, Smith over­hears a hit song com­posed on that very kalei­do­scope, “with­out any human inter­ven­tion what­ev­er,” sung by a woman of this dystopi­an Eng­land’s low­est class, whose very base­ness lib­er­ates it from the watch­ful eye that Big Broth­er’s vast sur­veil­lance sys­tem keeps on his osten­si­bly priv­i­leged Par­ty mem­bers. All the “pro­les” real­ly require, in the view of the state, is the free­dom to sat­is­fy their vices and a steady stream of paci­fy­ing media. The extru­sions of the ver­si­fi­ca­tor may now bring to mind the ever-increas­ing quan­ti­ties of “AI slop,” often cre­at­ed with van­ish­ing­ly small amounts of human inter­ven­tion, whose poten­tial to flood the inter­net has late­ly become a mat­ter of pub­lic con­cern. What’s more chill­ing to con­sid­er is that such low-effort, high-vol­ume con­tent would­n’t have attained such a pres­ence if it weren’t gen­uine­ly pop­u­lar. Much like the junk cul­ture pumped out by the Min­istry of Truth, AI slop reflects less the ill intent of (or at least neglect by) the pow­ers that be than the unde­mand­ing nature of the pub­lic. Per­haps we can pro­vi­sion­al­ly chalk this one up in the “Orwell was right” col­umn. It’s pos­si­ble that, in light of real tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments, even Isaac Asi­mov could be con­vinced to give it to him. Here on Open Cul­ture, we recent­ly fea­tured Asi­mov’s cri­tique of Nine­teen Eighty-Four as a poor prophe­cy of the future, not least from a tech­no­log­i­cal stand­point. That piece was writ­ten in 1980 at the very end of an “AI win­ter,” one of the fal­low peri­ods in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence research. A boom was soon to come, but the tru­ly aston­ish­ing devel­op­ments would­n’t hap­pen until the twen­ty-twen­ties, about thir­ty years after Asi­mov’s death. When describ­ing the ver­si­fi­ca­tor, Orwell was pre­sum­ably extrap­o­lat­ing from the dis­tract­ing, dis­pos­able enter­tain­ments of nine­teen-for­ties Eng­land. Even if his read­ers could­n’t believe the idea of that sort of thing being cre­at­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly, more than a few prob­a­bly agreed with his diag­no­sis of its qual­i­ty. Now, col­lec­tive human intel­li­gence may face its most for­mi­da­ble chal­lenger, but indi­vid­ual human dis­cern­ment has nev­er been more valu­able. via Boing Boing Relat­ed con­tent: Isaac Asi­mov Reviews George Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four and Calls It “Not Sci­ence Fic­tion, But a Dis­tort­ed Nos­tal­gia for a Past that Nev­er Was” George Orwell Pre­dict­ed Cam­eras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Nev­er Imag­ined We’d Glad­ly Buy and Install Them Our­selves An Intro­duc­tion to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Pow­er Man­u­fac­tures Truth George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984 Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949) Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Instan­ta­neous Glob­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Remote Work, Sin­gu­lar­i­ty & More Based in Seoul, Col­in M a rshall writes and broad­cas ts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro . Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinm a rshall . by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (3) | Sup­port Open Cul­ture We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion . We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here . We thank you! --> Related posts: Place related post plugin php here... --> --> Comments (3) Books , Literature , Technology . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. --> You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. 3 Comments so far --> Anonymous Coward says: April 16, 2026 at 7:43 am I hope the irony of an arti­cle about Orwell’s pre­dic­tion of “AI slop” fea­tur­ing an AI-gen­er­at­ed image is not lost on any­one. Reply Iamhanuman says: April 16, 2026 at 7:45 am Pret­ty dystopi­an Reply Tristan Elwell says: April 16, 2026 at 8:34 am Please stop using AI images to illus­trate AI-crit­i­cal sto­ries. We’ve moved way past the irony, now it’s just insult­ing. Reply --> Add a comment --> Leave a Reply Name (required) Email (required) Website --> XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong> --> Message Click here to cancel reply. Wordpress Hashcash needs javascript to work, but your browser has javascript disabled. Your comment will be queued in Akismet! 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