The need to shape reality began with the first Homo sapiens who carved a flint ax in the cave, blow by blow. It is laborious, it requires craftsmanship, but there is no alternative: transforming raw materials into useful tools for life requires friction, discomfort, even irritation when things don’t work out. Fast forward a few millennia, today only the bricklayer suffers from friction. He tells ChatGPT: “Build a house” and nothing happens. Instead, intellectual work has become fluffy, because language models remove the friction of writing. LinkedIn has been filled with posts written by ChatGPT; and TikTok, from videos made by Sora. More than half of the English content on the internet is made by AI, according to SEO company Graphite. Charlie Warzel reflects in The Atlantic about this type of content, which already has a specific name: slop. ‘Bazofia’ is a good translation. It floods us, giving language a melting, honeyed and narcotic texture. It gives us back a formless reality, devoid of meaning, but easy: I have the sensation of being a nine-year-old girl, with all her teeth, who they would like to stuff with porridge. And be careful, because that intellectual puree is, in turn, food for language models. Perhaps this vicious circle of self-phagocytizing swill will lead to the madness of AI. The problem is that friction cuts through real intellectual work since sapiens was in the cave. Wherever the golden nugget of ideas is found, the hinges squeak with an unbearable noise. Searching for it generates discomfort, so does finding it: reality is hard as flint and the thinker—even the most experienced one—must have the skill to shape the world. That is the way of working with ideas: blow by blow. The pompous name of “creators” has been given to those who fill the Internet with content, but in reality they are the new exploited class of cognitive capitalism. Models eliminate friction for the creator, who becomes more productive. Based on quantity, it manages to attract the attention of the algorithm, so friendly to addictions. You give ChatGPT a couple of ideas and write a post, an article, a book. Amazon has limited—to three!—the number of books that the same person can self-publish each day, so as not to turn the platform into a churrería. We understood business and philosophy (or art) as two irreconcilable life paths. The businessman chases money; the thinker and the artist seek the truth. But cognitive capitalism has dissolved the dilemma: digital creators produce content to make money. The less friction, the more benefit. Uniting the capitalist and the thinker in the creator is the latest trick of techno-feudalism: under the lure of monetization, autonomous thought is reduced and creativity is externalized, that is, the transcendent, dreamy and subversive breath of humans. Everything fits in with the anti-intellectualism in vogue: there we have the White House, happy to create swill. As things are moving quickly, I predict that the flood of swill will soon drown the “creators” and their audiences. The greater the confusion between what is true and what is false, the more we need journalists, that is, professionals who can identify what Hannah Arendt called “the modest truths of the facts.” Other emergencies will also have to be attended to. There are AI companies that, for a few euros, digitally resurrect the dead: they are chatbots that imitate the voice, style, personality of the loved one. To clarify the pair of opposites “being dead/being alive”, that is, between reality and fiction, intellectuals will be increasingly necessary. Because the great problem with garbage is that it distracts, but does not provide meaning. Where there is something important to know there is friction in learning it. Plato warned us: “The beautiful is difficult.” When you give yourself over to what is easy you get used to living in that ugly, false and meaningless filth. It will soon be seen that a life without friction is a life without meaning. Intellectual work entertains a few of us, but the effort to shape experience is universal, turning sapiens into sapiens. That’s why the desire for friction already appears around the corners: from those who go hiking to feel the rush of wind cutting their face, to those who turn to pottery to split the clay with their fingers. Soon the most valued skill will be to think with your own head, radically, with judgment and originality. The intellectual will once again be a reputed profession. Because sapiens understand themselves with imagination, thought and words, not with filth. Society will look for the hominid in the cave who, like the flint axe, shapes the world blow by blow. After all, thinking was always physical work. Irene Lozano She is a writer. His latest book is They are mills, not giants. How social networks and misinformation threaten our democracy (Peninsula).
