* Click here for background. From Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic…

At first glance, “Heat Index” appears as inoffensive as newspaper features get. A “summer guide” sprawling across more than 50 pages, the feature, which was syndicated over the past week in both the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, contains “303 Must-Dos, Must-Tastes, and Must-Tries” for the sweaty months ahead. Readers are advised in one section to “Take a moonlight hike on a well-marked trail” and “Fly a kite on a breezy afternoon.” In others, they receive tips about running a lemonade stand and enjoying “unexpected frozen treats.”

Yet close readers of the guide noticed that something was very off. “Heat Index” went viral earlier today when people on social media pointed out that its summer-reading guide matched real authors with books they hadn’t written, such as Nightshade Market, attributed to Min Jin Lee, and The Last Algorithm, attributed to Andy Weir—a hint that the story may have been composed by a chatbot. This turned out to be true. Slop has come for the regional newspapers. […]

AI-generated content is frequently referred to as “slop” because it is spammy and flavorless. Generative AI’s output tends to become content in essays, emails, articles, and books much in the way that packing peanuts are content inside shipped packages. It’s filler—digital lorem ipsum. The problem with slop is that, like water, it gets in everywhere and seeks the lowest level. Chatbots can assist with higher-level tasks such as coding or scanning and analyzing a large corpus of spreadsheets, document archives, or other structured data. Such work marries human expertise with computational heft. But these more elegant examples seem exceedingly rare. In a recent article, Zach Seward, the editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times, said that, although the newspaper uses artificial intelligence to parse websites and data sets to assist with reporting, he views AI on its own as little more than a “parlor trick,” mostly without value when not in the hands of already skilled reporters and programmers.

Speaking with [freelancer Marco Buscaglia, who submitted the error-filled AI-generated content], we could easily see how the “Heat Index” mistake could become part of a pattern for journalists swimming against a current of synthetic slop, constantly produced content, and unrealistic demands from publishers. “I feel like my role has sort of evolved. Like, if people want all this content, they know that I can’t write 48 stories or whatever it’s going to be,” he said. He talked about finding another job, perhaps as a “shoe salesman.”

One worst-case scenario for AI looks a lot like the “Heat Index” fiasco—the parlor tricks winning out. It is a future where, instead of an artificial-general-intelligence apocalypse, we get a far more mundane destruction. AI tools don’t become intelligent, but simply good enough. They are not deployed by people trying to supplement or enrich their work and potential, but by those looking to automate it away entirely. You can see the contours of that future right now: in anecdotes about teachers using AI to grade papers written primarily by chatbots or in AI-generated newspaper inserts being sent to households that use them primarily as birdcage liners and kindling. Parlor tricks met with parlor tricks—robots talking with robots, writing synthetic words for audiences that will never read them.

Discuss.