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Are we on the brink of World War Three?
The following column was written in 2024 for former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson when he left the magazine. This is the first time it has been published. My favorite ever email came from a friend and fellow hack, Roland White. It said: “You bastard. I had a 50 quid bet that Charles Moore would be the first Spectator writer to use the word ‘clunge’ in an article.” Ha. I admit I had been surprised to see the word there, in hard copy, when the mag was published. I had expected the usual haggling. “Can’t you say vagina, Rod? Or just leave it out altogether? Or how about Lady Garden?
The following column was written in 2024 for former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson when he left the magazine. This is the first time it has been published. My favorite ever email came from a friend and fellow hack, Roland White. It said: “You bastard. I had a 50 quid bet that Charles Moore would be the first Spectator writer to use the word ‘clunge’ in an article.” Ha. I admit I had been surprised to see the word there, in hard copy, when the mag was published. I had expected the usual haggling. “Can’t you say vagina, Rod? Or just leave it out altogether? Or how about Lady Garden?
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AI slop is not a new phenomenon. But it is becoming more prevalent as the lazy, the modish and the subliterate take advantage of an apparently beneficial and cost-free leap in technology that will save them the time and effort formerly required to construct a speech, résumé, article or image. I only started picking up on it myself quite recently. But now, when I get the feeling I’m being fed AI-generated pictures, I react like those dogs in the movies that are trained to spot Terminators. Thanks to the proliferation of sites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc., there’s an awful lot of cable-TV slop about these days, as there has to be with all that space to fill, all those subscription costs to justify.