Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"One hint that we might just be stuck in a hype cycle is the proliferation of what you might call “second-order slop” or “slopaganda”: a tidal wave of newsletters and X threads expressing awe at every press release and product announcement to hoover up some of that sweet, sweet advertising cash.</p><p>That AI companies are actively patronising and fanning a cottage economy of self-described educators and influencers to bring in new customers suggests the emperor has no clothes (and six fingers).</p><p>There are an awful lot of AI newsletters out there, but the two which kept appearing in my X ads were Superhuman AI run by Zain Kahn, and Rowan Cheung’s The Rundown. Both claim to have more than a million subscribers — an impressive figure, given the FT as of February had 1.6mn subscribers across its newsletters.</p><p>If you actually read the AI newsletters, it becomes harder to see why anyone’s staying signed up. They offer a simulacrum of tech reporting, with deeper insights or scepticism stripped out and replaced with techno-euphoria. Often they resemble the kind of press release summaries ChatGPT could have written."</p><p><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/24218775-57b1-4e9f-ba64-266a3239cf27?accessToken=zwAGMvPAVVcgkc8kIYd1V7FOn9O6ZCZqMjnPJw.MEUCIQDMtSVpX0B3iseXKaqvL8IjUVyohoowQhXAXzk4y5cqTQIgHcaK7yxG6mobaEqrLGe2GcJwB2T2gWNJyuaCBeaJsCU&sharetype=gift&token=9ee5e78e-8e38-4ce4-9f53-05b7dc4fd2ea&__readwiseLocation=" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">ft.com/content/24218775-57b1-4</span><span class="invisible">e9f-ba64-266a3239cf27?accessToken=zwAGMvPAVVcgkc8kIYd1V7FOn9O6ZCZqMjnPJw.MEUCIQDMtSVpX0B3iseXKaqvL8IjUVyohoowQhXAXzk4y5cqTQIgHcaK7yxG6mobaEqrLGe2GcJwB2T2gWNJyuaCBeaJsCU&sharetype=gift&token=9ee5e78e-8e38-4ce4-9f53-05b7dc4fd2ea&__readwiseLocation=</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GenerativeAI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AIHype" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AIHype</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AIBubble" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AIBubble</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AISlop" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AISlop</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AINewsletters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AINewsletters</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Slopaganda" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Slopaganda</span></a></p>