"AI generates slop by design" — a counterintuitive take on why average is the default

A provocative argument reframes AI output quality not as a bug but as a mathematical inevitability: models trained on all data converge toward the average of that data.

@teelokay posted a concise but thought-provoking take: AI generates "slop" by design because it produces the statistical average of its training data. The argument is simple but has real implications — if your model is trained on everything, its default output is the median of everything, which is by definition mediocre.

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