AI & Quality
I saw this post about how Amazon’s use of AI-generated code has caused serious problems, and it got me thinking about the main issue in the age of AI: quality.
Amazon has been having junior level software engineers use AI to write code, but it’s causing so many problems that their new policy is that a senior engineer has to sign off on any code produced with the assistance of AI. Because the quality is so low. So what they are basically instituting is quality control.
It’s no surprise that the main word people have taken up in opposition to AI dominance is slop—a word that precisely denotes a lack of quality. Slop is something hastily thrown together, which does the bare minimum for what it’s supposed to do. Food is slop if it is disgusting and horrible, but contains enough basic nutrition to fill your stomach and give you enough energy to get through the day.
As AI rises and fills all of reality, quality has rapidly declined. Everyone notices this, and it was pretty predictable. So more than ever, understanding quality has become an imperative. Not just a philosophical or metaphysical imperative, but an existential one—we need to understand quality in order to continue existing in anything resembling a human way.
So what is quality? The bestselling philosophical book of all time, Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance (1974) by Robert Pirsig, is all about inquiring into the nature of quality. What Pirsig basically concludes is that quality is not an adjective, but a noun—it isn’t something that things have, it is something that things are. Quality is part of the nature of reality, not a way of describing reality.
And AI precisely lacks quality—it produces things that are not quality, it lacks the nature, the reality of quality. It can approximate quality, it can imitate quality, but it will always have a gap between what it is, and what quality is. This is why humans are actually more important in the AI world—they are the onlyl beings that possess quality, and the ability to discern quality, and so are uniquely suited to conduct quality control. So much is being produced that is alienated from quality, and the task of the quality control performed by humans is to perform an essentially philosphical function.
Slop is something that is utterly alienated from quality—that lacks essential being, that is a copy of something that has being and reality. A world of slop, a world without quality, is an alienated world—an artificial world.
But quality has a strange property: it cannot be manufactured mechanically. It can only be encountered and recognized.
The more AI fills the world with things that resemble quality, the more necessary this human capacity becomes. The future may not belong to the systems that produce the most things, but to the people who can still tell the difference between what merely works and what is actually good.
Quality can’t be created—it always already exists, like all the atoms in the universe. It is being, and being is not created or destroyed—it is what has always been there, from the dawn of time.