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If you can’t beat ’em, tax ’em.
AI slop is as certain as government levies these days, infecting every corner of the internet and increasingly intruding on real life. It’s not going away, and surely any attempts to ban the stuff will be futile.
So what should we do about it? Well, why not institute a “slop tax?” proposes technologist Mike Pepi in an essay for The Guardian.
Such a tax would “restore balance to what has heretofore been a one-way extraction,” and “ensure robust institutional support structures for human creativity forced to compete in a sea of meaningless content,” Pepi writes. Essentially, you shave off a little of the AI industry’s bottom line to fund the arts, sciences, and other cultural institutions that they mined for free.
AI slop is more than just an ugly annoyance. In Pepi’s view, it’s a “malicious manipulation of human cognitive labor and the institutions that support it.” These billions of “facsimiles of human creativity and cognition” end up drawing resources away from actual human creatives.
The “slop tax,” as Pepi envisions, would work as follows: if a company “furnishes or hosts generative AI content,” it’s hit with an annual ~1 percent tax. “This revenue goes into a publicly controlled fund that distributes grants back to varying kinds to cultural institutions, artists and researchers — the very same groups the models used as training data.”
The largest AI companies are worth trillions of dollars each, so even a one percent tax will provide a windfall for cultural workers, bedrock cultural institutions, and grants for research, Pepi wrote. The interesting aspect is that the tax rate isn’t high enough to be considered a punitive action, giving AI companies less to rebel against, while still providing a boatload of cash.
How feasible it would be to implement a slop tax in reality is up for debate, but in Pepi’s view it would more meaningfully address one of AI’s catastrophic consequences, the destruction of cognitive and creative labor, than other attempts to rein in the industry. Bernie Sanders’ call for a “pause” on AI, he accuses, borrows “from doomers’ prognostications of a sentient artificial general intelligence — a distracting fantasy more at home in science fiction.”
But a “small tax on the worst parts of the industry,” he says, “could unleash a cultural renaissance.”
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