GoKawiilMy theme today is Knitting Bullshit and before I begin, I had better explain to you what I understand bullshit to be. In what follows, “bullshit” is used very much in the sense that Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt describes in his seminal essay, On Bullshit (1986; 2005). For Frankfurt, bullshit is an utterance with “a lack of connection to concern with truth” and an “indifference to how things really are.” From the off, Frankfurt tells us, it is important to understand that bullshit is, in its peculiarly execrable nature, materially different to a lie. While a liar displays an underlying respect for the truth in the very act of intentionally distorting it, “the essence of bullshit”, Frankfurt writes “is not that it is false but that it is phony.” For Frankfurt, then, bullshit, is discourse from which incidental matters like truth and reality have been completely hollowed out and replaced by performance and simulation. Unfortunately, as none of us can fail to be aware, we live in an age of bullshit; a moment when the bullshitter-in-chief sits in the White House daily purveying what Frankfurt, before his death in 2023, memorably referred to as “farcically unalloyed bullshit”. You’ll no doubt be pleased to hear, though, that the bullshit I am going to talk about today is of a very specific rather than a general kind: yes, what concerns me here is knitting bullshit.
I have been thinking about knitting bullshit now for quite some time, but I was alerted to a particular type of it while listening to Jamie Bartlett’s excellent series Everything is Fake and Nobody Cares (available wherever you get your podcasts). The first episode includes an interview with Anne McHealy, head of product at Inception Point AI, a podcasting company founded by Jeanine Wright, formerly COO at Wondery. Until its dissolution (by Amazon in 2025 at the cost of 110 jobs), Wondery was known for producing high quality, human-authored, narrative content. Inception Point AI, on the other hand, is a slop factory employing just 8 people which, according to Anne, publishes “about 3000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities.” Anne tells Jamie, that, to date, Inception Point AI’s podcasts have accumulated “12 million lifetime downloads. And we’re averaging about 750,000 downloads a month.” Stunned by these extraordinary figures, Jamie asks Anne about the editorial oversight of the content which she produces. Does she, or any of her colleagues, actually listen to any of these 3000 weekly episodes? With only 8 employees, who on earth has time to check the accuracy or quality of these podcasts? The answer, is, of course, that no one checks or edits the podcast content– but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes:
“most of our content sits squarely in topics that aren’t life or death necessarily. So gardening, for example, knitting, cooking, these things we can afford to be wrong. And it’s not necessarily the end of the world.”
Listening to this apologist for automated arbitrage with a kind of fascinated horror, I found myself pulled up short. Knitting, you say? Not life or death, you say? Who are you kidding, Anne?
So, of course I went to listen to Inception Point AI’s “knitting” podcast. I heartily encourage you not to do the same, not least because this joyless experience would be contributing to the slop factory’s jaw-dropping (and depressing) number of downloads while simultaneously serving you ads for accounting software and small business insurance (your tailored marketing will, of course, be personal to you). No, I have now done that work for you; those few sad hours are forever lost to me, and I am here to tell you that this ai generated knitting “content” is just as bad as you imagine. Worse than you imagine. Much, much worse.
Let’s take the first episode on Knitting Through the Ages, for example. The podcast opens by promising to “examine the cultural significance of knitting. . . the way this simple act of looping yarn has brought people together across generations and continents. We’ll be delving into the juicy details and quirky anecdotes that make the story of knitting truly captivating,” your husky-voiced AI host promises, “. . . from ancient Egyptian socks to the rise of knitting as a global phenomenon, we’ll uncover the hidden stories and colourful characters that have shaped this beloved craft.” Indeed, the host does go on to talk about a pair of ancient Egyptian socks, before leaping forward to a discussion of the contemporary global knitting community . . . but there is nothing in-between. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Yes, that’s right: the entire history of knitting is encompassed by a pair of Egyptian socks and Ravelry. But if these two huge historical milestones are apparently the only available topics then of what, pray, is the rest of the episode composed? I sat through 15 minutes which sounded as if the AI had been trained on a decade’s worth of poorly-composed yarn marketing material, and was spewing it back out at me as a syrupy word salad. As I listened, I could feel my grey matter dissolving into a kind of marshmallow soup as each sentence made its own kind of inane, sweet sense, while saying precisely nothing.
So far, so slop. Thanks so much, Inception AI, for such an insightful episode covering, as promised, the whole of knitting’s long, difficult, contested history: a story involving the invisible labour and creativity of women, the exploitation of that creativity and labour, industrialisation, ingenuity, resistance, solidarity . . . oh, you’re not telling that story, I’m so sorry. Let’s swiftly move on to the episode about knitting design. . . .
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