Written by Brook Schaaf

“Pastiche has to be the word that defines our time right now.” So wrote (too young to be a Gen-) X’er @thewaronbeauty. Pastiche is defined in a linked essay as “the mimicry of other styles.” As ChatGPT summarizes, form is recycled without meaning being added, which can feel hollow or derivative.

This is not so far from kitsch, the subject of a Philosophize This podcast examining Milan Kundera’s treatment of kitsch in his lustful, mournful The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As my Snipd podcasting app summarizes, kitsch expands from art to politics in Soviet-era Prague through a “sentimental flattening of reality” in two tiers. The first is a sense of congratulating oneself for sharing the feeling of having been touched. The second “turns feeling into herd validation and excludes dissenting perspectives.” 

Pastiche and kitsch represent more sophisticated, if not necessarily more pervasive, forms of slop, something that long predates AI. To take one example: when I was a child, elevator music, often called Muzak after the brand that pioneered it in the 1920s, was much complained about, despite being designed to be calming and pleasant. I remember people would sometimes comment sarcastically on it in elevators, and I never understood why they were so bothered. 

Fast forward to Instagram’s Adam Mosseri’s admission late last year that the old, personal feed is “dead,” and I think we’re seeing more of the same play out before us. While surveys indicate most people already can’t tell the difference between human- and AI-generated pastiche, simply knowing something might not be real or trustworthy engenders distrust, which threatens commercial operations. In response to Mosseri, one user replied, “This platform used to feel alive. Right now, it feels engineered, noisy, and disconnected from how people actually use it.” As commenter Om Malik (presumably a real person) stated, “The business reality is this: advertisers do not want fake people or fake stories.”  AdExchanger noted more generally, “Consumers have grown so weary of AI-generated content and straight-up slop, they’re taking extra time to find work made by real people.” 

This is the effect of commercial kitsch, which functions not in the service of a political ideology but to optimize yield by establishing emotional resonance that prompts users to take certain pathways or actions, such as endless Instagram scrolling, clicking a Google ad, or purchasing Amazon’s Choice. If users tire of these systems, as appears to be happening, they will use them less frequently or opt out entirely. 

Thus, the vaunted authenticity may be making its way from a moral good to systematic necessity and line-item reality. The platforms can de-kitch-ify their algorithms themselves, but they’ll still need quality content from users, including commercially relevant content, because people still like to shop. This is exactly where affiliate creators shine. Charlie Calabrese of AIM guest posted a checklist for how affiliate influencers can continue to create worthy content in the AI era. Indeed, in this context, perhaps it is no surprise that Google has been seen experimenting with third-party endorsements in ads. (Hat tip: Mike McNerney.)

I’ve come to see why people were so bothered by the Muzak. This isn’t to say that people will necessarily love the sound of affiliates, but each will have his or her own genuine sound.

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