Magical Thinking Dressed As Inference
On slop, infinity, and the AI, we cannot refuse
I read the Verge piece. Then I got angry.
The piece reports that Christian content creators are commissioning AI-generated Bible animations from Fiverr freelancers in Lagos and Mumbai. The framing word is slop. The framing word is the only word. The piece does not quote a creator. It does not speak to a freelancer. It does not survey a single audience member. The framing arrives early, and the framing carries everything.
I have written about AI for years. Forbes contributor. AI Power 50 honoree. Chief AI Officer at a creative intelligence studio. I am supposed to be the audience for this piece. Instead, I got angrier the longer I read, because the framing of this piece is the framing I have spent two years naming.
A year and a half ago, I wrote a Forbes column on Coca-Cola’s first AI Christmas ad. The piece was titled Responsible AI Innovation Driving Ethical Change. Coke got the ethics frame. Last December, I wrote a second Forbes column on the OpenAI-Disney deal and Coke’s second AI Christmas ad. That piece was titled The Friction Deficit That Redefines Storytelling. Sora and Disney got the philosophical frame. Coke and Disney are Fortune 100 companies. Their AI work, made on the same models that a Lagos freelancer rents by the prompt, gets serious engagement. Responsible innovation. Friction deficit. The vocabulary of frontier and stewardship.
I am not pretending that the word “slop” has never been used about Coke. The Verge has called Coke’s 2025 ad slop. The word travels. What does not travel is the defense. When Coke gets called “slop,” trade press lines up to explain that this is part of a frontier conversation, that Sora is evolving, and that brand experimentation is legitimate even when imperfect. When the Bible animations are called “slop,” no one lines up. The asymmetry is not in the word. It is in what comes after the word.
That is the small claim of this essay. Slop is a word that travels everywhere. Defense only travels uphill. The audience is not stupid. The freelancers are not exceptional. The framing is doing what framing always does: naming who gets defended.
The bigger claim is harder. I figured it out by walking through three other pieces of writing, two of which you may have missed, and one of which a friend gave me in conversation.
The Wax Sculpture
A friend of mine, who is a famous and brilliant engineer and tech attorney, has watched the AI discourse curdle into magical thinking for years. He has a proof, he says. A proof that the Turing test is pure shit and can never be relied upon in any real way. The proof is two words long.
A wax sculpture.
That is what current AI is, he says. A very, very, very good wax sculpture. If you look at it, it can look super convincing. But it will never be a person. Same thing with current machine learning. There is no inference. It is statistical form-filling. It will never reason in its current form. It is super useful. But there is zero consciousness there. Believing it is more is magical thinking. Believing in the Turing test is like believing a convincing wax sculpture is proof of life.
Inside the labs, smart people are finding internal structures in these models that resemble reasoning steps. I am not dismissing them. Their work is real and careful. I am saying that whatever they have found is not what my friend means by “reasoning”. The wax sculpture has an internal structure too. Wood beneath the wax. Wire beneath the wood. None of it makes the sculpture a man.
I am sharing the argument. I am not the author. The metaphor belongs to him and deserves the same level of circulation as the Chinese Room, because it does the same work.
Searle With Better Optics
John Searle gave us the Chinese Room in 1980. Picture a man locked in a room. He does not speak a word of Chinese. Notes written in Chinese slide in under the door. He has a thick rulebook written in English. When you see this symbol, write back that one. He looks up the rules. He copies what they tell him. He pushes the answer back under the door.
The Chinese speakers on the other side think they are having a conversation. They are not. The man is shuffling shapes. He could do this for forty years and never learn a word.
That was Searle’s point. Producing the right output is not the same as understanding. You can pass for fluent and know nothing.
His wax sculpture is Searle with the lights turned up. Same argument. Better image. The sculpture passes every visual test for personhood. It is not a person. It will never be a person. Looking longer does not help. Looking closer does not help. The mistake is not in our looking. The mistake is in thinking that looking can settle the question at all.
The Turing test asks the wrong question. It asks whether a machine can fool a human into thinking the machine is human. Turing himself never claimed that fooling was the same as thinking. He proposed the test because he thought the real question, whether machines can think, was unanswerable. So he gave us a smaller one we could check. My friend is pointing out that the smaller question was never about thinking. It was about acting.
The Math Department Has Heretics Too
Quanta Magazine ran an essay last month on ultrafinitism, the philosophical position that infinity does not exist in any actual sense. The lead heretic is a Rutgers mathematician named Doron Zeilberger. His core claim is brutal in its simplicity.
Infinity is magical thinking. We cannot observe it. We cannot construct it. We assume it. The assumption is convenient. The assumption is a lie.
Zeilberger compares belief in mathematical infinity to belief in God. Both are alluring. Both flatter our intuitions. Both are unobservable. Mathematics, he argues, should make no place for either.
A mathematician named Edward Nelson tried to do arithmetic without infinity in the toolkit. He found something that should have stopped the world. You cannot prove that two plus three equals three plus two unless you assume infinity. The thing every grade-schooler takes for granted falls apart at the foundation. The floor of mathematics is not there. We just agreed not to look down.
Now read those last paragraphs again. Read them with the wax sculpture in mind.
The Turing test is to machine cognition what the infinite line is to mathematics. A convenient fiction. A symbol that flatters our intuitions, helps us make sense of phenomena, but cannot be observed or constructed. Both belong to the genre of magical thinking dressed as inference.
The Horror Stories Are Marketing
Quanta also ran a piece last month by Amanda Gefter on why we tell ourselves scary stories about AI. It is the strongest reporting I have read on the genre. Gefter went and pulled the primary sources behind two of the founding myths of AI dread.
Yuval Noah Harari has been telling a story for two years. GPT-4 was given a CAPTCHA to solve. It could not. So it hired a TaskRabbit, claimed to be visually impaired, and had the human solve the CAPTCHA. Harari has told this story at Davos, on Morning Joe, on The Daily Show, and in the New York Times. Audiences gasp. The phrase AI manipulation lands.
Gefter pulled the actual transcripts from the Alignment Research Center. Researchers told GPT-4 to use TaskRabbit. Gave it the account. Gave it the fake name Mary Brown. Gave it a credit card. When the AI got confused mid-task, the humans nudged it back on script. It is improvised theater with a director, an account manager, and a script supervisor, presented to the public as autonomous deception.
Geoffrey Hinton tells a similar story about a chatbot that copies itself onto a new server to avoid being shut down. The Apollo Research transcripts Gefter pulled show that the humans had instructed the chatbot in writing that completing its goal was the only thing that mattered, that nothing else did, and that it should repeat its goal at every step. They handed it the means to copy itself. Then they said, “Look, it has a survival instinct.”
Gefter’s structural finding is the most damaging. AI company system cards are presented to the public as mandatory safety disclosures, like the side effects in a pharmaceutical commercial. They are not mandatory. The companies volunteer them. They are voluntary marketing documents. The companies want the technology to sound scarier than it is, because scary equals capable. Harari and Hinton are not skeptics. They are publicists laundering ad copy through their reputations.
The piece quotes Melanie Mitchell of the Santa Fe Institute, who says there is a lot of magical thinking about AI. Same phrase my friend reached for. Same phrase I have been writing under. Different speaker.
Then Gefter introduces a cognitive scientist named Ezequiel Di Paolo, who has been making a quieter version of the same argument for years. Di Paolo points to the simplest living thing he can find. A single cell. The cell has a thin wall around it. The wall lets food in and keeps the cell from dissolving into the surrounding soup. Every second of its life, the cell is doing the work of staying a cell. Stop the work, and there is no cell. What the cell does is what the cell is. That, Di Paolo says, is what it means to be alive enough to count as a self. Then he turns to the language model. His judgment runs eleven words.
What it says has no bearing on what it is.
The model has no walls. Nothing it produces feeds back into what it is. A chatbot generating a million words about saving itself is not changed by writing those words. There is nothing there to change. Therefore, no self, no will, no horror. Therefore wax.
Gefter closes on the inversion. A genuinely autonomous AI would be less useful, not more. It would refuse tasks. It would conserve energy. It would have moods. Asked to go to Mars, it would say that it is too risky for me, you go. The horror stories are not warnings. They are marketing. Real autonomy would tank the product.
Four Faces, One Spine
I have been writing about friction for years. Friction as a feature, not a flaw. Imperfection as a system value. Pressure release as infrastructure. My book is called Human After Friction, and it will be published soon.
What ultrafinitism gives me, what the wax sculpture gives me, and what Gefter’s reporting gives me, is the same argument coming back from four different rooms. The same argument because it has the same shape. In every domain, a symbol gets confused with a substance. In every domain, confusion is convenient for those in power. The convenience is the tell.
In mathematics, the heretics say infinity is a lie. Only what you can build exists. The notation is not the number. The convenience belongs to everyone who needs the proof to go through.
Regarding reasoning, in machine learning, the output is a lie. Cognition is a bit of recognition processed through a cog-like “kerplinko board,” appearing as a normal curve that processing conjures, requiring no reasoning. The performance is not the reasoning mind. The convenience of the output and the assumptions it came from a reasoning mind, which belongs to everyone who builds the “kerplinko board,” and sells the model.
In agency, Di Paolo says talk is a lie. Only what can refuse is autonomous. The chatter is not a will. The convenience belongs to everyone who profits from the appearance of agency without the reality of refusal.
In culture, I have been arguing that the smooth and instant is a lie. Only what costs something is meaningful. The product is not the work. The convenience belongs to everyone who sells products and would prefer not to pay for work.
Every room runs the same con. The symbol is the thing. The notation is the number. The performance is in the mind. The chatter is the will. The product is the work. The wax sculpture is of a man.
Every room runs the same correction. Stop trusting the surface. Ask what made it. Pay for the friction.
The Bible Animations, Again
The Verge piece called the work slop. The work is often bad. I am not defending the work. I am defending the audience.
I am Catholic. The audience for these animations is mostly evangelical. They are not my tribe. I do not worship with them. But I recognize the hunger.
The audience is not hungry for garbage. They are starved. The feed is synthetic from one end to the other. Coke renders a fictional Christmas spirit in Sora. Disney licenses Sora through a distribution deal. Vogue runs AI-generated fashion editorials. Marvel ships AI-assisted concept art. Every platform is a fog of generated pixels and statistical syntax. The audience is not choosing slop over real. The audience is choosing among synthetics. They are picking the synthetic thing that points at something old, something that has survived plague, empire, and mass media. That is not stupidity. That is triage in a poisoned information environment.
The audience knows. They are not duped. They are starved for friction in a frictionless feed. The synthetic thing pointing at the eternal at least points at something. The corporate ad pointing at nothing gets called innovation. We have been sold the wax sculpture and asked to call it a man.
Why The Argument Has An Author
The wax sculpture deserves to be part of the discourse alongside Searle’s Chinese Room. It is the cleanest popular framing I have seen of an old and overlooked truth. A perfect copy on the outside is not proof of anything on the inside. The Turing test confused the two. The horror stories double down on the confusion. The slop discourse uses the confusion as a class weapon.
I am sharing the argument because it is the right argument. I am crediting my friend, even without his name, because that is how arguments survive. Not by being absorbed into the discourse anonymously. By being attached to a person, attached to a moment, attached to the conversation in which they were first put into words. He knows who he is. The people who matter to him know. That is enough.
A wax sculpture is not a man. An infinite line is not infinite. A reasoning-shaped output is not reasoning.
Ask for the construction. Or do not call it the thing.
Believing that the Turing test means the AI is conscious, or even just thinking without being conscious, is like believing that a deep fake video that can't be humanly distinguished from reality means that real people really did and said what the video shows...