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Slop, productivity, and why the AI-fueled world is going nowhere mighty fast

Gary Marcus
Jun 7, 2026 at 15:31
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Slop, productivity, and why the AI-fueled world is going nowhere mighty fast

Just saw a graph at the FT from John Burn-Murdoch that really distills something I have been trying to articulate. AI generates a lot of output (which fits many people’s informal notion of productivity), but it hasn’t yielded much in the way of RoI for many companies (per studies from MIT, McKinsey, Bain, and many others), and hasn’t materially changed GDP.The particular graph from the FT happens to be about mobile apps (h/t Jen Zhu). But you could make similar graphs in many domains: loads of nominal productivity, but not much real world impact.You could, for example, say something similar about books. GenAI has led to a lot more books, but it’s not clear that they are better books or (sorry I don’t have the...

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