Say what you will about the cesspool that Twitter has become. I refuse to call it X. It still remains, for better or worse, a big part of my media diet. Between the outrage and noise, I still find perspectives, articles, videos, and podcasts that make me pause. One such instance was Scott Belsky’s recent set of predictions, which I found fascinating. These are less my “responses” and more the thoughts his thoughts triggered.

One line that stayed with me was: “The buzzy concerns around AI in Hollywood will be grounded by the reality of what audiences increasingly crave: craft, meaning, and shared experiences.”

That feels true. And it dovetails into something else I’ve been thinking about: the world seems to be shifting toward a default suspicion of anything remarkable. Whenever something is good, or even interesting, there is this reflex to say: “That must be AI.” We are in a liminal period. Content creation has been democratized. Before refined work emerges at scale, we will first be buried under a monumental wave of slop.

The technology and models that ultimately elevate the craft will get lasting traction in Hollywood, while the prompt-based slop tools will focus more on social and content creator use-cases. Finally, the idea of personalized films with audience cameos will be humbled by the realization that people favor shared experiences. People want to be inspired by craft – and they want a common experience to discuss (or even share, in theaters!) with friends.

I don’t love the term “slop.” Yes, there is absolute uninspired audio-visual and textual garbage created with lazy prompting. But “slop” has also turned into a shorthand insult for anything one simply doesn’t like. And there is another uncomfortable truth: some of the most interesting pieces I have read on Substack recently were AI-generated. Better than many human pieces, in some ways. Whether you like that or not is irrelevant. It’s simply what has happened.

But because we grew up in a world where humans made content, and suddenly machines are doing it, we will go through a period of suspicion. The old world of content is dying. The new world of content is struggling to be born. And in between, there will be monsters. Sloppy monsters.

Behind-the-scenes “proof of craft” content will enters the mainstream of advertising and entertainment. As more AI-generated content fills our feeds, we will develop a membrane of doubt. “That’s fake” will become a default reaction as we become increasingly unimpressed by attention-grabbing content. Only when we see the ingenuity and craftsmanship behind the making of a piece of content will we become mesmerized by it.

Another idea that struck me was the prediction about ambient listening and summarization. Always-on devices that monitor how we live, then give us insights. It sounds sci-fi. Minority Report-like. We already had a brief teaser of this with AI pins like Rabbit. And today, you can already hack together a semi-competent assistant with connectors and vibe-coded tools. If progress continues, most of us will eventually have a Jarvis of our own.

And because of the suspicion toward AI-generated work, I think a kind of “gourmet content” will emerge. Human-written as a premium tag. Like organic vegetables. A strange future where “written by a human” becomes a selling point. Content will split into an artisanal landscape. Weirdness will be the natural state. Horrendous lows, which are the real slops. And beautiful highs where man plus machine produces work we have never seen before.

We are heading into a world of fragmentation and extremes. Chaos and creativity. Suspicion and awe. And it will be interesting to watch, and maybe even more interesting to participate in.