Hunting Mosquitoes With a Blunderbuss

Perhaps I’m more disconnected from regular life than the average Joe, but look at that video. Did you know the LLM thang had progressed this far, this fast? Internet wags who stubbornly still call it nothing but glorified autofill might want to rethink their opinions. Although no one ever rethinks their opinions on the internet, do they?

Another term that gets used to describe all manner of LLM ouput is slop. It was the word of the year, and an addendum has been made to the word’s entry in the dictionary to account for the output of Large Language Models. Most devotees of calling everything an LLM puts out “slop” are textual complainers, not visual cavilers. I’d like to take up the cudgels for anyone who wants to call the video we just watched slop, because it is. Just not for the reasons they’d like to think it is.

By referring to the things that LLMs put out as slop, people are mostly objecting to the great leveling that they produce. But the average of everything is bound to be average, isn’t it? Complaining about it seems a fool’s errand. I was on the committee that named the internet, and I remember that Fool’s Errand came in second in the naming list. Pandora’s Hope Chest and The My Little Ponies of the Apocalypse had too many letters, and fell out of the running early. Al Gore said it was the internet, and here we are. Calling machine written text slop, when referring to the internet, is silly. The internet has always been 99% poorly written slop. At least chatbots can spell correctly.

So exactly where is the here, you know, where we are? Watch the video again. It’s not easy to make a video like that. It looks to my eye about as sophisticated a final LLM product as you could find. Then again I might have fallen behind the times in the time it took me to type this. Progress, if you want to call it that, is happening fast, and picking up speed.

My wife is quite innocent, and asked me how much of the video was real. She assumed that at least the young woman host must be a green screen projection of a real person, and some of the backgrounds must be some sort of Colonial Williamsburg real-life thing. I told her that the girl, and everything else, appears to be some guy name Jonathan, sitting at a desk, who types faster than I do, and knows how to stitch together all the LLM apps and LLM prompts to produce videos like that.

I asked an LLM (Chat GPT) to explain exactly how to make a video like this. It didn’t have any trouble, and explained it in great detail, which I won’t bore you with. I’ll bore you using my usual methods. I did ask it to make a short summation of how the video was achieved, and it kindly boiled it down:

Creators usually build these videos with a multi-stage AI pipeline rather than one app alone.

Typical apps:

OpenAI Sora, Runway, Kling AI, or Luma AI for generating photorealistic video clips
ElevenLabs for AI voiceovers
Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve for editing and stitching shots together

The prompting technique is highly structured. Instead of a simple sentence, creators stack detailed layers describing:

format (“vertical iPhone selfie vlog”)
subject (“young woman with messy auburn hair”)
action (“walking through Tudor London talking to camera”)
environment (“muddy streets, timber houses, chimney smoke”)
camera behavior (“handheld shake, autofocus hunting, rolling shutter”)
lighting (“flat cloudy daylight”)
realism flaws (“compression artifacts, motion blur, imperfect framing”)
negative constraints (“no CGI look, no cinematic lighting, no face warping”)

The realism comes from intentionally simulating imperfect smartphone footage rather than polished cinema. Modern AI models learned not only historical imagery, but also TikTok/influencer behavior patterns and phone-camera physics. Creators then generate many short clips, discard bad outputs, and edit the best pieces together into a seamless “historical influencer vlog.”

I noticed that the intrepid authors of videos like these seem to have at least mostly solved the problem of drift. LLMs had a tendency to allow things to morph into different things when making longer clips, so something like the narrator would be a problem. She’d be the internet ideal of a hot babe one minute, and slowly turn into someone else as the video went along. The characters in the video are pretty immutable through the whole thing, a real accomplishment. I found it kinda amusing that Anne Boleyn’s face was grabbed from a portrait I recognized, just made a little less dowdy and two-dimensional. A few months ago, an LLM might have made her look like Anna Nicole Smith after enough frames, for inscrutable LLM reasons.

So I promised you I was going to complain, in your honor, about the LLM slop this video represents. Here goes:

It’s wonderful. Truly. It’s a hair’s breadth from being an entire movie production studio RAMmed into a Dell Optiplex. It could be as big a breakthrough as Edison’s kinetoscope. To find its equal, I’d have to go back to Charlie Chaplin setting up shop on North La Brea Avenue, and thinking about making more than Keystone Kops two-reelers. It has that kind of potential. Unfortunately, it will all be wasted.

You see, I can picture what could be accomplished with this setup, or probably the setup that comes right after this one. Movies and television entertainment could be wrested back from the avaricious, depraved, unfunny, and historically, economically, and socially illiterate people who have a death grip on it now. But I know in my heart it won’t be. Staunch traditionalists will continue to complain that they don’t make movies like they used to, and then renew their Netflix subscription, lest they miss out on seeing Batman XIV, an adaptation of La Cage aux Folles.

The premise of the Chloe vs. History is charming, if you squint hard enough. The simalacrum of the same kind of vapid influencer girl with a camera on a stick, going on vacation and telling you all food is amazing as long as it’s served in a foreign restaurant, going back in time instead, could have an element of humor in it. It doesn’t, but it could. It’s a testament to the kind of imagination at work. It took a lot of intelligence and hard work to find, master, and cobble together all the LLM applications that make that video possible. The nature of the intelligence stopped there. It doesn’t know what to ask it, excuse me — tell it — to do. So he makes a TikTok influencer vlog, because it’s all he knows. Of course he’s double smart, because he knows it’s the only sort of thing his audience is going to understand, too.

Once the charm wears off, you notice that the missing element is something truly intelligent, insightful, or even informative. The THING, the agglomeration of apps and circuits, is probably nearly capable of producing a new Citizen Kane if you told it to, a real story with real characters who do dramatic but believable things. No one will even try. The same people who make Helen of Troy a rich, dark hue, and say Thomas Cromwell was the hero of the Tudor piece, and a sex machine to boot, will make the LLM slop, because they’re in charge of the big budget slop already. They’re currently using cameras instead of mainframes, but they’ll adapt. The remaining set painters, the ones not already in the breadline from green-screen filming, will be laid off, and the production of anti-human entertainment pablum will accelerate, not diminish, simply because it will be cheaper.

Granpa told me all about the genie in the lamp.

It’s the oldest story ever and came from the land of the sand and the women with only eyes. It’s in there, the genie of everything, but you have to find him and let him out. Then he’s out and you have to figure what to do with him. Granpa says he’s wonderful but as dumb as a stump, just like all of us. He can do anything but doesn’t know what to do. He needs guidin’.

The lamp is always hidden in plain sight he says. Men go prospectin’ all over the landscape for the easy riches but they’re generally layin’ right there on the ground but you step over them in your hurry and scurry to look for them. Granpa points to the men through the door of the grog shop and they’re playin’ cards and Granpa says what good does it do for them to find the riches anyway.

Granpa would take the books down from the high shelves that the kids weren’t supposed to get because the treasure in them was too dear to waste on such as us. He told me to run my hands over the cloth on the cover to see if it was the real deal inside there. They don’t waste the nubbly cloth on the fakers.

The lady wouldn’t like it but Granpa would shush her and we’d go home and open that book but only so far. A book is like a man, Granpa would say. You can only bend him so far back until he can’t take it no more and then his back breaks. People always put the book back on the shelf but you can always tell because neither the man nor the book can stand up straight any more after that.

Scheherezade told that Sultan all those stories and it kept her alive and me too.