Language evolves with technology, and there’s no better example than the title of a Rolling Stone article posted yesterday: Elon Musk appears to be completely addicted to anime gooner AI slop.
The headline would be unintelligible to most people in North America in 2000:
- Elon Musk was not yet a household name at the time. If you wanted to evoke images of high tech with a mainstream audience, you’d mention Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
- Anime had only started making headway into popular culture in the mid- to late 1990s thanks to Sailor Moon and Pokémon.
- At the time, the term gooner was limited to soccer, meaning “superfan of the Arsenal football club.” It had not yet become internet slang for “porn addict” or “chronic self-pleasurer.”
- The term “AI” would have been reasonably well known by then, and a year later, Syeven Spielberg’s film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, would be released.
- “AI slop” is a term that only got mainstream popularity last year thanks to programmer and tech blogger Simon Willison.
