AI Goulash
AI slop is flooding our feeds. It’s scraped, averaged, plated into a blob that tastes like nothing and says even less. It’s beige paste that leaves no crumbs.
This is my petition to coin a new term - AI Goulash.
Goulash is a human led mix augmented by AI. It keeps the weird carrots. Don’t ask about the ingredients - it’s unclear what the hell is actually in it half the time. It should never quite be the same thing twice (make a joke about non-determinism if you like). You eat goulash and ask questions later. It does not care if you are vegan. You hope for savory chunks and ingest it at risk of gastrointestinal distress.
Goulash is the adventure I want from AI.
Why now?
Volume is winning. There are more words, images, and videos of bunnies jumping on trampolines than hours in your life, and you will not beat paste with more paste. The better move is to assemble from your own inputs and let a model assist with structure and speed.
The only move is to cook. Goulash lets us salvage all the leftovers the day throws at us - voice notes, charts, code snippets, the “is this something”s. Toss them in and ask the model to chop fine or leave chunky.
What counts as AI goulash?
Using inputs that actually belong to you. These can be scribbles, photos of whiteboard, that email you never sent, or a janky bash script before my boy Claude Code has entered the chat. Keep the raw stuff with fingerprints (Is that analogy making this sound like light promotion of cannibalism?). At risk of overusing the term “taste” - Goulash has a taste. Not a brand voice sheet, but an unapologetic bias. The fact that I’m the only Android user in the Bay area and can’t do that bump share contact thing. Whatever it is GenZ means by “aura” (I think?)
What does not count?
Anything that reads like it was sanded smooth by a thousand identical summaries. A product of OpenAI taking the entire internet, computing a lot of dot products, jiggling it around and giving you a UI to generate text in Thinking Mode. A sea of goddamn em dashes. Slop removes you. Goulash reveals you.
How do I make goulash?
I say it how it is in your frantic head. I ignore spelling and grammar. I’m still deciding if Goulash needs to be capitalized. Then, I let the model sort, group, and compress. I want to keep the bits that taste like something.
Slop wants puree. Goulash wants pieces. Examples from my actual day, not from the library of nowhere or a “@grok is this true?”. I iterate and tell the model what it missed.
The model can augment you, but please make your own dish.
Regarding the topic of AI Goulash, your analogy realy nails the craving for a more personal, creatively chaotic approach to AI that embraces the 'weird carrots' of our own data, making me wonder about the optimal balance between deterministic structure and the very human joy of emergent, non-deterministic discovery in our augmented creations.