The Slop Tax, a Brief Introduction

A Cultural Reinvestment Framework for the AI Age

The following is a sneak peek into a larger project. I am looking for insights, feedback, and other contributions to support this idea. So in that way it’s a bit of teaser— a blueprint, if you will — but also an invitation. Want to work on this with me? Want to publish the next piece I write on the Slop Tax? DM me. Hopefully, this is not the last you hear about The Slop Tax 😀.

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The Slop Tax is the first pillar in a digital New Deal for cultural production after AI. This is a draft policy white-paper proposing a small levy on the market capitalization of various companies engaged in generative AI production and research. What follows is a brief sketch of how the Slop Tax might work.

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0. The Problem

Early AI breakthroughs were promising. Processing large amounts of data and coming to reasonable conclusions contained utility for a variety of applications in science, industry, and research. As the compute increased and the money followed, private AI companies armed with generative AI went further, vowing to unleash “abundance”, cure disease, and solve our most pressing problems. Critics and humanists discounted the AI utopianism as just another tech hype cycle. Meanwhile, our cultural institutions, media outlets, and casual internet users had little choice but to endure platforms inserting “AI” into every corner of our lives. We had seen this movie before; big promises, but in practice the result was more rot.

In the hands of Silicon Valley, the primary export of AI firms has come to be known as AI Slop — AI-generated amalgamation of the runoff from billions of harvested datapoints, served up as a low-effort synthetic paste by platforms (and for platforms).

AI slop is everywhere. Few of us have avoided its parasitic invasion. And even the most hardened AI boosters admit that it is an unfortunate byproduct of generative AI’s capabilities. These same capabilities are projected to only increase in power. As this power increases, so does the threat that slop might rupture the delicate balance keeping the open internet a trusted, viable network of expression and communication. It extracts from human creative labor and original thought and remunerates little in return. Worst of all, it has poisoned our shared cultural narrative, stolen intellectual property, and rendered it nearly impossible to rely on any media as a reliable arbiter of truth.

While under different administrators, the future of AI may deliver us productive and enriching creative outcomes, at present the industry must be held responsible for its chief export. There are many actors responsible for AI Slop — what unites them all is their core function to occupy our attention and titillate our basest desires, to cheat the dopamine game that directs our media and labor ecosystems, and to consolidate power to the administrators of the latest model and the most training data.

With this explosion in generative capability comes the economic dislocation. Slop’s seductive economic gambit is already becoming pretext to accept an inferior product for the masses at the expense of the human cognitive sources that fuel their accelerating pace.

Are we in the final stages of a cultural ecosystem united by a collective consensus reality? Have we seen the last generation of cultural workers who are incentivized by a set of rewards calibrated to the productive limitations of human creativity? Have we seen the last image, text, or music that did not require a secondary verification of human intent and authorship?

A mechanism to fortify the economic infrastructure of cultural work has never been more imperative. There is still time to forge an agreement permitting frontier AI to progress along its research journey while regulating its most odious social externalities. A public utility on the scale of a war time national defense apparatus is required.

0.1 The Solution

As AI tools flood the world with counterfeit reproductions of original art, media, and research, the Slop Tax ensures that the creativity and intellectual property that feeds AI models remains vibrant, funded, and autonomous. The Tax enables a robust ecosystem of counterinstitutions supporting cultural work displaced by slop.

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I. The Core Concept

Definition: The Slop Tax is a mandatory contribution by AI companies equal to ~1% of their annual market capitalization, directed into an independent, publicly managed Cultural Trust Vehicle.

The Cultural Trust Vehicle (CTV) is a publicly-controlled body with an appointed board. If executed, the CTV will be among the largest single financiers of cultural life in our history. It is ruled by bylaws has a mission statement. The tax revenue reclaims value from the artificial overproduction of platform slop and redirects it into individuals, institutions, and projects committed to cultural work that prioritizes human creativity over its computational imitation. This restores balance to what has heretofore been a one-way extraction. With the slop tax, every prompt of derivative slop funds art and creative work unencumbered by the demands of platform capitalism.

1.01. Precedent

This is not our first cultural crisis of this scale. As the great depression ravaged the economic structures of creative life, a series of publicly funded bodies directly and indirectly funded artists, writers, and other cultural workers under the New Deal Works Progress Administration. The same commitment to a “Cultural Democracy” animates the Slop Tax policy.

III. Structure and Function

1. The Tax Mechanism

- Applies to: AI companies over a defined valuation threshold (e.g., $1B) who accrue revenue in a jurisdiction governed by its users.

- Rate: 1% of market capitalization (the tax rate is assessed on a sliding scale from 0.5–1.2% by size of company)

- Form: Levied tax, collected annually

- Funds managed by: an independent public entity governed by an appointed board paid by the revenue from the tax.

Tentative estimates forecast this as a $200 billion annual intake to distribute to various cultural workers impact by generative AI slop. By comparison, the annual budget of the NEA is ~$210 million, PBS’ annual operating budget is ~$373 million, and the US Department of Education is ~$200 billion.

2. Governance

IV. Fund Allocation Model

The total sum of the Slop Tax’s levy will fund the CTV endowment, which in turn will be dispersed at the discretion of the Board and Staff according to the categories defined below.

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V. Legal and Policy Foundation

- Legislative Program: Propose national, state, or city level legislation enacting a levy via a Slop Tax Act.

- Enforcement: Administered by revenue authorities, similar to environmental levies, or Point of Sale taxes. The mechanism of assessment would depend on the nature of the jurisdiction of enforcement. A state level enforcement might assess the levy at the point of sale, e.g. all slop prompts/users in the state of New York are subject to a NYS tax. With a large enough jurisdiction, the assessment may be pegged to the location of the companies head quarters and/or operations.

- Definition of “AI Company”: Any firm whose primary products or revenue streams rely on or employ large-scale machine learning, generative models, or AI APIs to publish content. This includes technology company deploying their own models, intermediary software companies employing third party models for output, and existing media companies employing AI to produce work for public consumption. Additionally, this tax will be assessed on revenue from platforms that do not take actions to ban or prevent the proliferation of slop on their channels e.g. platforms, news sites, or other online properties.

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VI. Cultural IP and Data Rights

Artists and institutions funded by the Slop Tax retain full copyright and licensing rights. An independently administered opt-out mechanism and protection from work being used in training models will be used. Reasonable efforts will be made to ensure that recipients of funds are not making slop themselves.

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VII. Strategic Rationale

1. Bipartisan Economic Redistribution: Redirects AI-generated wealth into cultural equity that empowers, not extracts from, our economy.

2. Moral Accountability: AI firms contribute proportionally to the creative ecosystem they draw from to churn out derivative slop.

3. Public Perception: Builds acceptance and goodwill for AI companies by visibly investing in arts & humanities. A simple step towards their much discussed “alignment.”

4. Cultural Democracy: In the future, access to non-AI-slop, authentic human creativity may be a luxury good sold at a premium. The slop tax is an attempt to democratize the access to this creative production before it becomes rarefied and accessible to only the most elite consumers.

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VIII. Implementation Pathway

1. White Paper: Publish “The Slop Tax Proposal: A Digital New Deal for the Age of AI.”

2. Public Relations: Publish op-ed essays explaining the Slop Tax to the public

3. Legislative Relations: Discuss proposal with elected officials and advocacy organizations to educate them on the benefits to their constituents. Goal: implement law establishing Slop Tax in a pilot jurisdiction.

4. Vehicle Bylaws and Formation: Form the Cultural Trust Vehicle with rotating governors and independent audit boards.

5. Expansion: Extend programs, growth roster of fund recipients, add complexity to enforcement and fund operations.

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IX. Counterpoints & Mitigation

- Corporate Resistance: Frame contributions as cultural infrastructure investment, not punitive taxation. AI takes and breaks, but doesn’t make. The AI Slop Tax ensures a robust creative ecosystem exists alongside the AI labs’ more legitimate endeavors.

- Valuation Volatility: Use averaged quarterly market cap for stable calculation.

- Funding and Execution Risk: Prioritize geographic and economic diversity through quotas and transparent selection. All proceedings and records of the CTV are public.

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X. Symbolic and Economic Legacy

Over time, the Slop Tax and the Trust Vehicle operate like a sovereign wealth fund, generating investment income endowing arts funding for generations. It establishes a precedent for creative redistribution, based on the bipartisan acknowledgment that generative AI models extract from human artistic expression, and the audience for AI slop competes in a zero-sum game for attention, impoverishing the ecosystem for the arts, journalism, and cultural work.