December 28, 2025
Holiday Slop Wars
Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
Creator slams AI as a Christmas con; fans cheer, skeptics push back, memes fly
TLDR: Rich Hickey posted a blistering holiday rant calling modern AI a harmful con that floods the internet with junk and erodes jobs, education, and privacy. The community split: some cheered and memed “slopbaiting,” while others argued the real issue is how people and companies choose to use AI.
The creator of Clojure, Rich Hickey, just dropped a holiday roast called “Thanks AI,” and it’s spicy. He blasts today’s AI as a con that pirates art, wrecks education, kills entry-level jobs, floods the web with slop, and replaces humans with fake helpers. The comments? Absolute fireworks. One fan, thrilled to see Hickey echo Rob Pike, says it feels like we “jumped tracks into an alternate timeline.” Another coins the term “slopbaiting,” which instantly became the thread’s meme of the day.
But there’s serious pushback. A calm voice notes these critiques have hit every wave of tech, reminding everyone the verdict is still out on AI. Another argues the tool isn’t the villain — people and corporations choose how to use it, guided by laws and incentives. Meanwhile the humor brigade shows up: one commenter riffs a classic dril-style joke comparing AI defenses to excuses for drunk driving, roasting the “it helps” crowd with savage sarcasm. For the uninitiated, LLMs (large language models) are those chatbots that summarize and generate text; Hickey claims they make search “summary BS” and turn music into “robot parrots.” Verdict in the thread: split, loud, and wildly memeable.
Key Points
- •Rich Hickey published a critical open letter to AI vendors after receiving a machine-generated praise email.
- •He alleges AI training pirated creative works and asserts that AI harms education, raises utility rates, and damages the environment.
- •He claims AI wastes developer time and eliminates entry-level jobs, reducing future labor pools.
- •Hickey criticizes AI-driven support, search summaries, and content flooding as degrading user experience and information quality.
- •He warns agentic AI will swamp communication channels with low-quality output and questions tolerating technologies that create more problems than they solve.