Clichés Carry Less Information

Norbert Wiener's information-theoretic aesthetics: predictable, conventional language literally contains less information than innovative, idiosyncratic expression — so originality is, in a precise sense, higher-information. A ~1950 antecedent of today's debate about AI Slop.

The idea

Wiener linked information theory to aesthetics: a cliché is highly predictable, and predictable signals carry little information; the "innovative, heterodox, and idiosyncratic speech we associate with great artists" is improbable, and therefore information-rich (The Human Use of Human Beings — Wiener (excerpt)). He could only assert this — the n-gram models of his day were too crude to demonstrate it — but modern LLMs operationalize it: a model trained to predict likely text produces, by default, the most probable continuation, which is exactly the low-information, conventional, average one.

Wiener also warned against communication for its own sake: when people communicate "merely so that someone may earn… the prestige of becoming a priest of communication, the quality and communicative value of the message drop like a plummet" — a proto-critique of content-for-status (influencers, filler, AI exhaust).

Why it matters here

This is the deep root of two pages written from very different starting points:

• Slop — "visible sameness repeated ad nauseam" is just Wiener's low-information cliché at industrial scale: LLMs emit the high-probability/low-information default unless pushed.
• AI Commoditizes Expertise — "demand for difference" is demand for the improbable, high-information contribution; Wiener explains why difference is the scarce, valuable thing in information-theoretic terms.

Connections

• Slop — the modern, industrialized form of low-information cliché.
• AI Commoditizes Expertise — Wiener's information theory underwrites "demand for difference."
• The Bottleneck Shift — see also: if cheap output is low-information by default, the scarce input is the high-information human judgment about what's worth saying/doing.
• Norbert Wiener — the source thinker.
• What's Scarce When Execution Is Cheap — the synthesis this concept anchors historically.

Sources

• The Human Use of Human Beings — Wiener (excerpt) — secondary commentary + a Wiener quote.