The Manifesto

Chapter 1: In Which We Define Our Terms

In the beginning, there was email. And email was good, mostly, except for the parts that were absolutely terrible. The terrible parts eventually got a name: spam. Spam was junk mail, digital effluvia, the cold leftover mystery meat of the internet's refrigerator.

And for a time, we thought we had solved the problem. We had spam filters. We had blocklists. We had the blessed "Unsubscribe" button, which worked approximately 23% of the time (margin of error: 77%).

Then came the AI.

And the AI said, "Let there be content."

And there was content. So much content. An infinite, gurgling fountain of content, spraying across the digital landscape like a broken fire hydrant of words. And the people looked upon this content and said, "Huh. This is... something."

And lo, a new term was needed. Because this wasn't exactly spam — nobody was selling us anything (directly). It wasn't misinformation (usually). It wasn't even wrong (technically).

It was just... empty. Fluffy. Void of nutrition. A textual nothing-burger with extra nothing sauce.

We call it Baloney.

Chapter 2: The Taxonomy of Bullshirt

Now, some readers may be wondering why we don't simply call it "bullshit." An excellent question, and one that reveals a sophisticated appreciation for the nuances of low-quality content. Allow us to explain.

Bullshit (noun): Content that actively attempts to deceive, manipulate, or persuade you of something false. The bullshitter knows they're bullshitting. There is agency. There is intent. There is, dare we say, a certain craftsmanship to a well-constructed pile of bull-excrement.

Bullshirt (noun, polite alternative): The same thing, but what you say in front of your grandmother or in professional settings. As heard in NBC's "The Good Place," when characters discovered they literally could not swear in the afterlife. We adopt it here because it's funnier, less likely to trigger content filters, and because we are, fundamentally, cowards.

Baloney (noun): Content that is empty, generic, and devoid of substance — but without necessarily intending to deceive. The baloney-maker may genuinely believe they're contributing something. The AI generating baloney has no beliefs at all. Baloney is not lying; baloney is not even trying.

Consider this helpful Venn diagram that we won't actually draw because this is a text document:

The overlap region is where AI-generated content that sounds authoritative but says nothing intersects with human marketing copy. Scientists call this region "LinkedIn."

Chapter 3: The Muffin in the Cup

There's a wonderful scene in the Pixar film WALL-E where the future humans consume all their nutrition from cups. Everything is processed, liquified, and delivered through straws while they recline in hover-chairs, never having to engage with the physical reality of food.

We are now doing this with ideas.

AI has given us the content equivalent of Muffin in a Cup: easy to consume, requires no chewing, tastes vaguely like something you remember liking, but provides approximately zero nutritional value. You finish the cup and feel... fuller? But not nourished. Never nourished.

"But wait," says the helpful intern in the back, "isn't some content just meant to be light? Not everything needs to be a PhD thesis!"

True! Absolutely true. There's nothing wrong with light content. A nice snack. A palate cleanser. The problem arises when your entire information diet consists of muffin-cups, when the substantial meals disappear entirely, when you've forgotten what real food tastes like because everything comes pre-chewed and pre-digested.

The problem is the absence of struggle.

Chapter 4: In Praise of Struggle

Here is a secret that good writers have known forever, and that AI cannot replicate (yet, probably, maybe, who knows at this point):

Good writing is the residue of struggle.

When you wrestle with an idea — really grapple with it, pin it to the mat, get thrown across the ring by it, come back for another round — something happens. The text itself bears the marks of that engagement. Readers can feel it. They may not be able to articulate why this piece feels more real than that piece, but they sense the difference.

LLMs don't struggle. They predict the next token. They are very, very good at predicting what words should come next based on what words have come next in their training data. But "what should come next" is not the same as "what needs to be said."

Humans who don't struggle produce the same empty content. A person who sits down and types whatever comes to mind, without challenging their own assumptions, without questioning whether they have anything worth saying, without wrestling with the implications — that person will produce baloney identical to the AI's.

The medium is not the message. The struggle is the message.

Chapter 5: The Six Impossible Things

"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

— The White Queen, Through the Looking Glass

"Then you should definitely stop by Milliways for breakfast."

— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

We live now in an age of impossible things. What was impossible yesterday is trivially easy today:

Writing a 2,000-word blog post in 30 seconds — Impossible in 2020. Trivial in 2025.

Generating a professional-looking image from a text description — Impossible in 2021. Trivial now.

Creating a personalized video of yourself saying things you never said — Deeply unsettling and also trivial.

Producing an infinite stream of content that sounds plausible — So trivial we've automated it.

Distinguishing human-written content from AI-generated content — Rapidly becoming impossible.

Caring about quality when quantity is free — This is the impossible thing we choose to believe.

We choose the sixth impossible thing.

Chapter 6: Miracle-Gro for Your Character Flaws

Here is something no one wants to hear:

AI is not the problem. AI is a mirror.

AI doesn't create baloney from nothing. AI learned to create baloney by reading an ocean of human-generated baloney. Every cliché it produces, every hedge it generates, every empty claim it makes — it learned from us.

AI is, as one wise soul put it, "Miracle-Gro for your character flaws."

If you are prone to vagueness, AI will help you be vague at unprecedented scale. If you tend toward empty claims, AI will generate empty claims faster than you ever could. If your writing lacks specificity, AI will produce an infinite stream of non-specific content on your behalf.

The volume has increased. The speed has increased. The underlying patterns remain human.

This is both terrifying and oddly reassuring. Terrifying because it means the problem is us. Reassuring because it means the solution is also us.

Chapter 7: The Baloney Detection Kit

Carl Sagan, the astronomer and science communicator, proposed a "Baloney Detection Kit" for evaluating claims and arguments. We humbly adapt his framework for the AI age:

Signs of Baloney

The "In Today's Fast-Paced World" Opening

Any content that begins with a generic throat-clearing about the current state of things is immediately suspect. If your opening could apply to any topic, any audience, any year since approximately 1985, you have baloney.

The Hedge Parade

"It could potentially be said that this might possibly matter somewhat to certain stakeholders in specific contexts." If you cannot commit to an actual claim, you have nothing to say. Say nothing instead.

The Jargon Soup

"Leveraging synergistic paradigm shifts to drive holistic value propositions across the stakeholder ecosystem." This means nothing. It has never meant anything. Shoot it into the sun.

The Missing Example

"AI will transform every industry." Which industry? How? Show your work. Name names. Be specific or be quiet.

The Conclusion That Restates the Introduction

If your final paragraph is a rephrased version of your first paragraph, you went nowhere. The reader's time has been stolen.

Signs of Non-Baloney

Specific examples from actual experience

"When we implemented X at Y, the result was Z" beats "Implementation drives results" every single time.

Acknowledgment of complexity

"This is harder than it sounds because..." demonstrates actual engagement with reality.

Numbers, dates, names

Falsifiable specifics. The kind of thing that could be proven wrong if you made it up.

A clear point of view

Taking a position. Having a thesis. Arguing for something. Caring.

Evidence of struggle

"I used to think X, but now I think Y because of Z." This is the sound of someone who has actually thought about something.

Chapter 8: The Hitchhiker's Guide Entry for Baloney

The following is adapted from the entry for "Baloney" in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, should it ever be updated to include Earth-based phenomena:

BALONEY (Earth, digital variety)

A form of information pollution that emerged in the early 21st century when humans created artificial intelligences capable of producing unlimited text about any subject without understanding anything about any subject.

The phenomenon was predicted as early as 1988 by a philosopher named Harry Frankfurt, who wrote a book called "On Bullshit" that nobody read but everybody agreed with.

The key insight of Frankfurt's work was that the bullshitter is neither lying nor truth-telling — they simply don't care about the truth. They are filling space, making noise, producing output.

AI systems perfected this indifference. Unable to care about truth (or anything else), they produce text that has all the surface features of meaningful communication with none of the underlying substance.

Humans initially celebrated this development, using it to generate enormous quantities of blog posts, emails, and social media content. Then they noticed that all the content was the same. Then they noticed they couldn't tell their own writing from the AI's. Then they had a small existential crisis.

At time of writing, the crisis remains ongoing.

SEE ALSO: Spam, Slop, Bullshirt, Vienna Sausages

Chapter 9: Don't Panic (But Maybe Worry a Little)

The standard advice in situations like this is "Don't Panic." And that's good advice. Panic rarely improves anything.

But perhaps a moderate level of concern is warranted.

We are building a world where:

Content is infinite and free

Quality is hard to assess and expensive

Attention is the scarcest resource

Nobody can tell what's real anymore

This is, historically speaking, not a recipe for a healthy information ecosystem. Societies function on shared truths. Democracies require informed citizens. Science depends on trusted communication. All of these things get harder when the signal-to-baloney ratio drops below sustainable levels.

So what do we do?

We build tools. Not to ban AI (impossible), not to detect AI (increasingly impossible), but to detect baloney regardless of source.

We teach people to recognize empty content. We create systems that highlight substance and downrank fluff. We make the struggle visible and valuable.

We don't ask "did an AI write this?" — we ask "is this worth reading?"

Chapter 10: The Actual Manifesto Part

Fine. You want declarations? You want principles? Here they are:

We Declare

Quality is the only metric that matters.

We don't care who or what created the content. We care whether it's worth your time.

Struggle produces substance.

Content created without intellectual engagement — by human or machine — will be empty. We value the struggle.

Specificity is a superpower.

Vague content is baloney content. Real insights come with receipts.

Hedging is hiding.

If you can't commit to a claim, you don't have a claim. Be bold or be quiet.

AI amplifies, it doesn't create.

The patterns are ours. The responsibility is ours. The solution is ours.

Tools serve humans, not the reverse.

We build AI to help people think better, not to think for them.

The future is worth writing well.

What we put into the information ecosystem today shapes the minds that will build tomorrow.

We Commit To

Building a Baloney Detector that works

Open-sourcing the patterns and principles

Helping humans write (and think) better

Laughing at the absurdity while taking the problem seriously

Never, ever starting a document with "In today's fast-paced world"

Appendix A: The Vienna Sausages Principle

From a conversation that should probably remain private:

"If I'm alone, and the stakes are low, and nobody sees me eat my Vienna sausages, I love Vienna sausages, actually. With Miracle Whip on white bread."

Some content is Vienna sausages. Low-nutrition, wouldn't serve to guests, but perfectly fine for a solo snack when nothing is on the line.

The problem is when Vienna sausages become the main course. When every meal is processed meat product. When we forget that real food exists.

Know your Vienna sausages. Don't pretend they're steak.

Appendix B: So Long, and Thanks for All the Tokens

We are not anti-AI. We are not technophobes. We are not trying to stop the future.

We are trying to make sure the future is worth living in.

AI can be a tool for human flourishing. It can reduce drudgery, accelerate creativity, expand access to knowledge, and give voice to ideas that might otherwise remain unspoken.

Or it can drown us in an ocean of empty words, where nothing means anything because everything sounds the same.

The choice is ours. The tools we build, the standards we set, the values we embed — these things matter.

So let's build something good. Let's detect the baloney. Let's reward the struggle. Let's make quality matter again.

And for the love of all that is holy, let's stop opening documents with "In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape."

This manifesto was written by a human who struggled with it. Any resemblance to AI-generated content is coincidental and should be reported to the Baloney Detection Bureau immediately.

Released under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0. Share freely. Detect baloney vigorously. Always know where your towel is.

"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

The creation of AI content has had a similar reception."