Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 252 posts

Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

#11

Post by EForEndeavour »

The LLM/generative-AI genie is out of the lamp. I'm just some random midwit, but some predictions:

- Slop will continue to become cheaper to generate, and people will only notice the obvious stuff

- Hyperpersonalized content will abound, yet authenticity will run dry

- The lack of authenticity in electronic channels will drive a small segment of people offline into less fakeable (for now) social contexts

- Humans online will walk a treadmill of increasingly convoluted shibboleths / Gnirut tests (reverse Turing tests ;)) to self-identify as likely not AI-generated, i.e., subtly run-on sentences that are intelligible but slightly non-conformist to prevailing AI model outputs, and usage of old-school emoticons and other quirks

- Humans will walk on similar "Gnirut treadmills" for visual art, speech, video, and music

- AI models will gladly chase humans along these Gnirut treadmills, filling in canyons and sections of the Uncanny Valley with fractally sophisticated humanlike content

Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

#12

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #7
GaggiX wrote: post #5

"Slop" is a general term, you can create slop as a human, for example YouTubers who upload daily talking about the latest Twitter drama they are usually referred to as making slop, especially if they have a main channel where they upload high quality content. It's not a new term and it has little to do with AI by itself.

I think an important difference between Youtubers putting out low-quality videos is that it still takes them at least as much time to generate the video as the video's run-time - same with pointless self-promo blogposts, unhinged LinkedIn posts, etc. With generative A.I., this kind of slop can be pumped out at an industrial scale. It'd be like equating your neighbor dumping a bag of garbage on the roadside, with the…

> at least as much time to generate the video as the video's run-time

That's for the very lowest-tier video.

The usual formula, is that for every minute of runtime, you have at least 30 minutes of editing.

With professionally-produced video, I think it's triple or quadruple that.

Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

#13

Post by GaggiX »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #7
GaggiX wrote: post #5

"Slop" is a general term, you can create slop as a human, for example YouTubers who upload daily talking about the latest Twitter drama they are usually referred to as making slop, especially if they have a main channel where they upload high quality content. It's not a new term and it has little to do with AI by itself.

I think an important difference between Youtubers putting out low-quality videos is that it still takes them at least as much time to generate the video as the video's run-time - same with pointless self-promo blogposts, unhinged LinkedIn posts, etc. With generative A.I., this kind of slop can be pumped out at an industrial scale. It'd be like equating your neighbor dumping a bag of garbage on the roadside, with the…

I'm talking about how the term is used because the author doesn't seem to be too familiar with Internet slang and believes that the term is new and strictly related to AI.

Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

#14

Post by duxup »

Slop seems like a good term for unwanted AI generated content.

But I wonder how much this is AI and how much we've sort of curated a slop pattern even before AI:

- Video game tips web pages with massive chunks of text / ads before you get to the inevitable answer of "hit A when X happens".

- The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.

- Medium articles about coding that are filled with irrelevant pics and blocks of text that are "not wrong" but also "not right" followed by weirdly specific code...

We had all that before AI.

Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

#17

Post by tkgally »

Both HN itself and prolific HN contributor simonw get shoutouts in the article:

“The term [‘slop’] has sprung up in 4chan, Hacker News and YouTube comments, where anonymous posters sometimes project their proficiency in complex subject matter by using in-group language.”

“Some have identified Simon Willison, a developer, as an early adopter of the term — but Mr. Willison, who has pushed for the phrase’s adoption, said it was in use long before he found it. ‘I think I might actually have been quite late to the party!’ he said in an email.”

The first substantive discussion of the word here seems to be this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40301490

Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

#18

Post by tromp »

It's AI generated spam. Why not simply call it AI spam, as already in use by e.g. [1][2][3].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-spam-google-ruin-internet...

[2] https://www.ghostery.com/blog/how-to-prepare-for-ai-spam

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/13/google_ai_spam/

Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

#19

Post by duxup »

tromp wrote: post #18

It's AI generated spam. Why not simply call it AI spam, as already in use by e.g. [1][2][3]. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-spam-google-ruin-internet... [2] https://www.ghostery.com/blog/how-to-prepare-for-ai-spam [3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/13/google_ai_spam/

IMO it's slightly different in terms of how it plays out so a new term seems reasonable.

Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

#20

Post by fullshark »

I see no alternative if people are unwilling to actually pay for content. It's just going to be individualized slop feeds on every advertising based media app until they get tired of that (zero sign of that coming).

Maybe the algorithms will be so good, and enough creative people will use these tools to generate truly exciting content that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise but it just looks totally dire to me for creatives at this moment.

Post reply on HN