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

nytimes.com

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

#41

Post by StableAlkyne »

duxup wrote: post #28
skydhash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People wants to pay for content, but publishers are either not working on content worth paying for or don’t want you to purchase, they want you to rent instead.

Chicken and the egg there as far as "worth paying for" although I'd argue that's not really any different than "don't want to pay".

If it's "worth paying for," they can just squeeze more money out of the equation until it's barely worth the cost.

For a real world example, just look at the scientific journal system - researchers pay upwards of $5k to publish (after spending however many tens to hundreds of thousands on the science, out of their own pocket), readers can pay $50 per article or their institution can subscribe for tens of thousands of dollars (if they're lucky and have a good negotiator). Journals do nothing of value aside from hosting the PDFs (which absolutely does not cost $50/download) and facilitating anonymous peer review (which amounts to sending emails to a few academics who will review it for free, at no cost to the journal).

Even content that is worth paying for, like research, will quickly reach an equilibrium that maximizes profit while minimizing effort.

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

#42

Post by Workaccount2 »

rini17 wrote: post #25
fullshark wrote: post #20

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…

The subscription usually comes in a package and people hate to pay for something they disagree with, even if it's just one author of several, or the occassional mistake. Might not be the main reason, just that these unsatisfied users are so vocal, idk.

In my experience with a voluntary donation only service targeted and used primarily by educated middle and upper class people, virtually no one pays if they don't have to.

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

#43

Post by cletus »

I'm a huge Neal Stephenson fan. Cryptonomicon is to this day one of my all-time favorite books. Years ago now I read Anathem. It wasn't as good but it had some really interesting ideas.

One such idea was how the Internet was filled with garbage by all these agents (which were implied or stated were AI, I can't recall). They would subtly change things to be wrong. Why? Essentially to sell you a solution to this that filters out all the crap.

Currently we rely a lot on altruism for much of the information on the Internet (eg Wikipedia). AI agents will get harder and harder to differentiate from actual humans making Wikipedia edits. I don't think we're that far away from human-vs-AI Wikipedia edit wars.

I really wonder how much human knowledge will be destroyed by (intentional or otherwise) AI vandalism in the future.

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

#44

Post by jl6 »

fullshark wrote: post #20

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…

> unwilling to actually pay for content

The "content" industry (books, music, movies, all of it) has a systemic issue of which we are only just seeing the beginning. Namely, there is now so much content, and it is all so easily accessible, that the relative value of any one piece of content has fallen way, way down. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many days in a lifetime, and only so many humans on the planet, and growth in that aggregate content consumption capacity has been far outstripped by the growth in content production capacity.

There's just obscenely more high quality new-to-you content than you can ever consume - and an increasing proportion of it is available very cheaply, or even free. Anything new faces an uphill battle against everything old - and now, against AI too.

This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better (and it may never get better).

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

#45

Post by willvarfar »

Beyond slop, there will be personalized slop where AI 'optimizes' articles for each reader.

And beyond slop, there will be AI models that do product placement. OpenAI's "publisher partnerships" deck explains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228

So soon you'll go to a news website and get the political filter bubble that reinforces - or outrages - your prejudices to maximize your engagement. And in the middle of it, the AI will slip in that the brand of grill that caused the fire was rumoured to be ${insert_name_of_competitor_here} etc?

The big future for AI is to move slop beyond outrage and into intimacy territory. If rage was the engagement of the last ten years, then ending up only talking to AIs who pretend to care will be the even more addictive engagement of the next ten :(

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

#46

Post by imabotbeep2937 »

duxup wrote: post #14

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.…

Agree. Content was the OG slop. Buzzfeed with monkeys on typewriters.

The problem is that dopamine addicts generate outsized engagement. I know a literal crack mom who spends a solid 90+ hours a week watching accident videos to keep her brain triggered. The algorithm caters to her. Send promotional emails daily or more, constant notifications, recommend the same few videos over and over. Gotta get in there before she clicks another car crash video.

IMHO: Marketing is a top societal evil right now. If the media machine wasn't so desperate for content, AI wouldn't be a fraction of the problem it is. But with everyone obsessing over the next piece of content, fake AI presentations are mandatory.

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

#47

Post by Workaccount2 »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #33
skydhash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People wants to pay for content, but publishers are either not working on content worth paying for or don’t want you to purchase, they want you to rent instead.

Decades of internet use has shown me that people absolutely do not want to pay for content. The average person will choose free+ads over paying every time.

A large subset of those will choose free+ads with ad-block, so free+free.

Then they will complain that the internet is full of trash content that doesn't suite them.

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

#48

Post by bazil376 »

There’s going to be a lot of garbage content out there—but isn’t there already? People have been writing junk to try to get search engine placement for 20+ years.

I’m not necessarily seeing the slop problem. People should always have been skeptical of content on untrusted websites.

Now, if reputable sources start trying to pump out content with AI, that’d be a problem. I suspect for those who try, they’ll quickly lose their reputation.

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

#49

Post by pixl97 »

willvarfar wrote: post #36
fullshark wrote: post #20

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…

Companies will serve slop to paying subscribers too.

Exactly. Slop is like meth for corporations. It costs nearly nothing to produce unlike real content, and for a short period of time can give a real boost to number of viewers/ad impressions/etc, the current board members can get that jump in their stocks and take a golden parachute while their replacements have to deal with a company that can no longer produce anything useful and has to spend a massive amount of money to get everything back in shape.

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

#50

Post by GaggiX »

henriquecm8 wrote: post #34
duxup wrote: post #14

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.…

I can see the use to describe AI spam, but I am starting to seeing people using it to describe anything they don't like, basically a replacement for "mid" with was highly used the last couple of years. I noticed that when some people learn a new "trendy" word, they want to use it in every possible opportunity until it loses meaning.

"Slop" is a internet slang that has always been used to refer to low quality content that exploits current internet trends, using it to refer specifically to AI generated content is pretty new.
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