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

nytimes.com

61–70 of 252 posts

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

#61

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…

What happens if AI slop learns that I like accurate content and it suddenly gets good?

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

#62
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 - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.…

Yeah, and most of the reason for that can basically be summed up as "it's what Google incentivises".

They look for detailed pages, so pages are bloated with irrelevant information. They look for pages people spend a lot of time on, so the same thing occurs. Plus, the hellscape that is modern advertising means that rushing content out quickly and cheaply is encouraged over anything else.

AI will probably accelerate the process even more, but it's already been a huge issue for years now.

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

#63
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 - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.…

Yes, AI isn't entirely to blame for this - it's low quality, irrelevant and misleading content in general.

Also, we have to look at the incentives: advertisement. Somehow, this is acceptable to consumers, profitable for companies and profitable for publishers. How, is absolutely beyond me... and it won't change so long as Google has a majority in the "search"-space as they are directly profiting from this.

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

#64
Slop has been around a while. I was researching a topic, and noticed that most of the top search results had the same misunderstanding of some of the definitions. The writers were clearly not familiar with the topic, and I'm sure they were just copying each other. All of the articles pre-dated GPT-3.5.

The kicker is that if you ask GPT-4 about it, it spits out the same incorrect information, meaning that GPT-4 was likely trained on this bad data. FWIW, GPT-4o gives a much more accurate response.

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

#65
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.

> basically a replacement for "mid" with was highly used the last couple of years

Wot now? Somehow I managed to completely miss that.

Edit: ah, seems like it's mainly a twitter thing. That explains it.

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

#66

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 onl…

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

I think this segment might start small but I think it will grow rapidly if the utility of the internet is dwarfed with low quality crap. The belief that non-technical people won't catch on to the shenanigans and simply look elsewhere is a bad bet some are making and I think everyone living on the internet during covid gave non-technical people an intuitive feeling for all the manipulation and tenuous quality of the internet as a tool/public utility they can trust in any form.

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

#67
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a result of natural selection forced by search engines. I think that's why I like ChatGPT so much. You can ask it very specific things and it will tell you exactly what you need. It does also output verbose answers by default, but you can control it by promoting for a short answer.

Good point. I do find myself sometimes even prompting for a shorter answer after it hits me with a blob of text ;)

I do so as well, but usually the response is the chatbot first generating a paragraph about how it’ll comply with the request, making the prompt moot

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

#68

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 onl…

Fifteen years ago (I remember the apartment where I had this thought), it occurred to me that time was running out to write an authentic novel. Soon, computers would generate whole stories in an endless variety of styles, and even if future authors would hand write a book from start to finish, they would likely have been influenced by other artificial writing at some point. Readers would be unable to emotionally connect with authors due to the nagging awareness that the text might have been fully or partially generated by an unthinking, unfeeling machine.

Though I try, I fail to think of a comparable scenario in our past, at least as relates to language. You can look around whatever room you are in and try to identify an object that was made by human hands rather than a factory process. That's a fact that always makes me a bit sad. I think we're headed in a similar direction with the language we consume. Craftsmanship falls by the wayside, and our world loses even more of the human touch that connects us with one another.

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

#69

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 onl…

I weirdly think the shibbolethization of human culture will be a good thing because it will encourage everyone to be creative, lest they be accused of being a bot and ignored.

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

#70

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 onl…

Once we get to the point where models are or are nearly continuous learning and are getting data streamed from thousands of sources I feel it may be very hard to figure out if humans are leading the Gnirut or following.
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