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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

#81

Post by soco »

gamepsys wrote: post #76
cletus wrote: post #43

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 f…

The same idea is explored in more details in his later book 'Fall; or Dodge in Hell' where AI generated individualized content radicalizes parts of the population and convinces them to believe blatantly false facts. It's a decently large B plot in the novel that ties into some of the larger themes.

We didn't need AI for that, but it surely helps a lot making it easier possible.

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

#82

Post by bazil376 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #55
bazil376 wrote: post #48

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 los…

> 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. Yes, but people's output is limited by their ability to type words on a keyboard. LLMs and other generative A.I. aren't bound by this limitation, and can put out significantly more. > People should always have been skeptical of content on untrusted websit…

On the first point - I’m not sure there’s a difference to internet users between 1 billion junk articles on a topic and 1 trillion junk articles.

On the second point - this is precisely what I’m talking about when I say if reputable sources start churning out junk, they will lose their reputation. This is a negative publicity event for google. If it keeps happening, people will no longer trust the information coming from google.

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

#83

Post by troyvit »

whstl wrote: post #9
Swizec wrote: post #2

Is slop new or is it just a continuation of SEO, blogspam, and “content”? I love that we have a new better word that captures the nuance, but it doesn’t feel like a new phenomena.

I'd argue that the strange Gemini answers that were making the rounds of social media are more absurd than what you would see in regular blogspam. But again, they're extremes (and some of the reported screenshots were even fake). On the other hand, there's indeed a lot of popular human-made fake content lately, especially in TikTok, like fake guitar playing and fake nonsensical DIY videos. So it's not an AI exclusive…

Now I want to go ask one of my AIs to produce some clearly fake content so that I can get boosted on social media for complaining about awful AI.

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

#85

Post by apantel »

jl6 wrote: post #44
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…

Well said. It’s the same with news. When something big happens in the world, there is an explosion of communication about it on the internet. You can absorb the event from countless sources. So what value is any one news outlet’s coverage? It’s not worth much. The media outlets used to be able to monetize a captive audience, i.e. people living in a certain locale would have a few newspapers and television channels to choose from. Now anyone, anywhere, can go online and absorb news from all of the posting and aggregating and reprocessing and commenting going on. It’s almost impossible to sell into that.

The value of generic / impersonal content is rapidly approaching zero. The only thing that still has value is a particular creator of interest posting their next video — like your favorite YouTube channel, you’ll watch that.

It seems like the only way to succeed in this new environment is to be a real human person who builds a following / cult of personality around themselves and their content with its signature that is unique to them. It’s something like ‘releasing content that is personally signed’ where the person’s signature has value to a certain audience. The audience is ‘captive’ because they can’t get that ‘personal signature’ anywhere else. Even AI can’t deepfake it, because the perceived value of it is specifically that it is coming from a particular real human person.

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

#86

Post by martin293 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #59
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.…

> - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content. What kills me is I have to hunt for the answer in Quora now. I just treat quora like I do pinterest, just back out and never return.

I remember finding Quora when it was good. It was a literal godsend, actually interesting and meaningful questions and answers. Basically what the internet was advertised as (information interchange). Sadly it only lasted like 6 months.

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

#87

Post by antisthenes »

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.…

Literally all of these are just the symptoms of declining ability of people (general public) to perform critical thinking. The content/spam/slop is simply being tailored to be effective with its intended audience.

But that's not the scary part.

The difference with AI slop is just the enormity of the scale and speed at which we can produce it. Finally, a couple of data centers can produce more slop than the entirety of humanity, combined.

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

#88

Post by badgersnake »

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.…

Youtube videos that could have been a one paragraph answer.

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

#90

Post by pmtcc »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #58
imabotbeep2937 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmm. An AI trained to maximize dopamine could be a very bad thing. (It won't be stated that way. It will be trained to "maximize engagement", but it amounts to the same thing.)

Our brains have been under attack for years. Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and company have already spent decades and billions doing just that. With capabilities already in the AI realm.
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