See also: "botshit"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000768132...
A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
91–100 of 252 posts
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#92Slop 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 - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.…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.
Exactly why I literally never use videos for 'how to do [x]', when 'x' can be expected to be fairly straight forward, anymore.
- 10 seconds intro
- 10 seconds yoooo guys wassss up
- 30 seconds build up
- 30 seconds showing what the answer will do
- 30 seconds encouraging you to post comments to the video
- 2 seconds to explain the answer
- 20 seconds yooo don't forget to pound that like and subscribe
If this is really what's optimal for the sacred algorithm, then that algorithm needs a serious tune up.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#93I 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…
"There's just obscenely more high quality new-to-you content"
Are you sure about this? How are you measuring quality?
For me, if something resembles advertising I consider it to be of very low quality. There are some exceptions, for example some of the movie work by Roy Andersson, but they are very few.
As far as I can tell, ad-discourse and ad-style permeates pretty much everything in contemporary "content". Every time I go to my library and open something older than me the language is like a fresh air, it's clear that someone put some intellectual work into it and there is a distinct character to the text, personality imbued by the typographers, authors and editors. This is very rare on the Internet, and whenever I come across it the typography is usually ad-adjacent anyway.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#94Beyond 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?
The incentives are not aligned. They are not optimizing strictly for your preferences, they have agendas they are paid by advertisers to push.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#95Slop 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.
If you happen to use kagi, you can "ban" Pinterest from your SERP.
For me, it's one of those "quality of life" things that really improves my search experience (and is therefore worth paying for).
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#96It'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/
It's definitely not the same.
Spam is trying to sell you something, e.g. an unsolicited email peddling a supplements.
Slop is low-quality content, e.g. someone taking a bunch of bird pictures off Google and posting it in a birding Facebook group.
Spam is an ad, slop is not. With AI, it is now much easier to generate slop.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#97I 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.
If it gets bad enough that people will pay, I think some will pay for exclusively real content.
I hope this is the start of walled garden human internet. Web-rings, moderated forums, ect.
A common cyberpunk trope is a trashed net and a private net.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#98It'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/
Spam is content that is delivered to people who did not request it. Slop is content which pretends to be what you want, but turns out to be of low quality.
I don't see the difference. An email that pretends that I need to buy some pills and turns out to be a card collecting scam is obviously of low quality and not something I have requested.
Computer generated fake texts are spam, doesn't matter if they're selling pills to me or my attention to ad networks.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#99Interestingly, this article itself is an example of "slop"
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#100All this talk and jargon is indicative of a mass existential crisis as humanity is faced with the reality that many of its shared cultural artifacts are essentially frivolous.