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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

#101

Post by disqard »

somenameforme wrote: post #92
badgersnake wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

If it's a somewhat-successful YouTuber, then you missed the 60-second shout-out to their sponsor.

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

#102

Post by wafflemaker »

moi2388 wrote: post #67
duxup wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is probably an internalized "prompt engineering" trick from gpt3.5 times, where you could achieve near gpt-4 performance using stuff like that. Rephrase the question and plan your answer was on top of the list.

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

#103

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by quantified »

rdlw wrote: post #74
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/

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.

Huh. Whether or not a word has this meaning or that depends upon acceptance. You say it means X, someone else says it means Y, where X and Y can be arbitrarily dissimilar. And as much as you might be saying "means this to me", the way you are each phrasing it you mean "for all". How do either of you resolve this?

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

#105

Post by lovethevoid »

flessner wrote: post #63
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.…

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.

Good point. The standards for advertising networks has to increase tenfold, right now they reward slop, companies drain their ad budgets on channels they can’t even fully measure, and it repeats since it takes too long for companies to notice the effects.

It’s the reason advertising costs have ballooned digitally, and also the cause of many lawsuits that Google continues downplaying in the public eye.

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

#106

Post by greghinkleman »

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.…

[dead]

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

#107

Post by wafflemaker »

antisthenes wrote: post #87
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 o…

Don't think so. It's just democratizing of the internet. It went from elitist, well read and educated bunch to people communicating with pictures. Nothing wrong with that, tho text internet was nice.

At work people often ask me for help with documents or translation. Or I see some friends' conversations. While Polish grammar is pretty difficult, it's not surprising to see messages with orthographic errors in 5 out of six words. You just live in a bubble of people who can read and write well.

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

#108

Post by rdlw »

quantified wrote: post #104
rdlw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh. Whether or not a word has this meaning or that depends upon acceptance. You say it means X, someone else says it means Y, where X and Y can be arbitrarily dissimilar. And as much as you might be saying "means this to me", the way you are each phrasing it you mean "for all". How do either of you resolve this?

What is there to resolve? The comment I responded to was saying there's no useful distinction between the two words, I pointed out a distinction that I see between the two in what I think is accepted usage. Of course I see my opinion as more correct, since if I found something more convincing I would change my opinion. As the word becomes more widely used, usage will settle down.

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

#110

Post by rdlw »

cess11 wrote: post #98
rdlw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see 'slop' used more often in contexts where, say, you look up a problem you're working on, find an article that seems to be relevant and may have the answer you want, but at some point turns out to be devoid of content and possibly AI-generated.
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