Nice work Simon!
A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
121–130 of 252 posts
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're right. Since LLMs went mainstream, I've seen a lot of my colleagues' presentations and thought "was this written by ChatGPT?" but I've come to wonder if it's just given me the frame of mind to identify low-effort slop that lacks any original insight but uses all the right sorts of words and phrases, regardless of if it was authored by a human or not.
It's both. Especially the out of context tinfoil rage response. They always existed. But now it's so common to see some totally benign article about pizza, and the top comment is "don't let them tell you not to remember in 1995 when US implanted radios in Syrian babies". The algorithm is being trained solely for engagement. It is horrifying.
This sounds completely unrelated. If someone is really leaving a comment like that, it has nothing to do with the article and everything to do with the way weirdos engage with the internet.
The Slop is the wordy vapid garbage that maximizes SEO.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.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).
There are chrome plugins that block domains from Google results for free and don’t require a login.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#124I 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…
And this is where branding and reputation comes into play. For all their problems, I trust numerous media brands to not give me slop: The New York Times, The Financial Times, Monocle, Matt Levine, Linus Tech Tips, The Verge, hundreds of YouTubers and Twitter users, even Hacker News. Let media companies and creators who want to set fire to their good names get on with it, because it'll hopefully mean anyone doing a go…
> Linus Tech Tips
Caught red-handed faking test results, the official response "if we actually did the tests we wouldn't be able to publish videos fast enough"
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#125Love the term. People should call it for what it is. Tried to find some answers on Google earlier in the day, and the first result pages were 100% generated slop. Funnily enough, any AI summary of the slop would be slop squared. It's everywhere, and I hate it. What ways do people have to combat it out of their day?
Its infesting google image search too. I tried to find a picture of a guitarist playing a certain guitar. I got hits from “openart” where it looked like kurt cobain got crossed with a sand worm
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#126[deleted]
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Spam = unwanted and against what you asked for, trying to sell you something or get you to do something Slop = technically what you asked for, but intentionally created just to fill space and increase traffic/hits, generally of the lowest quality rendering it unusable
Then, to me, it's spam. The only times I've asked for fake text generated by a computer I stitched together some markov chain library and a corpus myself, and then it was to make the point that some people are so badly affected by ads and political propaganda that their contributions to the texts of humanity could easily be replaced by my code.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Argh, my apologies. The comment above yours in the sequence I see defines spam as unwanted marketing content, yours as unwanted content in general. For reasons unknown I saw that one as the parent of yours.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's spam. That's like the messages in your inbox of yesteryear that tried to entice you to look at them but they'll just waste your time or worse if you do.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#130Schlopp. Beautiful schlopp. Beautiful schlopp with a cherry on top.