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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

#141

Post by TeMPOraL »

disqard wrote: post #101
somenameforme wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus 30 seconds to 2 minutes of Patreon segment, depending on whether they're reciting the list of newest/bestest patrons, and then 30 seconds of outro in the end, creating a frame for YouTube to stuff recommended videos of the creator in.

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

#143

Post by coldblues »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #133
tkgally wrote: post #17

Both HN itself and prolific HN contributor simonw get shoutouts in the article: “The term [‘slop’] has sprung up in 4chan, Hacker News and YouTube comments, where anonymous posters sometimes project their proficiency in complex subject matter by using in-group language.” “Some have identified Simon Willison, a developer, as an early adopter of the term — but Mr. Willison, who has pushed for the phrase’s adoption, sai…

4chan has been calling things "slop" for literally so long I can't remember when it started. If you go to /g/ literally right now, ctrl F slop, 4 hits just on the front page previews. If anything, it originally started as calling things "goyslop", which you might be able to deduce is a portmanteau of "goyim" and "slop", the implication (given it's 4chan) of course being that it's low-quality stuff made by Jews that i…

The regular person will never get these terms right. Most people are not aware of this game of telephone they're unwillingly being part of. It will never ceases to annoy me. I still shudder at seeing "Troll" being misused.

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

#144

Post by datavirtue »

AlexandrB wrote: post #54
tananaev wrote: post #22

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.

Enjoy it while you can. Once the marketing guys and monetization engineers get to it I suspect things will get a lot more annoying.

Not if my company is paying for it. Which they will, because they have to. The price will be kept in check becauae it is a commodity. Anyone wanting enterprise business will have to include it (Microsoft 365).

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

#145

Post by d0odk »

datavirtue wrote: post #140
wdutch wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

This. Bad AI output is indistinguishable from bad human output. It's literally the same exact shit.

With AI, there can be more content, produced faster and probably more cheaply, that is tailored to individual users.

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

#146

Post by bee_rider »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #39
wdutch wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

My hope is that equivocating waffle will look so much like ChatGPT that humans will have to write clearly and precisely to differentiate ourselves and we can put this horrible era of essay writing style behind us. Though I’m starting to think that AI might improve faster than us so there might only be a diminishing margin of opportunity left to do this.

We’ll have AI tools to take our bullet-points and expand them into prose (crappy now, eventually beautiful prose). Then we’ll use AI tools to summarize that prose into bullet points.

Eventually we’ll realize we can just send the bullet points and generate the prose on the receiving side. This will be great because most of the time the AI’s will be able to say “let’s just be a nop.”

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

#147

Post by datavirtue »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #137
AlexandrB wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoy it while you can. Once the marketing guys and monetization engineers get to it I suspect things will get a lot more annoying.

This. Marketing is a cancer on modern society, and it's metastasizing to new communication media increasingly quickly.

Marketing is literally customer/product (market) identification and all the activity required to produce and deliver the product to customers. Business. Did you mean advertising?

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

#148

Post by datavirtue »

henriquecm8 wrote: post #34
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.…

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.

Of course, it's seeking it's low energy state.

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

#149

Post by brcmthrowaway »

imabotbeep2937 wrote: post #46
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.…

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…

Dude take me back to BuzzFeed listicles. Some millenials being cringe >> AI slop

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

#150

Post by TeMPOraL »

CM30 wrote: post #62
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.…

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 th…

There's a bit of blaming a victim going on here. Especially early on in the days of SEO, Google incentivized slop the same way a bank vault incentivized armed robbery: by having something of value in it.

Google incentives don't matter much for honest website operators. They're only relevant when you want to abuse the system to promote your worthless bullshit[0] at the expense of the commons.

I really wish society started to treat marketing hustlers with the same disdain it has for robbers.

--

[0] - If it was worth anything, you wouldn't be worried about SEO all that much, especially back before it all turned into a race to the bottom.

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