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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

#151

Post by skydhash »

pjc50 wrote: post #116
skydhash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People wants to pay for content, but publishers are either not working on content worth paying for or don’t want you to purchase, they want you to rent instead.

The fundamental issue is that it's unreliable to know if you'll like content before you've experienced it. But afterwards you're not going to pay because you have already experienced it. It's a "market for lemons".

It was always a bet. You make something and hope that people like it enough to pay for it. Just like any business. Why should businesses be entitled to my money if their offerings have no value to me?

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

#152

Post by coldblues »

neogodless wrote: post #139
coldblues wrote: post #131

I think it's pretty obvious that the term "slop" has food origins. When you think of "slop", you think of oily, greasy fast food, or disgusting amounts of sugar, syrup, icing, etc. The food allegory strikes again. When someone says something is "slop", they obviously mean mass-produced content that regular people willingly consume at their detriment, because it appeals to our most primitive desires. Something lacking…

That's not what I think of. I think of the buckets of scraps you would feed a pig. The stuff the humans don't want to eat and would just as well put in the garbage bin.

Reasonable individuals would think of the food I've described as pig feed, if not worse, of course with some hyperbole added. The reality is that most people are not knowledgeable enough to even tell "AI slop" apart from regular slop, or even human-made content. In that regard, people are eating pig feed, scraps no reasonable people would want to touch. Best example is AI generated Facebook posts with comments and likes from elderly folk or the the lower end of the bell curve.

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

#153

Post by fullshark »

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.

True, let's get even more cynical actually, companies will serve ads to paying customers too, even those paying for "ad-free" versions of the product.

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

#154

Post by TeMPOraL »

datavirtue wrote: post #147
TeMPOraL wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Motte and bailey. Marketing is what you say on paper, but nothing like it in practice.

(And people have been giving me identical response with "advertising" in place of "marketing" for years now, so I'll say yes to both; the terms are effectively interchangeable in both motte and bailey cases.)

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

#155

Post by ghaff »

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…

I've seen examples where seeing someone make e.g. some repair really benefits from video. But I certainly won't argue in general.

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

#156

Post by aidenn0 »

lux wrote: post #79
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 endless drivel of recipe websites is another one, burying the actual recipe under an absolute mountain of slop.

Recipe for cinnamon rolls:

When I was a kid we used to spend summers with my grandmother. It was an idyllica pastoral setting and we used to chase the goats around and catch butterflys.

[snip 3000 words]

...when I asked her for her recipe, it turns out she made cinnamon rolls by buying pillsbury ones at the grocery store! So if you don't want to be like grandmother, use 2 cups of flour...

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

#157

Post by ranger_danger »

wy35 wrote: post #96
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/

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.

People already use AI to generate ads though. It's only going to get worse.

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

#158

Post by p_l »

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.…

AI hype allows one to push "slop" about AI slop.

Just like simple template generated SEO, template-written "content", etc. before.

In fact, a lot of writing about AI slop could be considered just as much slop...

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

#159

Post by skydhash »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #33
skydhash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People wants to pay for content, but publishers are either not working on content worth paying for or don’t want you to purchase, they want you to rent instead.

Decades of internet use has shown me that people absolutely do not want to pay for content. The average person will choose free+ads over paying every time.

Free is free, and you can choose not to look at the ads. No wonder people are taking this option. In the process, it cheapens the whole thing.

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

#160

Post by guidoism »

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.…

Recipe articles with hundreds of words of irrelevant text before the actual recipe.
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