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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

#161

Post by cjbgkagh »

bee_rider wrote: post #146
cjbgkagh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

Reminds me of the SMBC comic https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3576 that explores the idea further.

I am less optimistic than the comic.

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

#162

Post by PheonixPharts »

GaggiX wrote: post #21
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 - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.…

We also had the term "slop" before and it's not strictly related to AI but "content or media of little-to-no value".

Coming up with and quickly adopting new terms to sound "hip" is one of the most important skills for AI practitioners. We've had "agent-based" concepts in CS for decades, but if you're "in" you'll of course refer to "agentic" workflows and the like.

It make sense to come up with terms to describe common patterns: Chain-of-Thought, RAG etc. are good examples of this. But the passion some members of this community have for being intentionally confusing is tiresome.

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

#163

Post by orge »

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?

Are engineering, design, and logistics just sub fields of marketing? Is this really how people use the word marketing?

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

#164

Post by Propelloni »

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.

Today's AI is not to blame for anything because those AIs lack agency. Take a good look at the theory and real-life algorithms and soon you will realize that GPTs are just better parrots. Tools that they are the blame does not lie in the tool, but in the user. Not unlike guns.

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

#166

Post by giancarlostoro »

disqard wrote: post #95
giancarlostoro wrote: post #59

Earlier 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).

I was, and I just might re-subscribe to it, I'm getting tired of how increasingly useless Google is becoming.

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

#167

Post by techjamie »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #47
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A large subset of those will choose free+ads with ad-block, so free+free. Then they will complain that the internet is full of trash content that doesn't suite them.

As someone that blocks ads with a vengeance, I'll turn off my ad blocker when advertising companies turn off their privacy invasion, and stop running ads for criminals and scammers.

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

#168

Post by wy35 »

cess11 wrote: post #127
pmtcc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, think about it like this. It's your anniversary with your partner so you decide to commission a drawing from an artist as a gift. However, when you receive it, it's clearly an AI-generated image that was printed out.

Would you still consider that "spam"?

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

#169

Post by TeMPOraL »

apantel wrote: post #85
jl6 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well said. It’s the same with news. When something big happens in the world, there is an explosion of communication about it on the internet. You can absorb the event from countless sources. So what value is any one news outlet’s coverage? It’s not worth much. The media outlets used to be able to monetize a captive audience, i.e. people living in a certain locale would have a few newspapers and television channels to…

> It seems like the only way to succeed in this new environment is to be a real human person who builds a following / cult of personality around themselves and their content with its signature that is unique to them.

Correction: pretend to be a real human (or even a hyperreal human), not to be a real human. This is the game YouTubers and Instagram influencers have been playing for over a decade - there's a team of people building a brand around the face of the vlogger/influencer, making them seem like a really nice and interesting human, where in fact the opposite is the case. The point of it is to exploit human vulnerability to parasocial relationships, creating a captive audience primed to be receptive to the deluge of advertising that follows.

Yes, this is one of the few ways for "content" to keep value these days. Which is ironic, given that the net value of it to the consumer and society is squarely negative.

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

#170

Post by baq »

pmtcc wrote: post #90
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. An AI trained to maximize dopamine could be a very bad thing. (It won't be stated that way. It will be trained to "maximize engagement", but it amounts to the same thing.)

Our brains have been under attack for years. Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and company have already spent decades and billions doing just that. With capabilities already in the AI realm.

Still can’t decide how terrified should I be that somehow zuck is the good guy in the AI wars.
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