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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

#171

Post by marginalia_nu »

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 - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.…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, slop isn't new, AI makes it easier to produce.

Other examples include those books where each chapter generously estimated has a tweet worth of thought padded out with 35 pages of meandering anecdotes that just paraphrase the same idea. Like it's very clearly a sort of scam, the padding is there to make it seem like the book has more information that it does when you look at it in a digital bookstore.

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

#172

Post by TeMPOraL »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #97
willvarfar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies will serve slop to paying subscribers too.

If it gets bad enough that people will pay, I think some will pay for exclusively real content. I hope this is the start of walled garden human internet. Web-rings, moderated forums, ect. A common cyberpunk trope is a trashed net and a private net.

> If it gets bad enough that people will pay, I think some will pay for exclusively real content.

People who pay for content demonstrate that they have disposable income and are willing to spend it, which makes them prime population for advertisers to target. By paying, they're distinguishing themselves for the net-near-worthless population of free users. There's a huge pressure for advertisers to tap into that juicy population of paying users; it takes only so long before any given service succumbs to that pressure.

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

#173

Post by dorkwood »

callamdelaney wrote: post #165

You'll soon no longer be able to find anything of use via traditional search engines. How will we keep improving AI models when the amount of 'slop' in their training data starts to outnumber the real content?

Do they need new training data? I'm pretty sure Midjourney, OpenAI etc. already scraped all of the images in existence long before the well was poisoned. They can use other methods, such as improved tagging, to improve their models.

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

#174

Post by woodruffw »

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.…

As with everything, I think it's scope and scale: Quora was always a cesspool, but now every single question has a machine-generated response that's frequently incorrect or misleading (sometimes in legally concerning ways, like one was for me recently).

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

#175

Post by axpvms »

4star3star wrote: post #68
EForEndeavour wrote: post #11

The LLM/generative-AI genie is out of the lamp. I'm just some random midwit, but some predictions: - Slop will continue to become cheaper to generate, and people will only notice the obvious stuff - Hyperpersonalized content will abound, yet authenticity will run dry - The lack of authenticity in electronic channels will drive a small segment of people offline into less fakeable (for now) social contexts - Humans onl…

Fifteen years ago (I remember the apartment where I had this thought), it occurred to me that time was running out to write an authentic novel. Soon, computers would generate whole stories in an endless variety of styles, and even if future authors would hand write a book from start to finish, they would likely have been influenced by other artificial writing at some point. Readers would be unable to emotionally conn…

Interesting thought. Looking around the room I'm in the only think I'm sure was definitely handmade is a musical instrument, because I know the guy who made it for me. And even then it uses parts which were machine made: strings, tuners, bridge etc.

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

#176

Post by TeMPOraL »

techjamie wrote: post #167
Workaccount2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As another person that blocks ads with vengeance, I'll turn off my ad blocker only when advertising companies go bankrupt and effectively disappear from the face of the planet. Even non-surveilling, non-criminal advertising is still brain poison. Why would I want to ever expose myself to that? Especially when on the margin, the damage inflicted to my life by ads is usually comparable to, or greater than, the value provided by the piece of content nested between those ads.

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

#177

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

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/

I have similar feelings about "smishing", "vishing", and other medium-specific variants of "phishing".

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

#179

Post by woodruffw »

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…

It helps that "slop" has a widespread, intuitive meaning (in this setting) that doesn't need 4chan's anti-semitic usage. I hadn't even made the connection to the 4chan phrase, even though I'd heard it before.

(This is in contrast to Pepe, which was popularized principally on 4chan and then exported by reactionaries.)

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

#180

Post by ketralnis »

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/

Feels like people calling bad scrolling and other jitter "janky" to just mean that it's a bit crap and people deciding that "jank" is a technical term. No buddy jank just means jank and slop just means slop. This isn't a "new term".
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