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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

#181

Post by scotty79 »

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…

The problem is people wouldn't know what content to pay for because paid content in large part is also scam and bait and switch these days.

You literally can't evaluate content before you consume it in it's entirety or the at least the amount you wish.

Given that copyright should be abolished, adverts should be banned and content industry should move to entirely post-paid voluntary financing.

Something like gaming piracy where you play the whole game for free and if you really liked it you "buy" "a copy" to support developers and their investors.

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

#183

Post by visarga »

cletus wrote: post #43

I'm a huge Neal Stephenson fan. Cryptonomicon is to this day one of my all-time favorite books. Years ago now I read Anathem. It wasn't as good but it had some really interesting ideas. One such idea was how the Internet was filled with garbage by all these agents (which were implied or stated were AI, I can't recall). They would subtly change things to be wrong. Why? Essentially to sell you a solution to this that f…

We can always rely on pre-2022 data. But I guess what you're saying is plausible, I see it becoming like the adversarial game of virus vs immune system, a constant arms race. We got to build our immunity. On the one hand AI can churn bullshit on command, on the other hand training on large datasets tends to cancel out many errors across the corpus.

All the more reason to use local models and curated feeds from now on. Local LLMs can clean / firewall the bad stuff, and follow our guidance. They will be like the new anti-virus software. I've predicted early in 2023 that in the future operating systems and browsers will all sport a small LLM that will ensure we don't get abused by the internet and provide a "room of our own", where we have total privacy. It's already a reality.

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

#184

Post by wizzwizz4 »

wafflemaker wrote: post #107
antisthenes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally all of these are just the symptoms of declining ability of people (general public) to perform critical thinking. The content/spam/slop is simply being tailored to be effective with its intended audience. But that's not the scary part. The difference with AI slop is just the enormity of the scale and speed at which we can produce it. Finally, a couple of data centers can produce more slop than the entirety o…

Don't think so. It's just democratizing of the internet. It went from elitist, well read and educated bunch to people communicating with pictures. Nothing wrong with that, tho text internet was nice. At work people often ask me for help with documents or translation. Or I see some friends' conversations. While Polish grammar is pretty difficult, it's not surprising to see messages with orthographic errors in 5 out of…

> it's not surprising to see messages with orthographic errors in 5 out of six words

But they're saying something. The characteristic feature of slop is not informality: it's fundamental meaninglessness.

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

#185

Post by iamleppert »

AI will never come close to producing what people can, because an AI cannot be made to suffer. Suffering is essential to the creative process. Suffering is the key, it's the whole point, and at the core of the human experience. When we look at creative output, we are looking at the sum of the suffering experienced by the creator. The more suffering, the better the content.

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

#186

Post by tavavex »

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.

Luckily, unlike search engines and similar, LLMs can be run completely locally. As long as there are corporate interests trying to squeeze new tech for every cent with no regard to anything else, there will be hobbyists making what's actually useful for them.

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

#187

Post by petercooper »

anal_reactor wrote: post #124
petercooper wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I did say "for all their problems" ;-)

I still trust LTT more than a channel pumping out faceless review videos or one so unknown that there aren't enough viewers to even provide any scrutiny. To butcher the eponymous Linus's law: given enough eyeballs, all mistakes are shallow?

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

#188

Post by greendestiny_re »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #51
cletus wrote: post #43

I'm a huge Neal Stephenson fan. Cryptonomicon is to this day one of my all-time favorite books. Years ago now I read Anathem. It wasn't as good but it had some really interesting ideas. One such idea was how the Internet was filled with garbage by all these agents (which were implied or stated were AI, I can't recall). They would subtly change things to be wrong. Why? Essentially to sell you a solution to this that f…

> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. > “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. > “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began…

100 good sentences and 1 subtly wrong one? That makes for an extraordinary text! I suppose the idea sounded better in the writer's head but it would not be nearly as bad as implied.

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

#189

Post by s1artibartfast »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #172
s1artibartfast wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Real content doesnt necessarily mean advertising free. There are tons of high quality pages and services funded by ads.

The problem is with the spam and slop.

Any sucessful walled garden will need to keep this crap out. banning adds is just one way. Content review is another.

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

#190

Post by antisthenes »

wafflemaker wrote: post #107
antisthenes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally all of these are just the symptoms of declining ability of people (general public) to perform critical thinking. The content/spam/slop is simply being tailored to be effective with its intended audience. But that's not the scary part. The difference with AI slop is just the enormity of the scale and speed at which we can produce it. Finally, a couple of data centers can produce more slop than the entirety o…

Don't think so. It's just democratizing of the internet. It went from elitist, well read and educated bunch to people communicating with pictures. Nothing wrong with that, tho text internet was nice. At work people often ask me for help with documents or translation. Or I see some friends' conversations. While Polish grammar is pretty difficult, it's not surprising to see messages with orthographic errors in 5 out of…

> It went from elitist, well read and educated bunch to people communicating with pictures. Nothing wrong with that, tho text internet was nice.

There is absolutely everything wrong with that if it consistently invades and drowns out the voices of the well-educated elite.

The worst tyranny in this world is the tyranny of the ignorant against the learned. In its worst form, it can lead to mob justice and other horrible things.

Maybe that's not your worldview, but it is the view of many, and it's just as legitimate as yours.

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