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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

#191

Post by tivert »

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 - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.…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 had all that before AI.

What AI gives us is vastly cheaper slop, so now it can be produced at a scale unimaginable to prior generations. No more paying some schmuck a penny a word to bang out "private label articles," so they were only practical as SEO. Now you can have a unique slop for every spam email, every search query!

Truly, we are making the world a better place.

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

#192

Post by tivert »

visarga wrote: post #183
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…

> We can always rely on pre-2022 data.

No we can't. How many websites from 1998 survive today, in a form you can actually find (e.g. not the Wayback Machine)? In ten or twenty years, most pre-2022 data will be inaccessible.

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

#193

Post by kokanee »

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.…

It's true... the quality of content on the Internet has a bunch of problems, and AI is just one of them. The economic incentives to trick people into staying on your page and scrolling as much as possible are a fundamental part of the problem. Politically-motivated ragebait and lies are a separate huge problem. AI-generated slop is also a problem for content quality and UX, but I'm far more concerned about the impact of AI on the value of human labor and intellectual property than I am about the UX of my search result pages.

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

#194

Post by citizenpaul »

scrps wrote: post #66
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…

- The lack of authenticity in electronic channels will drive a small segment of people offline into less fakeable (for now) social contexts I think this segment might start small but I think it will grow rapidly if the utility of the internet is dwarfed with low quality crap. The belief that non-technical people won't catch on to the shenanigans and simply look elsewhere is a bad bet some are making and I think every…

Hop on various markertplace apps like craiglist or facebook market and you will discover there already exists a decent chunk of invisible population that largely rejects the online world for all but basic communication means.

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

#196

Post by tuckerpo »

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…

Like most sticky internet slang terms, "slop" stems from 4chan's "sloppa", initially used to describe gross looking food, i.e. "slop of shit" shortened to "sloppa"

Now used to describe anything that looks half-assed, poorly put together, etc.

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

#197

Post by simonw »

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.

Sounds like you'd prefer to interpret slop as being a subset of spam. So all slop is spam but not all spam is slop.

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

#199

Post by lxgr »

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…

You forgot the NordVPN ad!

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

#200

Post by mvdtnz »

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…

I'm re-reading Anathem now (my favourite book). Something I noticed on my second reading is Stephenson describes Sammann's physical appearance exactly once in the book and I must have missed it the first time around.

I always pictured the Ita as wearing elaborate robes with hoods darkening their faces due to their secretive nature. But in fact he describes Sammann as looking basically just like Gilfoyle from Silicon Valley, including the way he dresses. Which is amazing given the roots of the Ita (he describes the word as coming from Information Technology and the meaning of the A is lost to time, but it's obvious to a 20th century Earth-born reader it comes from IT Administrator).

There are so many delightful details in Anathem, it's well worth a second reading.

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