Like with all terms originating from 4chan, some people will try to reject it and make it the new n-word like they're paid to do this. The irony is they do it for free on a Friday afternoon. At the end of the day normal people who don't larp as Internet hall monitors don't care and adopt the term anyway. Many such cases. And people haven't learned in the 20 years this kept happening over and over again.
A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
231–240 of 252 posts
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#232I 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…
What I am thinking is bad cafeteria food. Something they slop on your plate from big container with zero ceremony. Which does not have any desirable, consistency, taste or colour...
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#233I 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…
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.
I'm not honestly sure if people want to pay for content. They want to pay for convenience or value. That is to have content available easy. But not necessarily for content if they can avoid it or get it cheaper.
Not that there is no sub-groups that will happily pay.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. Content was the OG slop. Buzzfeed with monkeys on typewriters. The problem is that dopamine addicts generate outsized engagement. I know a literal crack mom who spends a solid 90+ hours a week watching accident videos to keep her brain triggered. The algorithm caters to her. Send promotional emails daily or more, constant notifications, recommend the same few videos over and over. Gotta get in there before she…
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.)
You don’t need AI for that, “old fashioned” ML has been doing it for a decade.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#235Slop 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.…
I guess the problem is that for the lazy, the ability to generate slop has accelerated significantly through the advent of AI. Slop creators have been disproportionately empowered by AI tools. People who create quality content still benefit from AI, but not to the same extent.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#236If only we had an AI that could sift through all the slop and give us only the decent information that we wanted...
Been reading too much slop lately eh ?
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#237Works where archive.ph is blocked:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240611214752if_/https://www.ny...
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#238'Slop' has been used to describe low quality, mass produced web content for at least five years. Media is behind the curve, as usual.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#239Slop 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.…
Agree. Content was the OG slop. Buzzfeed with monkeys on typewriters. The problem is that dopamine addicts generate outsized engagement. I know a literal crack mom who spends a solid 90+ hours a week watching accident videos to keep her brain triggered. The algorithm caters to her. Send promotional emails daily or more, constant notifications, recommend the same few videos over and over. Gotta get in there before she…
Brainrot
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> Why should businesses be entitled to my money if their offerings have no value to me?
That's completely the wrong framing for this idea.
The problem is that you don't know if it's valuable until you've bought it, unless the seller gives it for free and just trusts you to pay later in the event you did.
If I see a new-to-me fruit in the supermarket, I can buy one to see if I like it, and I can be reasonably confident that my first taste will be a reliable indicator of if I should buy more.
People used to do this with entire newspapers, but (1) newspapers have been derided for taking nonsense for basically as long as we would even recognise them to be newspapers in the modern sense, and (2) dividing them up into separate web pages per article makes the challenge greater, as it's gone from 50p for the entire broadsheet based on the front page headline as an advert, to a "please subscribe" banner after seeing the headline and generic intro paragraph for a random article you were probably linked to because someone else thought it was interesting.