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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

#111

Post by ryandrake »

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…

What we need is an AI agent who can parse through 10 minute videos, and then extract out and summarize in text format only the important 2 seconds.

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

petercooper wrote: post #77
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by pmtcc »

cess11 wrote: post #98
rdlw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam is content that is delivered to people who did not request it. Slop is content which pretends to be what you want, but turns out to be of low quality.

I don't see the difference. An email that pretends that I need to buy some pills and turns out to be a card collecting scam is obviously of low quality and not something I have requested. Computer generated fake texts are spam, doesn't matter if they're selling pills to me or my attention to ad networks.

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

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

#114

Post by pjc50 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #58
imabotbeep2937 wrote: post #46

Earlier 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.)

> An AI trained to maximize dopamine could be a very bad thing.

Spelled "profitable". This is definitely something that's already happened/happening; see algorithmic timelines and the widespread sudden legalization and acceptance of gambling.

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

#116

Post by pjc50 »

skydhash wrote: post #24
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…

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.

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".

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

#117

Post by echelon »

antisthenes wrote: post #87
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.…

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…

> 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 of humanity, combined.

Think only about your own consumption for a second. You're not going to engage with slop, are you?

I'm imagining that whatever your filter process is, that you manage to heavily engage with content that is mostly good and well-suited for you. Discounting Google search becoming crummy, of course.

AI in the hands of talented people is a tool, and they'll use it to make better stuff that appeals to you.

I wouldn't worry about other people. Lots of people like rage bait, yellow journalism, tabloid spam, celebrity gossip, etc. There's not much you can do about that.

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

#118

Post by anal_reactor »

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.…

When I was a kid and I was told to write an essay "what is slop" teachers would give lots of extra points for dumping useless and somehow vaguely related information just to raise the word count. Answers along "slop is useless shit created only to serve as filler content to make money on stupid people" would get zero points, I was expected to write the history of slop, the etymology of the word, the cultural context, the projected future, blah blah blah, don't forget at least ten citations, even if they're even more useless than the essay I was writing and 100% pure unadulterated slop.

My master's thesis was on a topic that nobody else researched (it wasn't revolutionary, just a fun novel gimmick), so I had to write filler just to have a chapter on a topic possible to find references to, in order to get the citations count, even if the chapter wasn't relevant to the actual topic of the thesis

So yes, I think that the push to create slop was there even before computers became a thing, we just didn't recognize it

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