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 of substance, non-challenging material, "Roller coaster" content.
A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
131–140 of 252 posts
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's both. Especially the out of context tinfoil rage response. They always existed. But now it's so common to see some totally benign article about pizza, and the top comment is "don't let them tell you not to remember in 1995 when US implanted radios in Syrian babies". The algorithm is being trained solely for engagement. It is horrifying.
This sounds completely unrelated. If someone is really leaving a comment like that, it has nothing to do with the article and everything to do with the way weirdos engage with the internet. The Slop is the wordy vapid garbage that maximizes SEO.
Parent is right though: AI slop in an article is to maximize SEO. AI slop in a comment is a weird jumble of implausible claims to maximize engagement. I see both on a daily basis now.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#133Both 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 is foisted upon the "goyim" (non-Jews). To the point that I usually see people calling it "AIslop"... specifically to differentiate it from "goyslop", so pervasive is the use of the term.
I'm honestly surprised "slop" (in this specific context) is hitting the mainstream (apparently) given it's so closely married to anti-Semitic undertones. I assume it's kind of like Pepe? People see the cute frog or the edgy designation of things as "slop" not knowing that's kind of a minced version of how it's actually used on 4chan.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#134Earlier 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.
The problem is that sometimes slop looks like content from a far enough distance. And to the untrained eye, it is indistinguishable from real content. For example, a Kafka tutorial could start with pages about other irrelevant technology before getting to the real material. But you wouldn't know which content is useless at first.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There’s going to be a lot of garbage content out there—but isn’t there already? People have been writing junk to try to get search engine placement for 20+ years. Yes, but people's output is limited by their ability to type words on a keyboard. LLMs and other generative A.I. aren't bound by this limitation, and can put out significantly more. > People should always have been skeptical of content on untrusted websit…
On the first point - I’m not sure there’s a difference to internet users between 1 billion junk articles on a topic and 1 trillion junk articles. On the second point - this is precisely what I’m talking about when I say if reputable sources start churning out junk, they will lose their reputation. This is a negative publicity event for google. If it keeps happening, people will no longer trust the information coming…
> On the first point - I’m not sure there’s a difference to internet users between 1 billion junk articles on a topic and 1 trillion junk articles.
But there is a difference whether the ratio of good to bad articles is 1:10 or 1:10,000 one is tedious but managable, the other is hopeless.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point. I do find myself sometimes even prompting for a shorter answer after it hits me with a blob of text ;)
I do so as well, but usually the response is the chatbot first generating a paragraph about how it’ll comply with the request, making the prompt moot
Keep in mind that tokens are LLM units of thought; the only moment the model does any computation is when generating tokens. Therefore, asking it to be succinct means effectively dumbing it down.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#137Earlier 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.
This. Marketing is a cancer on modern society, and it's metastasizing to new communication media increasingly quickly.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> unwilling to actually pay for content The "content" industry (books, music, movies, all of it) has a systemic issue of which we are only just seeing the beginning. Namely, there is now so much content, and it is all so easily accessible, that the relative value of any one piece of content has fallen way, way down. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many days in a lifetime, and only so many humans…
"There's just obscenely more high quality new-to-you content" Are you sure about this? How are you measuring quality? For me, if something resembles advertising I consider it to be of very low quality. There are some exceptions, for example some of the movie work by Roy Andersson, but they are very few. As far as I can tell, ad-discourse and ad-style permeates pretty much everything in contemporary "content". Every t…
Even if a super-Sturgeon's-Law holds at a 10000:1 crap:quality ratio, there's still overwhelmingly so much stuff out there, produced over so many generations of talented writers, artists, musicians and directors, that you'd have to be unreasonably picky not to be able to fill a whole lifetime of consumption with enjoyable content. It's only our predilection for novelty that keeps the content mills going, and I wonder how long that can last against the ever-growing accumulation of culture.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#139I 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…
That's not what I think of.
I think of the buckets of scraps you would feed a pig. The stuff the humans don't want to eat and would just as well put in the garbage bin.
Re: A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
#140Slop 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 think you're right. Since LLMs went mainstream, I've seen a lot of my colleagues' presentations and thought "was this written by ChatGPT?" but I've come to wonder if it's just given me the frame of mind to identify low-effort slop that lacks any original insight but uses all the right sorts of words and phrases, regardless of if it was authored by a human or not.
This. Bad AI output is indistinguishable from bad human output. It's literally the same exact shit.