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That’s not what “slop” means. Slop is output produced by generative AI without regards to its quality, not the telltale tics that current models tend to exhibit.
It's a new term so the meaning hasn't had a chance to settle. It's generally considered to be a negative term, so there's motivation for people to expand the definition to include things that they don't like. It is much easier to subvert a category than it is to make an argument for an individual item.
Imagine if people accept that falling rocks kill hundreds of people every year, and you wanted to convince them that falling cheese also kills plenty of people.
It would be much easier to imply that cheese, often coming in large roundish lumps, counts as a type of rock. It stretches the definition a bit but it's still much easier to argue than the actual falling cheese argument that is your actual agenda.
When the definition is new it is more malleable. Sometimes you might need a qualifier to declare it is different but imply it is essentially like the other thing. It's just a dairy-rock, or just enhanced-interrogation.
I've been using ChatGPT fairly regularly for about a year. Mostly as an editor/brainstorming-partner/copy-reviewer. Lots of things have changed in that year, but the things that haven't are: * So, so many em-dashes. All over the place. (I've tried various ways to get it to stop. None of them have worked long term). * Random emojis. * Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause w…
You can customize it to get rid of all that. I set it to the "Robot" personality and a custom instruction to "No fluff and politeness. Be short and get straight to the point. Don't overuse bold font for emphasis."
> Abstract: [...] Our approach combines three innovations: (1) The Antislop Sampler, which uses backtracking to suppress unwanted strings at inference time without destroying vocabulary; (2) An automated pipeline that profiles model-specific slop against human baselines and generates training data; (3) Final Token Preference Optimization (FTPO), a novel fine-tuning method that operates on individual tokens, surgically adjusting logits wherever a banned pattern has appeared in an inference trace.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546037#45585680 , an additional potential method:
>> Could build a simple heuristic: if similar memory content gets created/updated N times within short timeframe, flag it as potential loop
I don't know if not getting the idea right, but I'm pretty sure people refer to AI outputs as "slop" not due to (only) repetitiveness. According to some sources: [1] Wikipedia > AI slop is digital content made with generative artificial intelligence, specifically when perceived to show a lack of effort, quality or deeper meaning, and an overwhelming volume of production.[1][4][5] Coined in the 2020s, the term has a p…
I honestly can’t always distinguish AI slop from the formulaic corp-speak used in emails and memos and brochure websites and other marketing. I’m guessing that must be a large component of the training matter.
That’s not what “slop” means. Slop is output produced by generative AI without regards to its quality, not the telltale tics that current models tend to exhibit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The emoji thing is so bad. You can see it all over github docs and other long form docs. All section headers will have emojis and so on. Strange.
Obviously nothing solid to back this up, but I kind of feel like I was seeing emojis all over github READMEs on JS projects for quite a while before AI picked it up. I feel like it may have been something that bled over from Twitch streaming communities.
Could be my own changing perspective, but what I think is interesting is how the signal it sends keeps changing. At first, emoji-heavy was actually kind of positive: maybe the project doesn't need a webpage, but you took some time and interest in your README.md. Then it was negative: having emoji's became a strong indicator that the whole README was going to be very low information density, more emotive than referential[1] (which is fine for bloggery but not for technical writing).
Now there's no signal, but you also can't say it's exactly neutral. Emojis in docs will alienate some readers, maybe due to association with commercial stuff and marketing where it's pretty normalized. But skipping emojis alienates other readers, who might be smart and serious, but nevertheless are the type that would prefer WATCHME.youtube instead of README.md. There's probably something about all this that's related to "costly signaling"[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakobson%27s_functions_of_lang... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_evo...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause when 5 launched. But it's back and worse than ever now. What a great point! I also can’t stand it. I get it’s basically a meme to point it out - even South Park has mocked it - but I just cannot stand it. In all seriousness it’s so annoying. It is a tool, not my friend, and considering we are already coming from a place of skepticism…
Drives me nuts too. All the stuff like "OK let me do..." Or "I agree ..." stop talking like a person. I want the star trek experience. The computer just says "working" and then gives you the answer without any chit-chat. And it doesn't refer to itself as if it's a person. What we have now is Hal 9000 before it went insane.
I've been using ChatGPT fairly regularly for about a year. Mostly as an editor/brainstorming-partner/copy-reviewer. Lots of things have changed in that year, but the things that haven't are: * So, so many em-dashes. All over the place. (I've tried various ways to get it to stop. None of them have worked long term). * Random emojis. * Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause w…
ChatGPT is made for normies—they love sweatdrop emojis. I recommend https://ai.dev