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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

#71

Post by cj »

brazzy wrote: post #65
henriquecm8 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see the use to describe AI spam, but I am starting to seeing people using it to describe anything they don't like, basically a replacement for "mid" with was highly used the last couple of years. I noticed that when some people learn a new "trendy" word, they want to use it in every possible opportunity until it loses meaning.

> basically a replacement for "mid" with was highly used the last couple of years Wot now? Somehow I managed to completely miss that. Edit: ah, seems like it's mainly a twitter thing. That explains it.

"mid" is something I hear from people high school age most commonly.

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

#72

Post by ALittleLight »

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…

If OpenAI, or whoever, turns the AI crank once more and we go from GPT-4 to 5, and the jump is the same size as 3 to 4, then I think the answer will be pretty clear: AI content will improve in quality to meet or exceed human content.

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

#73

Post by djaouen »

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 - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.…

I don’t think they are saying that the internet hasn’t been shit. It is. I think what they are saying is that it is about to get a whole lot shittier thanks to AI.

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

#74

Post by rdlw »

tromp wrote: post #18

It's AI generated spam. Why not simply call it AI spam, as already in use by e.g. [1][2][3]. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-spam-google-ruin-internet... [2] https://www.ghostery.com/blog/how-to-prepare-for-ai-spam [3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/13/google_ai_spam/

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.

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

#75

Post by CM30 »

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…

At least part of the issue is that much of this slop is 'good enough' for many people. As bad as many of those terrible recipe sites and video game walkthroughs and news articles might be, they're clearly good enough for the majority of the population, and enough so they don't see paying for content as worth the price.

The other part is that practically speaking, there's enough good free content in most fields that paying doesn't get you anything better. It's not surfaced well enough by the algorithms, but it does exist, and it makes it so in most areas, there's very little reason to pay for anything.

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

#76

Post by gamepsys »

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…

The same idea is explored in more details in his later book 'Fall; or Dodge in Hell' where AI generated individualized content radicalizes parts of the population and convinces them to believe blatantly false facts. It's a decently large B plot in the novel that ties into some of the larger themes.

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

#77

Post by petercooper »

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 good, consistent job will rise.

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

#78

Post by soco »

chromaton wrote: post #64

Slop has been around a while. I was researching a topic, and noticed that most of the top search results had the same misunderstanding of some of the definitions. The writers were clearly not familiar with the topic, and I'm sure they were just copying each other. All of the articles pre-dated GPT-3.5. The kicker is that if you ask GPT-4 about it, it spits out the same incorrect information, meaning that GPT-4 was li…

I wonder (as an outsider) why would GPT-4o give more accurate responses? The training data is the same, right... so maybe somebody can point this out like for a kid, thank you.

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

#79

Post by lux »

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.…

The endless drivel of recipe websites is another one, burying the actual recipe under an absolute mountain of slop.

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

#80

Post by islandert »

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.)

TikTok?
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