[HN Gopher] A new term, 'slop', has emerged to describe dubious ...
___________________________________________________________________
A new term, 'slop', has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated
material
Author : 65
Score : 229 points
Date : 2024-06-11 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| Swizec wrote:
| Is slop new or is it just a continuation of SEO, blogspam, and
| "content"? I love that we have a new better word that captures
| the nuance, but it doesn't feel like a new phenomena.
| whyage wrote:
| Unlike slop, SEO content can't be totally off-base, or search
| engines will rank it low. The ecosystem keeps it annoying but
| consistent with the facts, at least.
| whstl wrote:
| I'd argue that the strange Gemini answers that were making the
| rounds of social media are more absurd than what you would see
| in regular blogspam. But again, they're extremes (and some of
| the reported screenshots were even fake).
|
| On the other hand, there's indeed a lot of popular human-made
| fake content lately, especially in TikTok, like fake guitar
| playing and fake nonsensical DIY videos. So it's not an AI
| exclusive phenomena.
| troyvit wrote:
| Now I want to go ask one of my AIs to produce some clearly
| fake content so that I can get boosted on social media for
| complaining about awful AI.
| thih9 wrote:
| I'd guess both: a continuation and its own new flavor.
|
| It's better than what automated scripts could produce and
| cheaper than human generated copy. It has expertise of the
| whole Internet and its reasoning capabilities are often worse
| than those of a three year old.
|
| Similar for sure, and yet something different.
| cj wrote:
| Our company is working with a SEO firm we pay $11k/mo for (who
| I want to fire).
|
| They sent us new copy for our core marketing pages last week,
| and many sections simply sound non-sensical. As in it just
| didn't make cohesive sense, and it was clear a human being
| didn't write (or even review) the content.
|
| This is the problem with new AI "slop". In the past, blogspam /
| SEO spam was at least reviewed and written by a human. Now, we
| have content getting published straight out of the mouth of
| text generators.
|
| The quality of long-form content from text generators is
| significantly worse than even mediocre $10/hr copywriters in
| many cases.
| Joeboy wrote:
| https://archive.ph/PueKj
| GaggiX wrote:
| "Slop" is a general term, you can create slop as a human, for
| example YouTubers who upload daily talking about the latest
| Twitter drama they are usually referred to as making slop,
| especially if they have a main channel where they upload high
| quality content. It's not a new term and it has little to do with
| AI by itself.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I think an important difference between Youtubers putting out
| low-quality videos is that it still takes them at least as much
| time to generate the video as the video's run-time - same with
| pointless self-promo blogposts, unhinged LinkedIn posts, etc.
|
| With generative A.I., this kind of slop can be pumped out at an
| industrial scale.
|
| It'd be like equating your neighbor dumping a bag of garbage on
| the roadside, with the industrial plant down the road pouring
| out thousands of gallons of toxic waste per minute into a
| river.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> at least as much time to generate the video as the video
| 's run-time_
|
| That's for the very lowest-tier video.
|
| The usual formula, is that for every minute of runtime, you
| have at least 30 minutes of editing.
|
| With professionally-produced video, I think it's triple or
| quadruple that.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I'm talking about how the term is used because the author
| doesn't seem to be too familiar with Internet slang and
| believes that the term is new and strictly related to AI.
| veesahni wrote:
| tldr: "slop" is defined as unwanted AI content
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| The LLM/generative-AI genie is out of the lamp. I'm just some
| random midwit, but some predictions:
|
| - Slop will continue to become cheaper to generate, and people
| will only notice the obvious stuff
|
| - Hyperpersonalized content will abound, yet authenticity will
| run dry
|
| - The lack of authenticity in electronic channels will drive a
| small segment of people offline into less fakeable (for now)
| social contexts
|
| - Humans online will walk a treadmill of increasingly convoluted
| shibboleths / Gnirut tests (reverse Turing tests ;)) to self-
| identify as likely not AI-generated, i.e., subtly run-on
| sentences that are intelligible but slightly non-conformist to
| prevailing AI model outputs, and usage of old-school emoticons
| and other quirks
|
| - Humans will walk on similar "Gnirut treadmills" for visual art,
| speech, video, and music
|
| - AI models will gladly chase humans along these Gnirut
| treadmills, filling in canyons and sections of the Uncanny Valley
| with fractally sophisticated humanlike content
| scrps wrote:
| _- The lack of authenticity in electronic channels will drive a
| small segment of people offline into less fakeable (for now)
| social contexts_
|
| I think this segment might start small but I think it will grow
| rapidly if the utility of the internet is dwarfed with low
| quality crap. The belief that non-technical people won't catch
| on to the shenanigans and simply look elsewhere is a bad bet
| some are making and I think everyone living on the internet
| during covid gave non-technical people an intuitive feeling for
| all the manipulation and tenuous quality of the internet as a
| tool/public utility they can trust in any form.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Hop on various markertplace apps like craiglist or facebook
| market and you will discover there already exists a decent
| chunk of invisible population that largely rejects the online
| world for all but basic communication means.
| 4star3star wrote:
| Fifteen years ago (I remember the apartment where I had this
| thought), it occurred to me that time was running out to write
| an authentic novel. Soon, computers would generate whole
| stories in an endless variety of styles, and even if future
| authors would hand write a book from start to finish, they
| would likely have been influenced by other artificial writing
| at some point. Readers would be unable to emotionally connect
| with authors due to the nagging awareness that the text might
| have been fully or partially generated by an unthinking,
| unfeeling machine.
|
| Though I try, I fail to think of a comparable scenario in our
| past, at least as relates to language. You can look around
| whatever room you are in and try to identify an object that was
| made by human hands rather than a factory process. That's a
| fact that always makes me a bit sad. I think we're headed in a
| similar direction with the language we consume. Craftsmanship
| falls by the wayside, and our world loses even more of the
| human touch that connects us with one another.
| axpvms wrote:
| Interesting thought. Looking around the room I'm in the only
| think I'm sure was definitely handmade is a musical
| instrument, because I know the guy who made it for me. And
| even then it uses parts which were machine made: strings,
| tuners, bridge etc.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Thank you for your reminder that I should finish rereading
| _If on a winter 's night a traveler_. It has sections that,
| IIRC, deal with similar themes.
| noman-land wrote:
| I weirdly think the shibbolethization of human culture will be
| a good thing because it will encourage everyone to be creative,
| lest they be accused of being a bot and ignored.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Once we get to the point where models are or are nearly
| continuous learning and are getting data streamed from
| thousands of sources I feel it may be very hard to figure out
| if humans are leading the Gnirut or following.
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
|
| - Medium articles about coding that are filled with irrelevant
| pics and blocks of text that are "not wrong" but also "not right"
| followed by weirdly specific code...
|
| We had all that before AI.
| GaggiX wrote:
| We also had the term "slop" before and it's not strictly
| related to AI but "content or media of little-to-no value".
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| Coming up with and quickly adopting new terms to sound "hip"
| is one of the most important skills for AI practitioners.
| We've had "agent-based" concepts in CS for decades, but if
| you're "in" you'll of course refer to "agentic" workflows and
| the like.
|
| It make sense to come up with terms to describe common
| patterns: Chain-of-Thought, RAG etc. are good examples of
| this. But the passion some members of this community have for
| being intentionally confusing is tiresome.
| tananaev wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| Good point.
|
| I do find myself sometimes even prompting for a shorter
| answer after it hits me with a blob of text ;)
| moi2388 wrote:
| 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
| wafflemaker wrote:
| It is probably an internalized "prompt engineering" trick
| from gpt3.5 times, where you could achieve near gpt-4
| performance using stuff like that. Rephrase the question
| and plan your answer was on top of the list.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Enjoy it while you can. Once the marketing guys and
| monetization engineers get to it I suspect things will get a
| lot more annoying.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This. Marketing is a cancer on modern society, and it's
| metastasizing to new communication media increasingly
| quickly.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Marketing is literally customer/product (market)
| identification and all the activity required to produce
| and deliver the product to customers. Business. Did you
| mean advertising?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Motte and bailey. Marketing is what you say on paper, but
| nothing like it in practice.
|
| (And people have been giving me identical response with
| "advertising" in place of "marketing" for years now, so
| I'll say yes to both; the terms are effectively
| interchangeable in both motte and bailey cases.)
| orge wrote:
| Are engineering, design, and logistics just sub fields of
| marketing? Is this really how people use the word
| marketing?
| datavirtue wrote:
| Not if my company is paying for it. Which they will,
| because they have to. The price will be kept in check
| becauae it is a commodity. Anyone wanting enterprise
| business will have to include it (Microsoft 365).
| tavavex wrote:
| Luckily, unlike search engines and similar, LLMs can be run
| completely locally. As long as there are corporate
| interests trying to squeeze new tech for every cent with no
| regard to anything else, there will be hobbyists making
| what's actually useful for them.
| wdutch wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| I've had similar false positive experiences where I swore
| some content had to be some form of LLM generated content,
| until I discovered the source was just poorly done or even
| just text from some older writing that "sounded" wonky but
| was more of a product of its time (like a 1940s newsreel).
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| My hope is that equivocating waffle will look so much like
| ChatGPT that humans will have to write clearly and precisely
| to differentiate ourselves and we can put this horrible era
| of essay writing style behind us.
|
| Though I'm starting to think that AI might improve faster
| than us so there might only be a diminishing margin of
| opportunity left to do this.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We'll have AI tools to take our bullet-points and expand
| them into prose (crappy now, eventually beautiful prose).
| Then we'll use AI tools to summarize that prose into bullet
| points.
|
| Eventually we'll realize we can just send the bullet points
| and generate the prose on the receiving side. This will be
| great because most of the time the AI's will be able to say
| "let's just be a nop."
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Reminds me of the SMBC comic https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/?id=3576 that explores the idea further.
|
| I am less optimistic than the comic.
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| 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.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| 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.
| smcin wrote:
| 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.
| datavirtue wrote:
| This. Bad AI output is indistinguishable from bad human
| output. It's literally the same exact shit.
| d0odk wrote:
| With AI, there can be more content, produced faster and
| probably more cheaply, that is tailored to individual
| users.
| threetonesun wrote:
| The signal to noise being so bad on the web today is AI's most
| compelling use for me, it's better at getting a pretty-close-
| to-right answer than searching the web, with much less crap I
| have to block along the way.
|
| But, consider that all that crap ended up on the web for a
| reason, and wonder how long before AI just injects it itself
| into its own results.
| henriquecm8 wrote:
| 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.
| GaggiX wrote:
| "Slop" is a internet slang that has always been used to refer
| to low quality content that exploits current internet trends,
| using it to refer specifically to AI generated content is
| pretty new.
| brazzy wrote:
| > 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.
| cj wrote:
| "mid" is something I hear from people high school age most
| commonly.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Of course, it's seeking it's low energy state.
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| 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 clicks
| another car crash video.
|
| IMHO: Marketing is a top societal evil right now. If the media
| machine wasn't so desperate for content, AI wouldn't be a
| fraction of the problem it is. But with everyone obsessing over
| the next piece of content, fake AI presentations are mandatory.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.)
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > could be
|
| is
| islandert wrote:
| TikTok?
| pmtcc wrote:
| Our brains have been under attack for years. Zuckerberg,
| Dorsey, and company have already spent decades and billions
| doing just that. With capabilities already in the AI realm.
| baq wrote:
| Still can't decide how terrified should I be that somehow
| zuck is the good guy in the AI wars.
| asystole wrote:
| No clue what would give you that idea.
| fragmede wrote:
| llama3
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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.
| noobermin wrote:
| Too many people are worried about hallucinating AIs somehow
| taking over nukes instead of them juicing the dopamine
| machines
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Dude take me back to BuzzFeed listicles. Some millenials
| being cringe >> AI slop
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > - The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically
| correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical
| content.
|
| What kills me is I have to hunt for the answer in Quora now. I
| just treat quora like I do pinterest, just back out and never
| return.
| martin293 wrote:
| I remember finding Quora when it was good. It was a literal
| godsend, actually interesting and meaningful questions and
| answers. Basically what the internet was advertised as
| (information interchange). Sadly it only lasted like 6
| months.
| disqard wrote:
| If you happen to use kagi, you can "ban" Pinterest from your
| SERP.
|
| For me, it's one of those "quality of life" things that
| _really_ improves my search experience (and is therefore
| worth paying for).
| janalsncm wrote:
| There are chrome plugins that block domains from Google
| results for free and don't require a login.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I was, and I just might re-subscribe to it, I'm getting
| tired of how increasingly useless Google is becoming.
| CM30 wrote:
| Yeah, and most of the reason for that can basically be summed
| up as "it's what Google incentivises".
|
| They look for detailed pages, so pages are bloated with
| irrelevant information. They look for pages people spend a lot
| of time on, so the same thing occurs. Plus, the hellscape that
| is modern advertising means that rushing content out quickly
| and cheaply is encouraged over anything else.
|
| AI will probably accelerate the process even more, but it's
| already been a huge issue for years now.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There's a bit of blaming a victim going on here. Especially
| early on in the days of SEO, Google incentivized slop the
| same way a bank vault incentivized armed robbery: by having
| something of value in it.
|
| Google incentives don't matter much for honest website
| operators. They're only relevant when you want to _abuse the
| system_ to promote your worthless bullshit[0] at the expense
| of the commons.
|
| I really wish society started to treat marketing hustlers
| with the same disdain it has for robbers.
|
| --
|
| [0] - If it was worth anything, you wouldn't be worried about
| SEO all that much, especially back before it all turned into
| a race to the bottom.
| flessner wrote:
| Yes, AI isn't entirely to blame for this - it's low quality,
| irrelevant and misleading content in general.
|
| Also, we have to look at the incentives: advertisement.
| Somehow, this is acceptable to consumers, profitable for
| companies and profitable for publishers. How, is absolutely
| beyond me... and it won't change so long as Google has a
| majority in the "search"-space as they are directly profiting
| from this.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| Good point. The standards for advertising networks has to
| increase tenfold, right now they reward slop, companies drain
| their ad budgets on channels they can't even fully measure,
| and it repeats since it takes too long for companies to
| notice the effects.
|
| It's the reason advertising costs have ballooned digitally,
| and also the cause of many lawsuits that Google continues
| downplaying in the public eye.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Today's AI is not to blame for anything because those AIs
| lack agency. Take a good look at the theory and real-life
| algorithms and soon you will realize that GPTs are just
| better parrots. Tools that they are the blame does not lie in
| the tool, but in the user. Not unlike guns.
| djaouen wrote:
| 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.
| lux wrote:
| The endless drivel of recipe websites is another one, burying
| the actual recipe under an absolute mountain of slop.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Recipe for cinnamon rolls:
|
| When I was a kid we used to spend summers with my
| grandmother. It was an idyllica pastoral setting and we used
| to chase the goats around and catch butterflys.
|
| [snip 3000 words]
|
| ...when I asked her for her recipe, it turns out she made
| cinnamon rolls by buying pillsbury ones at the grocery store!
| So if you don't want to be like grandmother, use 2 cups of
| flour...
| antisthenes wrote:
| 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 of humanity,
| combined.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| Don't think so. It's just democratizing of the internet. It
| went from elitist, well read and educated bunch to people
| communicating with pictures. Nothing wrong with that, tho
| text internet was nice.
|
| At work people often ask me for help with documents or
| translation. Or I see some friends' conversations. While
| Polish grammar is pretty difficult, it's not surprising to
| see messages with orthographic errors in 5 out of six words.
| You just live in a bubble of people who can read and write
| well.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _it 's not surprising to see messages with orthographic
| errors in 5 out of six words_
|
| But they're _saying something_. The characteristic feature
| of slop is not informality: it 's fundamental
| meaninglessness.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > It went from elitist, well read and educated bunch to
| people communicating with pictures. Nothing wrong with
| that, tho text internet was nice.
|
| There is absolutely everything wrong with that if it
| consistently invades and drowns out the voices of the well-
| educated elite.
|
| The worst tyranny in this world is the tyranny of the
| ignorant against the learned. In its worst form, it can
| lead to mob justice and other horrible things.
|
| Maybe that's not your worldview, but it is the view of
| many, and it's just as legitimate as yours.
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Youtube videos that could have been a one paragraph answer.
| somenameforme wrote:
| 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 really what's optimal for the sacred algorithm,
| then that algorithm needs a serious tune up.
| disqard wrote:
| If it's a somewhat-successful YouTuber, then you missed the
| 60-second shout-out to their sponsor.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Plus 30 seconds to 2 minutes of Patreon segment,
| depending on whether they're reciting the list of
| newest/bestest patrons, and then 30 seconds of outro in
| the end, creating a frame for YouTube to stuff
| recommended videos of the creator in.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've seen examples where seeing someone make e.g. some
| repair really benefits from video. But I certainly won't
| argue in general.
| lxgr wrote:
| You forgot the NordVPN ad!
| anal_reactor wrote:
| 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
| p_l wrote:
| AI hype allows one to push "slop" about AI slop.
|
| Just like simple template generated SEO, template-written
| "content", etc. before.
|
| In fact, a lot of writing about AI slop could be considered
| just as much slop...
| guidoism wrote:
| Recipe articles with hundreds of words of irrelevant text
| before the actual recipe.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, slop isn't new, AI makes it easier to produce.
|
| Other examples include those books where each chapter
| generously estimated has a tweet worth of thought padded out
| with 35 pages of meandering anecdotes that just paraphrase the
| same idea. Like it's very clearly a sort of scam, the padding
| is there to make it seem like the book has more information
| that it does when you look at it in a digital bookstore.
| woodruffw wrote:
| As with everything, I think it's scope and scale: Quora was
| always a cesspool, but now _every single question_ has a
| machine-generated response that 's frequently incorrect or
| misleading (sometimes in legally concerning ways, like one was
| for me recently).
| tivert wrote:
| > We had all that before AI.
|
| What AI gives us is _vastly_ cheaper slop, so now it can be
| produced at a scale unimaginable to prior generations. No more
| paying some schmuck a penny a word to bang out "private label
| articles," so they were only practical as SEO. Now you can have
| a unique slop for every spam email, every search query!
|
| Truly, we are making the world a better place.
| kokanee wrote:
| It's true... the quality of content on the Internet has a bunch
| of problems, and AI is just one of them. The economic
| incentives to trick people into staying on your page and
| scrolling as much as possible are a fundamental part of the
| problem. Politically-motivated ragebait and lies are a separate
| huge problem. AI-generated slop is also a problem for content
| quality and UX, but I'm far more concerned about the impact of
| AI on the value of human labor and intellectual property than I
| am about the UX of my search result pages.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| Anything that is a response to classic "SEO manipulation" to
| get higher ranking on a search engine result page to create an
| appearance that the content is higher value, is more
| comprehensive, or took more effort to produce does create net-
| slop. And that's been going on for 10+ years.
| zrn900 wrote:
| > The horrendous mess that Quora became
|
| Its not a horrendous mess for me. It works very well.
| Everything depends on what content you interact with as the
| algorithm heavily shapes your content depending on what you
| interact with. Its no different from any other social network.
| asadotzler wrote:
| 99% of people who use Quora don't use it as a social network,
| they click that top Google search result claiming to answer
| their question and then get frustrated at how fucked up
| Quora's website is and how rarely it actually answers their
| question.
| justinclift wrote:
| Even Kagi has this crap too. :(
| tkgally wrote:
| Both 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, said it was in use long before he found it. 'I
| think I might actually have been quite late to the party!' he
| said in an email."
|
| The first substantive discussion of the word here seems to be
| this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40301490
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| 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.
| coldblues wrote:
| The regular person will never get these terms right. Most
| people are not aware of this game of telephone they're
| unwillingly being part of. It will never ceases to annoy me.
| I still shudder at seeing "Troll" being misused.
| woodruffw wrote:
| It helps that "slop" has a widespread, intuitive meaning (in
| this setting) that doesn't _need_ 4chan 's anti-semitic
| usage. I hadn't even made the connection to the 4chan phrase,
| even though I'd heard it before.
|
| (This is in contrast to Pepe, which was popularized
| principally on 4chan and then exported by reactionaries.)
| pcwalton wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The way 4chan lingo seeps into mainstream Internet discourse
| is so annoying. It happened with "degenerate" too (which, of
| course, 4chan borrowed from the Nazis' Degenerate Art
| Exhibition).
| hotdogscout wrote:
| Degenerate was never used to describe people in a non-
| hateful context though, even before it became /pol/'s
| favorite word.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| "Goyslop" as an insult is less about anti-semitism and more
| about how Jews are allegedly injecting anti-white
| multiculturalism (ex: DEI) in entertainment.
|
| So things that are woke get called goyslop (as opposed to
| Jewish as you imply).
| sfp wrote:
| I got curious and first usage was apparently on 08 May 2019
| ">Implying I care about what Goyslop companies do".
|
| https://archive.4plebs.org/_/search/text/goyslop/order/asc/
| tbabb wrote:
| They don't mention Twitter, but that's where Willison got it
| from.
| tromp wrote:
| 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/
| duxup wrote:
| IMO it's slightly different in terms of how it plays out so a
| new term seems reasonable.
| rdlw wrote:
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| 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.
| rdlw wrote:
| I see 'slop' used more often in contexts where, say, you
| look up a problem you're working on, find an article that
| seems to be relevant and may have the answer you want, but
| at some point turns out to be devoid of content and
| possibly AI-generated.
| cess11 wrote:
| That's spam. That's like the messages in your inbox of
| yesteryear that tried to entice you to look at them but
| they'll just waste your time or worse if you do.
| pmtcc wrote:
| 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
| cess11 wrote:
| 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.
| pmtcc wrote:
| 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.
| wy35 wrote:
| Ok, think about it like this. It's your anniversary with
| your partner so you decide to commission a drawing from
| an artist as a gift. However, when you receive it, it's
| clearly an AI-generated image that was printed out.
|
| Would you still consider that "spam"?
| simonw wrote:
| Sounds like you'd prefer to interpret slop as being a
| subset of spam. So all slop is spam but not all spam is
| slop.
| quantified wrote:
| Huh. Whether or not a word has this meaning or that depends
| upon acceptance. You say it means X, someone else says it
| means Y, where X and Y can be arbitrarily dissimilar. And as
| much as you might be saying "means this to me", the way you
| are each phrasing it you mean "for all". How do either of you
| resolve this?
| rdlw wrote:
| What is there to resolve? The comment I responded to was
| saying there's no useful distinction between the two words,
| I pointed out a distinction that I see between the two in
| what I think is accepted usage. Of course I see my opinion
| as more correct, since if I found something more convincing
| I would change my opinion. As the word becomes more widely
| used, usage will settle down.
| quantified wrote:
| Argh, my apologies. The comment _above_ yours in the
| sequence I see defines spam as unwanted marketing
| content, yours as unwanted content in general. For
| reasons unknown I saw that one as the parent of yours.
| wy35 wrote:
| It's definitely not the same.
|
| Spam is trying to sell you something, e.g. an unsolicited email
| peddling a supplements.
|
| Slop is low-quality content, e.g. someone taking a bunch of
| bird pictures off Google and posting it in a birding Facebook
| group.
|
| Spam is an ad, slop is not. With AI, it is now much easier to
| generate slop.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| People already use AI to generate ads though. It's only going
| to get worse.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| It is the same. Pages and pages of generated content so that
| 1) they end up higher in Google and 2) when you end up on
| their page they're able to show you ads / try to sell you
| stuff.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| I have similar feelings about "smishing", "vishing", and other
| medium-specific variants of "phishing".
| ketralnis wrote:
| Feels like people calling bad scrolling and other jitter
| "janky" to just mean that it's a bit crap and people deciding
| that "jank" is a technical term. No buddy jank just means jank
| and slop just means slop. This isn't a "new term".
| fullshark wrote:
| 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 for creatives at this moment.
| skydhash wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| Chicken and the egg there as far as "worth paying for"
| although I'd argue that's not really any different than
| "don't want to pay".
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| If it's "worth paying for," they can just squeeze more
| money out of the equation until it's barely worth the cost.
|
| For a real world example, just look at the scientific
| journal system - researchers pay upwards of $5k to publish
| (after spending however many tens to hundreds of thousands
| on the science, out of their own pocket), readers can pay
| $50 per article or their institution can subscribe for tens
| of thousands of dollars (if they're lucky and have a good
| negotiator). Journals do nothing of value aside from
| hosting the PDFs (which absolutely does not cost
| $50/download) and facilitating anonymous peer review (which
| amounts to sending emails to a few academics who will
| review it for free, at no cost to the journal).
|
| Even content that _is_ worth paying for, like research,
| will quickly reach an equilibrium that maximizes profit
| while minimizing effort.
| paulddraper wrote:
| The overwhelming majority do not want to pay for online
| publications.
|
| They are willing to view ads (proving they value the
| material) but as a rule are unwilling to pay any cash.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Decades of internet use has shown me that people absolutely
| do not want to pay for content. The average person will
| choose free+ads over paying every time.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| A large subset of those will choose free+ads with ad-block,
| so free+free.
|
| Then they will complain that the internet is full of trash
| content that doesn't suite them.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Then they will complain that the internet is full of
| trash content that doesn't suite them.
|
| This will happen regardless if you paid for content or
| not. The natural world is filled with parasites, it is an
| effective evolutionary strategy.
| techjamie wrote:
| As someone that blocks ads with a vengeance, I'll turn
| off my ad blocker when advertising companies turn off
| their privacy invasion, and stop running ads for
| criminals and scammers.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| As another person that blocks ads with vengeance, I'll
| turn off my ad blocker only when advertising companies go
| bankrupt and effectively disappear from the face of the
| planet. Even non-surveilling, non-criminal advertising is
| _still brain poison_. Why would I want to ever expose
| myself to that? Especially when on the margin, the damage
| inflicted to my life by ads is usually comparable to, or
| greater than, the value provided by the piece of content
| nested between those ads.
| skydhash wrote:
| Free is free, and you can choose not to look at the ads. No
| wonder people are taking this option. In the process, it
| cheapens the whole thing.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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".
| skydhash wrote:
| 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?
| rini17 wrote:
| The subscription usually comes in a package and people hate to
| pay for something they disagree with, even if it's just one
| author of several, or the occassional mistake.
|
| Might not be the main reason, just that these unsatisfied users
| are so vocal, idk.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| In my experience with a voluntary donation only service
| targeted and used primarily by educated middle and upper
| class people, virtually no one pays if they don't have to.
| barfbagginus wrote:
| False. False. False.
|
| 1. People could forcibly seize and redistribute content already
| made in years 1980-2020. Even that would be better than slop.
|
| 2. People could read only those - like scientists or open
| source and public domain authors - either funded by the state
| or otherwise willing to publish their works for free at high
| quality without the monetization slop text. The content exists,
| but monetized slop hides it.
|
| 3. Actually good AI can compress multiple slop articles into
| useful, non-sloppy content.
|
| I'd be perfectly fine if the internet consists of just math
| textbooks and science papers, and actually good articles
| automatically distilled from slop.
|
| It has the potential to give us what we need.
|
| The problem is that slop hides all that!
| fullshark wrote:
| So the other alternative is piracy and only consuming public
| domain information?
| Zambyte wrote:
| Maybe we should stop demonizing unauthorized sharing?
| People like to pretend nobody would make art in the absence
| of copyright, but it's easy to point them to millenia of
| contrary evidence.
| barfbagginus wrote:
| Those are other alternatives, yes. That and mining the slop
| with automated tools.
|
| The problem with public domain stuff is that there is more
| than enough of it, but you cannot access public domain
| information because monetized slop has superseded it in the
| search results.
|
| I believe that automated AI engines will eventually help
| individuals find non-sloppy public domain articles, or
| assemble them from slop directly.
|
| But piracy is always a good option.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Companies will serve slop to paying subscribers too.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Exactly. Slop is like meth for corporations. It costs nearly
| nothing to produce unlike real content, and for a short
| period of time can give a real boost to number of viewers/ad
| impressions/etc, the current board members can get that jump
| in their stocks and take a golden parachute while their
| replacements have to deal with a company that can no longer
| produce anything useful and has to spend a massive amount of
| money to get everything back in shape.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| If it gets bad enough that people will pay, I think some will
| pay for exclusively real content.
|
| I hope this is the start of walled garden human internet.
| Web-rings, moderated forums, ect.
|
| A common cyberpunk trope is a trashed net and a private net.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If it gets bad enough that people will pay, I think some
| will pay for exclusively real content._
|
| People who pay for content demonstrate that they have
| disposable income and are willing to spend it, which makes
| them prime population for advertisers to target. By paying,
| they're distinguishing themselves for the net-near-
| worthless population of free users. There's a _huge_
| pressure for advertisers to tap into that juicy population
| of paying users; it takes only so long before any given
| service succumbs to that pressure.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Real content doesnt necessarily mean advertising free.
| There are tons of high quality pages and services funded
| by ads.
|
| The problem is with the spam and slop.
|
| Any sucessful walled garden will need to keep this crap
| out. banning adds is just one way. Content review is
| another.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Real content doesnt necessarily mean advertising free.
| There are tons of high quality pages and services funded
| by ads._
|
| There are some, but it's a rounding error compared to the
| ad-funded slop. Basing your business model around
| advertising creates strong perverse incentives, pitting
| you against your users/customers. Sometimes, a company
| gets enough return on advertising investment they can
| fund side ventures off their marketing budget - this
| creates an UBI-like low pressure space for quality
| content to grow. But stuff funded directly from ads? It's
| safe to assume the content there is secondary at best,
| and exists primarily as a vector to bait you so you can
| be exposed to ads.
|
| > _banning adds is just one way. Content review is
| another._
|
| Right, but they're complementary. Content review gets
| easier when you cut out 99% of crap at the source by
| fiat, and with a hard line drawn, the reviewers are much
| harder for marketers to compromise either.
| fullshark wrote:
| True, let's get even more cynical actually, companies will
| serve ads to paying customers too, even those paying for "ad-
| free" versions of the product.
| jl6 wrote:
| > 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 on the planet, and growth in that aggregate _content
| consumption capacity_ has been far outstripped by the growth in
| _content production capacity_.
|
| There's just obscenely more high quality new-to-you content
| than you can ever consume - and an increasing proportion of it
| is available very cheaply, or even free. Anything new faces an
| uphill battle against everything old - and now, against AI too.
|
| This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better (and it
| may never get better).
| apantel wrote:
| Well said. It's the same with news. When something big
| happens in the world, there is an explosion of communication
| about it on the internet. You can absorb the event from
| countless sources. So what value is any one news outlet's
| coverage? It's not worth much. The media outlets used to be
| able to monetize a captive audience, i.e. people living in a
| certain locale would have a few newspapers and television
| channels to choose from. Now anyone, anywhere, can go online
| and absorb news from all of the posting and aggregating and
| reprocessing and commenting going on. It's almost impossible
| to sell into that.
|
| The value of generic / impersonal content is rapidly
| approaching zero. The only thing that still has value is a
| particular creator of interest posting their next video --
| like your favorite YouTube channel, you'll watch that.
|
| It seems like the only way to succeed in this new environment
| is to be a real human person who builds a following / cult of
| personality around themselves and their content with its
| signature that is unique to them. It's something like
| 'releasing content that is personally signed' where the
| person's signature has value to a certain audience. The
| audience is 'captive' because they can't get that 'personal
| signature' anywhere else. Even AI can't deepfake it, because
| the perceived value of it is specifically that it is coming
| from a particular real human person.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It seems like the only way to succeed in this new
| environment is to be a real human person who builds a
| following / cult of personality around themselves and their
| content with its signature that is unique to them._
|
| Correction: _pretend to be a real human_ (or even a
| _hyperreal_ human), not to _be_ a real human. This is the
| game YouTubers and Instagram influencers have been playing
| for over a decade - there 's a team of people building a
| brand around the face of the vlogger/influencer, making
| them seem like a really nice and interesting human, where
| in fact the opposite is the case. The point of it is to
| exploit human vulnerability to _parasocial relationships_ ,
| creating a captive audience primed to be receptive to the
| deluge of advertising that follows.
|
| Yes, this is one of the few ways for "content" to keep
| value these days. Which is ironic, given that the net value
| of it to the consumer and society is squarely negative.
| cess11 wrote:
| "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 time
| I go to my library and open something older than me the
| language is like a fresh air, it's clear that someone put
| some intellectual work into it and there is a distinct
| character to the text, personality imbued by the
| typographers, authors and editors. This is very rare on the
| Internet, and whenever I come across it the typography is
| usually ad-adjacent anyway.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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.
| CM30 wrote:
| 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.
| petercooper wrote:
| 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.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > Linus Tech Tips
|
| Caught red-handed faking test results, the official response
| "if we actually did the tests we wouldn't be able to publish
| videos fast enough"
| petercooper wrote:
| I did say "for all their problems" ;-)
|
| I still trust LTT more than a channel pumping out faceless
| review videos or one so unknown that there aren't enough
| viewers to even provide any scrutiny. To butcher the
| eponymous Linus's law: given enough eyeballs, all mistakes
| are shallow?
| scotty79 wrote:
| The problem is people wouldn't know what content to pay for
| because paid content in large part is also scam and bait and
| switch these days.
|
| You literally can't evaluate content before you consume it in
| it's entirety or the at least the amount you wish.
|
| Given that copyright should be abolished, adverts should be
| banned and content industry should move to entirely post-paid
| voluntary financing.
|
| Something like gaming piracy where you play the whole game for
| free and if you really liked it you "buy" "a copy" to support
| developers and their investors.
| ai4ever wrote:
| see slop ? say something !
|
| there will be a backlash against robotic phone assistants in
| support centers.
|
| support businesses that dont put out slop or ai-garbage.
| fluffet wrote:
| Love the term.
|
| People should call it for what it is. Tried to find some answers
| on Google earlier in the day, and the first result pages were
| 100% generated slop. Funnily enough, any AI summary of the slop
| would be slop squared.
|
| It's everywhere, and I hate it. What ways do people have to
| combat it out of their day?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Its infesting google image search too. I tried to find a
| picture of a guitarist playing a certain guitar. I got hits
| from "openart" where it looked like kurt cobain got crossed
| with a sand worm
| telepathy wrote:
| SLOP: Judith Miller at the NY Times circa 2003
| cletus wrote:
| 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 filters out all
| the crap.
|
| Currently we rely a lot on altruism for much of the information
| on the Internet (eg Wikipedia). AI agents will get harder and
| harder to differentiate from actual humans making Wikipedia
| edits. I don't think we're that far away from human-vs-AI
| Wikipedia edit wars.
|
| I really wonder how much human knowledge will be destroyed by
| (intentional or otherwise) AI vandalism in the future.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > "Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became
| almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete,
| or downright misleading information," Sammann said.
|
| > "Crap, you once called it," I reminded him.
|
| > "Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important.
| Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came
| up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the
| well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately,
| forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back
| out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap
| into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap."
|
| > "What is good crap?" Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous
| tone.
|
| > "Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting
| of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset,
| well-written document that contained a hundred correct,
| verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It's a lot
| harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans
| to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate
| documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another,
| say. But it didn't really take off until the military got
| interested."
|
| > "As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy's
| reticules, you mean," Osa said. "This I know about. You are
| referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First
| Millennium A.R."
|
| > "Exactly!" Sammann said. "Artificial Inanity systems of
| enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the
| purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis
| leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant
| Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there
| was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my
| Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand."
| greendestiny_re wrote:
| 100 good sentences and 1 subtly wrong one? That makes for an
| extraordinary text! I suppose the idea sounded better in the
| writer's head but it would not be nearly as bad as implied.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I'm re-reading Anathem now (my favourite book). Something I
| noticed on my second reading is Stephenson describes
| Sammann's physical appearance exactly once in the book and I
| must have missed it the first time around.
|
| I always pictured the Ita as wearing elaborate robes with
| hoods darkening their faces due to their secretive nature.
| But in fact he describes Sammann as looking basically just
| like Gilfoyle from Silicon Valley, including the way he
| dresses. Which is amazing given the roots of the Ita (he
| describes the word as coming from Information Technology and
| the meaning of the A is lost to time, but it's obvious to a
| 20th century Earth-born reader it comes from IT
| Administrator).
|
| There are so many delightful details in Anathem, it's well
| worth a second reading.
| gamepsys wrote:
| 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.
| soco wrote:
| We didn't need AI for that, but it surely helps a lot making
| it easier possible.
| visarga wrote:
| We can always rely on pre-2022 data. But I guess what you're
| saying is plausible, I see it becoming like the adversarial
| game of virus vs immune system, a constant arms race. We got to
| build our immunity. On the one hand AI can churn bullshit on
| command, on the other hand training on large datasets tends to
| cancel out many errors across the corpus.
|
| All the more reason to use local models and curated feeds from
| now on. Local LLMs can clean / firewall the bad stuff, and
| follow our guidance. They will be like the new anti-virus
| software. I've predicted early in 2023 that in the future
| operating systems and browsers will all sport a small LLM that
| will ensure we don't get abused by the internet and provide a
| "room of our own", where we have total privacy. It's already a
| reality.
| tivert wrote:
| > We can always rely on pre-2022 data.
|
| No we can't. How many websites from 1998 survive today, in a
| form you can actually find (e.g. not the Wayback Machine)? In
| ten or twenty years, most pre-2022 data will be inaccessible.
| 93po wrote:
| It's interesting how often I have to look at timestamps on
| content on the internet these days. I assume anything after
| 2022 that has the slightest whiff of ChatGPT wordiness is
| probably slop
| willvarfar wrote:
| Beyond slop, there will be personalized slop where AI 'optimizes'
| articles for each reader.
|
| And beyond slop, there will be AI models that do product
| placement. OpenAI's "publisher partnerships" deck explains
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228
|
| So soon you'll go to a news website and get the political filter
| bubble that reinforces - or outrages - your prejudices to
| maximize your engagement. And in the middle of it, the AI will
| slip in that the brand of grill that caused the fire was rumoured
| to be ${insert_name_of_competitor_here} etc?
|
| The big future for AI is to move slop beyond outrage and into
| intimacy territory. If rage was the engagement of the last ten
| years, then ending up only talking to AIs who pretend to care
| will be the even more addictive engagement of the next ten :(
| duxup wrote:
| What happens if AI slop learns that I like accurate content and
| it suddenly gets good?
| willvarfar wrote:
| The incentives are not aligned. They are not optimizing
| strictly for your preferences, they have agendas they are
| paid by advertisers to push.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| It'll sell you on the idea that you can trust it; that it
| only sources verified reports and data; that it's better than
| the other AI slop that doesn't care about accuracy or
| privacy.
|
| Then it'll build up habits and routines with you. You'll feel
| good that your AI slop is actually good AI and is trying to
| benefit you.
|
| All the while, the verified reports and data always supports
| your expectations and worldview. It's almost perfect, aside
| from the fact it sometimes cites The Federalist more than it
| should. And it convinced you to throw out all your pillows
| and buy a whole new set for your family. But you're able to
| look past it, because it's actually good AI.
| bazil376 wrote:
| 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.
|
| I'm not necessarily seeing the slop problem. People should always
| have been skeptical of content on untrusted websites.
|
| Now, if reputable sources start trying to pump out content with
| AI, that'd be a problem. I suspect for those who try, they'll
| quickly lose their reputation.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _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 websites. Now, if reputable sources start trying to
| pump out content with AI, that'd be a problem._
|
| How do you define untrusted websites, or reputable source?
| Especially when Google - which _should_ be a trusted, reputable
| source - starts pumping out garbage as they did?
| bazil376 wrote:
| 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 from google.
| haizan wrote:
| > 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.
| chromaton wrote:
| 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 likely trained
| on this bad data. FWIW, GPT-4o gives a much more accurate
| response.
| soco wrote:
| 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.
| FezzikTheGiant wrote:
| Would people be willing to pay for a gmail plugin that takes a
| stab at combatting ai email spam? something like Mailman [1] but
| with an LLM layer for detecting AI slop?
|
| [1]: https://mailmanhq.com/
| taco_emoji wrote:
| wish i could read the fucking paywalled article
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| See also: "botshit"
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000768132...
| novaRom wrote:
| Interestingly, this article itself is an example of "slop"
| simonw wrote:
| Why?
| tolerance wrote:
| All this talk and jargon is indicative of a mass existential
| crisis as humanity is faced with the reality that many of its
| shared cultural artifacts are essentially frivolous.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Google leading again on the minus side
| yadaeno wrote:
| Slop is more of a term to describe extreme cost savings pushed
| onto consumers and marketed as "progress".
| pmdr wrote:
| We've been feeding it slop for years, if anything it's become
| better at writing it than us humans.
| Havoc wrote:
| It's starting to get more noticeable week on week. Both on insta
| and google
|
| At this velocity it'll make some categories pure noise by end of
| year
| hm-nah wrote:
| Nice work Simon!
| eugenekolo wrote:
| Schlopp. Beautiful schlopp. Beautiful schlopp with a cherry on
| top.
| coldblues wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyoNGSKWIaw
| neogodless wrote:
| 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.
| coldblues wrote:
| Reasonable individuals would think of the food I've described
| as pig feed, if not worse, of course with some hyperbole
| added. The reality is that most people are not knowledgeable
| enough to even tell "AI slop" apart from regular slop, or
| even human-made content. In that regard, people are eating
| pig feed, scraps no reasonable people would want to touch.
| Best example is AI generated Facebook posts with comments and
| likes from elderly folk or the the lower end of the bell
| curve.
| tuckerpo wrote:
| Like most sticky internet slang terms, "slop" stems from
| 4chan's "sloppa", initially used to describe gross looking
| food, i.e. "slop of shit" shortened to "sloppa"
|
| Now used to describe anything that looks half-assed, poorly put
| together, etc.
| nateburke wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Really-Like-Slop-Elephant-Piggie/dp/1...
|
| Irrelevant, but also fantastic.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| You'll soon no longer be able to find anything of use via
| traditional search engines. How will we keep improving AI models
| when the amount of 'slop' in their training data starts to
| outnumber the real content?
| dorkwood wrote:
| Do they need new training data? I'm pretty sure Midjourney,
| OpenAI etc. already scraped all of the images in existence long
| before the well was poisoned. They can use other methods, such
| as improved tagging, to improve their models.
| spacecadet wrote:
| It was slop before
| sangnoir wrote:
| All I need is a Cloud-to-Butt-like browser plugin that replaces
| all instances of "GenAI" and "generative AI" with "AI slop"
| iamleppert wrote:
| AI will never come close to producing what people can, because an
| AI cannot be made to suffer. Suffering is essential to the
| creative process. Suffering is the key, it's the whole point, and
| at the core of the human experience. When we look at creative
| output, we are looking at the sum of the suffering experienced by
| the creator. The more suffering, the better the content.
| SirMaster wrote:
| If only we had an AI that could sift through all the slop and
| give us only the decent information that we wanted...
| acureau wrote:
| NYT writer discovers the term 'slop' days after NYT source leaks
| on 4chan. Specifically on a board where this is a common phrase.
| Cites 4chan. I'm connecting the dots
| antifa wrote:
| Slop is not a new term, it refers to content people like
| (perjoratively, similar to how fast food is something people
| like) but for whatever reason (low brow? bad for you? clickbait?
| lowest common denominator?) should not be classified as good
| quality content. This slang is older than AI, possibly by
| decades.
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