John Oliver did a segment on this, you can search his name and AI Slop on yt to see it. I didn't realize how much fb was pushing it bc I haven't used it in years, but wow, am I now extra glad I don't use it anymore. And poor Pinterest, r.i.p.
Same with Reddit. In fact I'd just decided to delete the Reddit app and just hang out here, because the AI slop has become intolerable. But really I'm seeing it everywhere. Google News used to be interesting and now again AI slop. Is this the end of human-based online articles and interactions?
It's been everywhere for a while, but the fediverse seemed like a last bastion up until very recently where I've noticed a change.
Is this the end of human-based online articles and interactions?
I sure hope not. At least it's just a few posts here that are generated for now. If it ever gets to the level of Reddit, I might just leave.
"slop" is being thrown around just like "socialist" and "gay". Save it for actual AI slop. Just because something is made by AI doesn't make it automatically "slop" 🙄
I'm referring to stuff that I consider low quality. I don't mind if something is generated, as long as it is labeled as such and is interesting or valuable in some way.
There's always been plenty of human-made content that is slop. AI is just another tool to make easy content. Trying to categorize everything done with AI as slop is lazy and shifting blame, ignoring the difficulty in both moderating large volume as well as the lack of a definition of what is and isn't "good". Which really ends up coming back to the individual, who has means to shut out places that are regularly a problem to them.
God I remember deep fried memes. That was around when i decided humanity needed to be reset.
How would you use that term? Would you call "slop" something that was just mindlessly generated using AI in a single prompt and non-"slop" something that uses AI in more sophisticated/deliberate ways? What is the threshold of something being "slop" ultimately? Is this just result not looking decent enough or amount of effort combined with amount of knowledge and experience that was used to create that? I'm personally conflicted on this, because sometimes even mindless prompt may give great result, and sometimes a lot of manual effort may give shit result. I guess with "slop" I tend to gravitate towards "amount of effort combined with amount of knowledge and experience that was used to create" and perhaps also the amount of content that particular person produces and speed of its production. So if someone is really good with some tools (not necessarily AI) and figured some overpowered shortcuts that allow to produce results very fast with little effort, it also can be called "slop" just for the rate of production alone.
It’s always kind of hard to nail down trendy slang terms, but from what I’ve gathered, and the interpretation I think is useful, is less to do with AI, quality, or effort (although those are certainly common elements of slop) and more to do with what the thing’s role is. What was it made for? What is expected of the audience? Regular art or non-fiction stuff is meant to communicate something to its audience. An emotion, an idea, etc. it requires the audience to engage with it if only in a fairly limited way.
Slop, by contrast, is a product meant to take advantage of the increasingly marketized internet. It’s there merely to capture some small share of the attention economy on a mass scale. It’s not trying to communicate anything to the audience, what it specifically is doesn’t matter, it’s just, to play into the metaphor, feed to fill the trough so people stick around and keep paying, generating data, or looking at ads. All that matters is that it takes up space. It requires nothing of it’s audience, in fact it’s probably advantageous that they don’t spend too much time looking at it, lest they notice how vacuous it is.
Under this definition, we can better sort things out. Someone making art because they want to share an idea or feelings but they use AI because they don’t have the skill to make it themselves? Not slop. Someone making propaganda or misinformation? Not good, but also not slop. It has a purpose which couldn’t be achieved if someone scrolled by it after a second.
Meanwhile, this definition can identify slop, or at least slop-like elements, in other pieces of media you may not have considered. Streaming services have been making movies and TV differently based around the assumption that the audience isn’t actually going to be paying that much attention, so either the content needs to be really attention grabbing, or it needs to be so unremarkable that you get as much out of it while looking at your phone as you would actually giving it your full attention. They make all of this because it’s a cheap way to make it look like their service has a lot to watch so that people keep subscribing. They don’t even necessarily need people to watch it for it to achieve its goal. Just having it existing in the service gives the appearance of value they’re going for.
i wish there were a client available that would simply hide all image posts because i really hate memes
Be the change you want to see
Personally I block all the meme communities.
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