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210 sats \ 5 replies \ @Scoresby 25 Jul \ on: Craft Is the Antidote to Slop Design
I wonder how he would separate these two -- toil and labor?
Doing the dishes? Toil.
Re-reading and editing this comment for the fifth time? Labor.
Helping my kids brush and floss their teeth every night? Toil...I think.
Reading to them? Labor...I think.
It gets messy very quickly, and I can see an argument that says it is the quotidian things that lead to the meaningful things.
Perhaps you can't get to the meaningful engagement of a stone mason working on a cathedral if you don't so do the toil of dragging a stone up the scaffolding.
This sounds good to me. But I want to nail it down more: throwing a bunch of ai generated images on a social media feed feels like it lacks history. But maybe it's that it lacks refinement. Refine in the sense of going over and over something. Slop doesn't feel like anyone went over it. Definitely not over and over it.
But he probably meant more than something so literal.
The craft of walking with a very full wheelbarrow is craft. It's impressive and difficult to do well. Yet, it's not valuable. And if it gets replaced with a machine, I don't think humanity is going to be worse off for the matter.
It may be that the difference between toil and craft needs to be specific to each person, but I'm dissatisfied with this because it feels too wishy washy.
I do like how this sounds, though:
Slop is production without history. This sounds good to me. But I want to nail it down more: throwing a bunch of ai generated images on a social media feed feels like it lacks history.
What if the AI was trained on more historic images that you could ever examine in your lifetime? What if it used one of those novel memory modules and has been gaining experience over 10 years?
Personally, I'd say it lacks feeling. It can only simulate, but not emulate that.
But then the question becomes, how can a group of people that love simulated scarcity (not emulated, per Erik Voskuils's theory of calling shitcoins "vertical scaling") hate simulated feeling so much? It's difficult to answer.
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Gosh, I really enjoy these comments. I always get a lot to think on from them.
I don't know how to understand ai slop. That's what is so great about it. I mostly find it skimmable, but then I have enough times where it isn't that I wonder.
Then there's this thing: is some stuff better just because a human put some time into it?
This gets at whether what we call "feeling" actually comes from some innate knowledge that it's scarce. As humans, we all know to some extent that the experience of being human is unique. And any time we encounter another human mind, we know that there might be something there that we have never encountered before -- perhaps even that no one has ever encountered before.
With ai stuff, in the back of our minds is the idea that it may be saying the same thing to everyone. Maybe there's nothing special about it. Maybe it isn't new. Is that what we mean by lacking feeling?
PS. What do you think of Voskuil's theory? (I'll admit it makes a lot of sense to me. Is there really a reason that btc has to be the only Bitcoin chain?)
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I don't know how to understand ai slop.
I think that there's no difference between human slop and ai slop, if I'm honest. I feel that the article, in stating "Slop [is] born of effortless, replicable processes", is hinting at that too, as it doesn't make it exclusive about AI slop, but more... all slop. AI just makes it effortless and replicable to do something that before required effort for most people: "talking out of one's ass" before didn't often show textual eloquence, so it's harder to detect, but it still happened, and this is what for example scammers exploited.
is some stuff better just because a human put some time into it?
It cannot be "time" and not even "human" that is a guaranteed means for quality, I think that this is our tribal instinct talking to us because we're perceiving a threat of sorts. I find it an interesting thing to observe because I expect that how humanity reacts to AI could be similar to how humanity would react to alien contact.
This gets at whether what we call "feeling" actually comes from some innate knowledge that it's scarce. .. Is that what we mean by lacking feeling?
I think that the feeling part is what triggers our actions and that the underlying recipe for this is self-awareness, which autocorrect definitely doesn't have 1, combined with finite time which means we are constantly fighting the impeding end of self. This is what makes us take action. An AI (current generation) does not have any concept of time or even "end" either, because it is a piece of software.
Even if we would run the AI software in a loop so that it can be triggered by something, currently it doesn't make choices, because it doesn't have the underlying concept of feeling to be rewarded or punished. It nowadays emulates this in a reasoning process, but that too is simulation, and pre-programmed.
However, just because a person that has feelings spent some of their finite time on something doesn't make it better. In fact, because time is finite for a human I'd argue we're more prone to automate everything (make everything effortless and replicable, in the words of the article.)
There can also be a moral high ground in the automation: I automate my business emails (which I judge to be less important) so that I can spend my newly saved time to properly home-school my kids (which i judge to be more important)...
PS. What do you think of Voskuil's theory?
I think that the observation is right, but that shitcoins aren't bitcoin, so it's not an apples-to-apples thing. The fact that these networks have their own native assets isn't really optimal. What I find interesting though: I've over the years met some shitcoin devs at miner events and some of them actually agreed with me that, paraphrased, flooding the markets with low-effort tokens is also a form of slop.
Footnotes
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"alignment" makes LLMs simulate self-awareness through reinforcement training and system prompts, so that in the interaction, a human perceives it as self-aware, but this is a trick to comfort humans, not an actual feature. Fake it until you make it. ↩
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lacking any imprint of history or specific human interaction with place...This might explain why truly inspired creation, the antithesis of slop, often seems rooted in something beyond mere human effort or secular concern.
i think gets closer to the point of the article. although I'll admit it is not elaborated on very much and emphasis on labour confuses this.
personally i would have written this article without the labour argument at all. it is easy to hammer home the idea that a godless society produces less beautiful artifacts without bringing labour into it. but i do feel intuitively i get the idea of transplant cities and industrial farmed food being slop.
in bitcoin language, proof of work is useless without a direction toward a meaningful cause.
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