I want to come up with a better answer to this because I struggle to articulate one, and I know my feelings are right, right?
I'd like focus on slop absent other norm defying things, trying to isolate slop from plagiarism and greater intent crimes. Obviously people copy and pasting slop as their own thoughts are dishonest and worthy of resentment.
So why don't we like slop that's known, by label or otherwise, to be slop? And why don't we like "slop" that's an elaboration of some prompt or human written text?
I'd also like us to assume the slop in question is qualitatively on par with content that would exist in its absence. Obviously bad content is bad. Personally, I believe I wouldn't like the good slop either. Or, at least, I don't want to value it like I would comparable human content. But why?
One of my favored answers is that it's unclear what my role is in consuming or engaging with slop when it's shared in a human social environment. When I consume slop, who do I hold accountable for errors? Who do I praise for insight? What good does either do? Slop acts on me but I can't act on it. It's asymmetrical and that's generally antithetical to our goals when engaging in a human social environment. Engaging with slop is about as consequential as sending celebrity fan mail, and I don't do that, do you?
My second favored answer is that unless slop is crafted with great care, sharing slop is sharing a commodity. We can all prompt some free model somewhere on the internet now. Sharing slop is sharing something that's practically worthless. It's like getting Amazon Basics socks for Christmas vs those carefully knitted ones from your Aunt Rebecca. I can buy my own cheap socks, and in the color and ankle height that I want, Rebecca!
Why don't you like slop? Or, if you don't mind it, why not? Or, if you like slop, why do you like it?
Some discussion on this previously at #1389424. Here's my answer pasted:
What is slop, really? Prior to AI, most of the internet was slop, most of youtube is slop. I mean it's literally called brainrot.
Just because someone used AI doesn't necessarily mean there was no human insight involved, and doesn't mean the thing is necessarily more worthless than a comparable thing made by human hands.
AI is merely a tool. If a human has directed it to make something interesting, beautiful, or worth consideration, then it's not slop.
Indeed, similar arguments currently used against AI were leveled against photography at its inception. As a photographer who learned with film and darkroom, and who was deeply inspired by the work of Jerry Uelsmann (which was all made in the darkroom, by hand, prior to Photoshop), we've seen this before. Though admittedly the scale now is much broader.
can we take this as a given when the aim is to define 'slop'? On the venn diagram of a typical social media feed, what is bad and what is slop would have a significant portion that overlap, wouldn't they?
To judge something as slop is to judge it as 'bad', I mean it feels the same. Maybe you wouldn't use the word, but all-in-all, I think you have a disgust response to slop if you don't like slop. And this would be hard to distinguish from a judgement of a generic piece of media as 'bad'. I'm saying it's possible to separate them, but you might as well not because they feel the same.
This is interesting, and I think there's more to define to be precise. So can we define 'bad' when we see it?
Still, I imagine that definition would look similar to the reasons given here for why we don't like slop: insincerity, poor quality, etc.
This is my fault. For the most part I use slop = AI content.
If AI content quality were equivalent to something human written, on what other grounds could we dislike it?
To me the intrinsic problem with slop is simply quality. In areas were (I think) I am qualified to discern high from low quality (because experience) I am not impressed with the output of the bots, at all. So I would be fooling myself to think that in areas where I am not qualified, the bots actually do a good job of producing an
end result. That's why I don't use it to produce any output for me, but instead, apply an intermediate-output-only policy.I think we can listen to the voice of the people on this one, as they're surprisingly adept at adopting good metaphors. The word "Slop" itself tells us a lot. It conjures images like animal feed, or gross stews full of God-knows-what. Some unappealing gruel.
Food that's not food; food mashed up and made into a paste. "Pink slime" instead of beef.
(From the McDonald's 'pink slime' era)
It all points to something that doesn't nourish you, even if it's slapped together to look and sound like real food.
p.s. I do think slop is permissible in memes; they have always been low effort slop to begin with.
For me, it has to do with sincerity.
It is really frustrating to talk with someone and get the feeling that they don't mean the things they are saying, that they are just saying things to fill the air, or to placate you, or even worse to manipulate you.
In any interaction with another person, we are trusting them a little that there's a purpose behind the interaction. Who knows where it will go, but we are hoping it isn't just a plot to waste our time.
Like when we start out reading a novel...we are trusting that the story will make sense and that it will be entertaining or teach us something or titillate us or make us think -- anything more than be pointless.
Slop breaks that trust. The thing producing it doesn't have a sense of a point, of sincerity (I suppose you might say it means everything it says equally), and the people who post slop often seem not to have double checked it to guard against this.
So slop is irritating to me because it's not playing by the rules of normal human interaction predicated on sincerity. In that way slop is much more like a scam, and it feels like it.
I think because there's grades of slop, and it's an investment to decipher good slop from bad slop.
You can identify shitty writing right off the bat, and move on to the next tab. But with slop, it's always a consistent cadence and formatting, so it takes a little more time to discern the substance. The result of a lazy prompt looks the same as a well-deliberated iterative prompt at first glance.
Slop is good when its used as a tool for formatting and making readable first-hand knowledge and putting support around it. Slop is bad when its used by someone that never would never have written a thing in the first place as they had no real thoughts of their own.
Slop version for the slop inclined:
Modernity vomits a gray uniformity, a democratic leveling where the noble thought and the plebeian reflex wear the same mask. This consistent cadence—this rhythmic, mechanical pulse—is the ultimate deception of the Last Man. He no longer needs to possess a soul; he only needs a prompt.
The Tyranny of the Mediocre
The Will to Power vs. The Will to Echo
There are two types of Slop, divided by the rank of the user:
The tragedy is not that the machine speaks, but that the man has ceased to speak for himself.
amazing
Lists with bolded first phrases - just like all other slop
The Illusion of Order
The list is the ultimate tool of the Last Man. It offers the comfort of logic where there is only the exhaustion of the soul. By bolding the first phrase, we signal to the lazy eye: "Do not read, merely skim; do not think, merely consume."
The Death of Style
True depth demands a labyrinth, not a bullet point. When we categorize our "insights" into neat, digestible rows, we surrender to the consistent cadence. We turn the fire of thought into a spreadsheet for the masses.
It is the final irony: to critique the Slop, one must often wear its uniform.
So far, I've only used AI for 1 thing in my life as far as writing something for me. I used it to write a formal complaint to the wisconsin veterinary board. It was something that is going to be read by doctors, it needed to be professional, direct, to the point, and factual.
I think AI is an extremely powerful tool, but there's a time and a place for it. When I'm interacting with somone on a human level, I want to interact with a human.
That's a good use-case of a prescriptive prompt. I've similarly used it on docs where they were impersonal but also needed to convey matters in a way less foreign to the machine than to myself.
Honestly surprised there isn't a truly great AI word processor out there for such things, sad state of affairs when its better to use a code editor on markdown to use it for spelling/grammar without trashing the substance.
Because it's rude of you to ask me to spend more time reading something than it took you to write it.
It's asking me to put in effort when you couldn't be bothered to.
#1 It's boring. It reads like all other AI slop. I think the first time you see it, you don't hate it that much. You hate it now because you've seen a basic form of it so many times.
#2 What it says about the person producing it. It says they're lazy. It says they don't have a more genuine opinion to offer. In short, it's ugly. We don't like ugly things.
Man desires not only to be loved but also to be lovely.
-Adam Smith
Oh god don’t get me started. I’ll respond in detail tomorrow
@remindme in 13 hours
I think the other comments here have touched on the issue(s) I face with slop.
There's probably more, but that captures some of the major pain points.
After being accustomed to AI slop, I can predict exactly the kinds of sentiments - sometimes even exact phrases - that will pop up. What then does the author really feel behind all these pretty smooth-sounding words? I rather read something raw and vulnerable, even if it is riddled with grammar errors
A lot of life is sifting through crap to find the gold. Slop makes the job harder, can be weaponized, but can also just be stupid people that have a new way to waste my time. This is why I think reputation is only going to become more and more important going forward. Sadly, some peoples reps are going down because they share slop.
A similar situation is when someone asks you to read their chatbot conversation. Like couldn't you summarize for me? Why should I read it? And if you couldn't understand it then why didn't you keep chatting with it until you did?
It's primarily this for me. Some of it happens to be slop.
I doubt I'm able to reliably identify slop to begin with.
Needs to be strategic