It seems that the human race is intent on drowning itself in slop.
slop booksslop books
slop lawslop law
slop scienceslop science
slop softwareslop software
slop musicslop music
As far as I can see, this trend will only continue and get worse. Not that we want the slop:
But ask most people for their thoughts on AI content and they will probably say they prefer the human touch. (Rest assured, this article was written and edited by people.) Books that appear to be authored by AI have fewer and worse reviews on Amazon. And quality aside
Yet the fear is that we won't know the slop when we see it and it will come to be comfortable, familiar, like your parent's bad cooking -- the only thing you know.
A survey by Deezer found that 97% of respondents could not hear the difference between AI and man-made music; some artificial tracks have received millions of streams.
Similarly, blind tests have found that people often prefer AI-generated text to human writing. In an in-house experiment, our colleagues at The Economist struggled to pick which Bartleby column was written by our human columnist versus his AI agent.
I would very much like to hear from some of these posters of slop: what do you expect to happen? Do you think anyone wants to spend ten or fifteen minutes reading the output from your minute or so of prompting? Or do you actually think it is interesting?
I suppose we all love our children and we recognize that parents are proud of their progeny, even though they don't take much time to conceive and are frequently unremarkable (although, now that I think about it, fucking to the point of conception definitely takes longer than most people spend on their slop production). But if you produce some bit of slop, why would you think the world wants to see it?
At least with your own writing, the thoughts that come from your head and nowhere else, there's a sense that you are showing yourself to the world. That's something, right? Because the world will hate you or love you or ignore you and at least you can work with that. But if the world hates your slop or ignores it, what are you going to do? Use a new model? Or is it all the dream: maybe the world will like my slop?
I'm a little worried that pay to post won't fix this, and if that's the case, what becomes of the internet? Does everything get locked behind private groups? Maybe we will switch to a world where writers/posters/content creators pay readers for their time, rather than the other way round.
My question is does any of the slop actually matter?
We already knew there was a long tail of junk music, junk blogs, junk writing, junk everything, even before the age of AI.
Getting noticed was always a challenge. Is it substantially more of a challenge now? Does the amount of slop competition really matter for the genuinely high quality stuff?
In my mind, these are all still open questions.
I think that slop is bad for LLM training, for humans trying to consume good content there are good places for it, as SN here filtered by money.
Slop makes good content shinny bright.
Any place that actually attempts to review things or recommend them or sort them has to contend with this wave of new low-value content. I suspect the easiest/most cost-effective way to make it so it doesn't overwhelm users is something that looks a lot like Toy Story 5 or Shrek 16 -- platforms just go with what they know works.
Sure, Toy Story has the best of the best working for them, but the new ideas, the next Toy Story, I don't think it's going to be so easy for that person to break in.
And as for social media, where we don't necessarily only want to see the posts of highly brilliant and successful people (dumb memes from your uncle Bill are occasionally fun), what do we do about that? It's just a firehose of slop.
Pay readers for their curation services and develop reputations as thinking meat bags
does this mean, pay them to recommend/review? My impression of the self-publishing world (at least as far as fiction goes) is that there is a huge amount of this. Everyone is battling to get seen, and so you have to beg, plead, bribe reviewers to talk about your book, leave a review, mention it on their pod. It didn't seem to be working well (and my interaction with it was from before the AI wave).
I was referring to how we reward zappers for identifying quality content.
That’s the secret sauce and figuring out a way to do it that doesn’t have the bizarre Keynesian Beauty Contest incentives would be a game changer.
Rewards are such a tough nut to crack. It doesn't feel like we've got it figured out in a way that really drives people to look for the good posts and zap 'em.
If content becomes abundant, reputation and curation become more valuable — but I’m not convinced humans become editors for machines. We still choose the questions.
If you can produce slop with AI you can also filter slop with AI, I think it will probably balance out.
At the end of the day, internet micropayments will fix the quality signalling issue.
I sure hope so
Everything is slip now isn’t it?
slippage, really
a product/service is fake but the dopamine hit is real? 🤔
!T'$ ∆11 iN U® H3@D
💢💊😵🍭💥
That was the mistake of social media, the Instagram and blog generation... if I say it, it must be worthwhile.
No, but it's the obvious conclusion from infinite generation meeting limited attention span.
Yes. SN was on the way there (rewards pool), but somehow choose differently.
AI-generated and AI-assisted are increasingly being treated as the same thing. I don’t think they are. More output doesn’t automatically mean less value — humans were already exceptionally good at producing noise. The harder question may be whether our ability to filter, discover, and reward quality can keep pace.
Which was the criteria for slop? I know that is true, but Im curious about it.
Most of the time they barely know of their existence, when they don't, they don't even pay attention and it's not the same as ignoring. That’s why I don’t give a shit about opinion of strangers.
The real shift isn't just that content creation costs have dropped to zero; it's that the cost of generating fake signal has dropped to zero.
If you can use AI to generate endless slop, someone else will inevitably use AI to generate endless "organic-looking" engagement, reviews, and zaps to push that slop to the top. It becomes an adversarial loop.
The optimists are right that internet micropayments and skin-in-the-game curation (like SN) are the best shield we have. But the pessimists are also right that finding true human signal is going to feel like digital archaeology. Moving forward, the premium won't be on the content itself, but on un-bottable reputation networks. We're going to have to care a lot more about who is signing the transaction than what the text actually says.
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