14 ms·

A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

272 points by 65 2y ago

Swizec 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
- thih9 2y ago
  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.
- whstl 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
- cj 2y ago
  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.
Black616Angel 2y ago
[flagged]
Joeboy 2y ago
https://archive.ph/PueKj https://archive.ph/PueKj
GaggiX 2y ago
"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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
tldr: "slop" is defined as unwanted AI content
EForEndeavour 2y ago
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 2y ago
  - 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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.
duxup 2y ago
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.
- tananaev 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Good point. I do find myself sometimes even prompting for a shorter answer after it hits me with a blob of text ;)
    - moi2388 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        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.
verticalscaler 2y ago
[flagged]
justinclift 2y ago
Even Kagi has this crap too. :(
tkgally 2y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40301490
- atomicnumber3 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
    - gravescale 2y ago
      Or hacker for that matter. Actually "engineer" as well in countries where it's not protected. Though the confused look on my German housemate's face when an "engineer" turned up to connect the cable broadband cable to the property was pretty funny.
fullshark 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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.
tromp 2y ago
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-search-scams-chatgpt-2024-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-spam-google-ruin-internet... [2] https://www.ghostery.com/blog/how-to-prepare-for-ai-spam https://www.ghostery.com/blog/how-to-prepare-for-ai-spam [3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/13/google_ai_spam/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/13/google_ai_spam/
- duxup 2y ago
  IMO it's slightly different in terms of how it plays out so a new term seems reasonable.
- rdlw 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
ai4ever 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
SLOP: Judith Miller at the NY Times circa 2003
cletus 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > “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.”
willvarfar 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
  What happens if AI slop learns that I like accurate content and it suddenly gets good?
  - willvarfar 2y ago
    The incentives are not aligned. They are not optimizing strictly for your preferences, they have agendas they are paid by advertisers to push.
  - iAMkenough 2y ago
    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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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/ https://mailmanhq.com/
taco_emoji 2y ago
wish i could read the fucking paywalled article
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
See also: "botshit" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681324000272 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000768132...
novaRom 2y ago
Interestingly, this article itself is an example of "slop"
- simonw 2y ago
  Why?
tolerance 2y ago
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 2y ago
Google leading again on the minus side
yadaeno 2y ago
Slop is more of a term to describe extreme cost savings pushed onto consumers and marketed as “progress”.
pmdr 2y ago
We've been feeding it slop for years, if anything it's become better at writing it than us humans.
Havoc 2y ago
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 2y ago
Nice work Simon!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
eugenekolo 2y ago
Schlopp. Beautiful schlopp. Beautiful schlopp with a cherry on top.
coldblues 2y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyoNGSKWIaw
- neogodless 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  What I am thinking is bad cafeteria food. Something they slop on your plate from big container with zero ceremony. Which does not have any desirable, consistency, taste or colour...
- 2y ago
nateburke 2y ago
https://www.amazon.com/Really-Like-Slop-Elephant-Piggie/dp/1484722620 https://www.amazon.com/Really-Like-Slop-Elephant-Piggie/dp/1... Irrelevant, but also fantastic.
callamdelaney 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
It was slop before
sangnoir 2y ago
All I need is a Cloud-to-Butt-like browser plugin that replaces all instances of "GenAI" and "generative AI" with "AI slop"
iamleppert 2y ago
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 2y ago
If only we had an AI that could sift through all the slop and give us only the decent information that we wanted...
- reportgunner 2y ago
  Been reading too much slop lately eh ?
  - SirMaster 2y ago
    I just mean it seems AI are fairly good at sifting through and summarizing information, so it may be that the same AI that generate all this slop may also be able to be used to sift through all the slop to pick out only what we need and is relevant.
    - reportgunner 2y ago
      Sounds to me like you are trying to plug a hole by making a hole. I don't think AI is a perpetuum mobile for intellect.
PM_me_your_math 2y ago
[dead]
acureau 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.
- atrettel 2y ago
  Yes, this is not a new term. It's not hard to find earlier examples of the term "social media slop" to refer to endless posts on social media. A simple Google search for this reveals many examples of this particular term before 2022. I remember the term "slop" being used in the context of social media as a play on the idea of the "feed" giving you mass quantities of low-quality hogwash, etc.
xen2xen1 2y ago
But was the term coined by an AI?
southernplaces7 2y ago
I've been calling it sludge since it started to clog the internets all over the place (like cat photos but so much less cute or real). Slop works too though.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
compiler1410 2y ago
Like with all terms originating from 4chan, some people will try to reject it and make it the new n-word like they're paid to do this. The irony is they do it for free on a Friday afternoon. At the end of the day normal people who don't larp as Internet hall monitors don't care and adopt the term anyway. Many such cases. And people haven't learned in the 20 years this kept happening over and over again.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://web.archive.org/web/20240611214752if_/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/style/ai-search-slop.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240611214752if_/https://www.ny...
DoItToMe81 2y ago
'Slop' has been used to describe low quality, mass produced web content for at least five years. Media is behind the curve, as usual.
berniedurfee 2y ago
That’s not the four letter s-word I would have gone with.
bni 2y ago
BoomerArt slop

272 points by 65 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
thih9 2y ago
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.
whstl 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
cj 2y ago
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.

Black616Angel 2y ago

[flagged]

Joeboy 2y ago

https://archive.ph/PueKj https://archive.ph/PueKj

GaggiX 2y ago

"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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago

tldr: "slop" is defined as unwanted AI content

EForEndeavour 2y ago

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 2y ago
- 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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.

duxup 2y ago

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.

tananaev 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Good point. I do find myself sometimes even prompting for a shorter answer after it hits me with a blob of text ;)
  - moi2388 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      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.

verticalscaler 2y ago

[flagged]

justinclift 2y ago

Even Kagi has this crap too. :(

tkgally 2y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40301490

atomicnumber3 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - gravescale 2y ago
    Or hacker for that matter. Actually "engineer" as well in countries where it's not protected. Though the confused look on my German housemate's face when an "engineer" turned up to connect the cable broadband cable to the property was pretty funny.

fullshark 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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.

tromp 2y ago

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-search-scams-chatgpt-2024-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-spam-google-ruin-internet... [2] https://www.ghostery.com/blog/how-to-prepare-for-ai-spam https://www.ghostery.com/blog/how-to-prepare-for-ai-spam [3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/13/google_ai_spam/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/13/google_ai_spam/

duxup 2y ago
IMO it's slightly different in terms of how it plays out so a new term seems reasonable.
rdlw 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.

ai4ever 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

SLOP: Judith Miller at the NY Times circa 2003

cletus 2y ago

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 2y ago
> “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.”

willvarfar 2y ago

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 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 2y ago
What happens if AI slop learns that I like accurate content and it suddenly gets good?
- willvarfar 2y ago
  The incentives are not aligned. They are not optimizing strictly for your preferences, they have agendas they are paid by advertisers to push.
- iAMkenough 2y ago
  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 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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/ https://mailmanhq.com/

taco_emoji 2y ago

wish i could read the fucking paywalled article

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

See also: "botshit" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681324000272 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000768132...

novaRom 2y ago

Interestingly, this article itself is an example of "slop"

simonw 2y ago
Why?

tolerance 2y ago

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 2y ago

Google leading again on the minus side

yadaeno 2y ago

Slop is more of a term to describe extreme cost savings pushed onto consumers and marketed as “progress”.

pmdr 2y ago

We've been feeding it slop for years, if anything it's become better at writing it than us humans.

Havoc 2y ago

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 2y ago

Nice work Simon!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

eugenekolo 2y ago

Schlopp. Beautiful schlopp. Beautiful schlopp with a cherry on top.

coldblues 2y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyoNGSKWIaw

neogodless 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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.
Ekaros 2y ago
What I am thinking is bad cafeteria food. Something they slop on your plate from big container with zero ceremony. Which does not have any desirable, consistency, taste or colour...
2y ago

nateburke 2y ago

https://www.amazon.com/Really-Like-Slop-Elephant-Piggie/dp/1484722620 https://www.amazon.com/Really-Like-Slop-Elephant-Piggie/dp/1... Irrelevant, but also fantastic.

callamdelaney 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

It was slop before

sangnoir 2y ago

All I need is a Cloud-to-Butt-like browser plugin that replaces all instances of "GenAI" and "generative AI" with "AI slop"

iamleppert 2y ago

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 2y ago

If only we had an AI that could sift through all the slop and give us only the decent information that we wanted...

reportgunner 2y ago
Been reading too much slop lately eh ?
- SirMaster 2y ago
  I just mean it seems AI are fairly good at sifting through and summarizing information, so it may be that the same AI that generate all this slop may also be able to be used to sift through all the slop to pick out only what we need and is relevant.
  - reportgunner 2y ago
    Sounds to me like you are trying to plug a hole by making a hole. I don't think AI is a perpetuum mobile for intellect.

PM_me_your_math 2y ago

[dead]

acureau 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.

atrettel 2y ago
Yes, this is not a new term. It's not hard to find earlier examples of the term "social media slop" to refer to endless posts on social media. A simple Google search for this reveals many examples of this particular term before 2022. I remember the term "slop" being used in the context of social media as a play on the idea of the "feed" giving you mass quantities of low-quality hogwash, etc.

xen2xen1 2y ago

But was the term coined by an AI?

southernplaces7 2y ago

I've been calling it sludge since it started to clog the internets all over the place (like cat photos but so much less cute or real). Slop works too though.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

compiler1410 2y ago

Like with all terms originating from 4chan, some people will try to reject it and make it the new n-word like they're paid to do this. The irony is they do it for free on a Friday afternoon. At the end of the day normal people who don't larp as Internet hall monitors don't care and adopt the term anyway. Many such cases. And people haven't learned in the 20 years this kept happening over and over again.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://web.archive.org/web/20240611214752if_/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/style/ai-search-slop.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240611214752if_/https://www.ny...

DoItToMe81 2y ago

'Slop' has been used to describe low quality, mass produced web content for at least five years. Media is behind the curve, as usual.

berniedurfee 2y ago

That’s not the four letter s-word I would have gone with.

bni 2y ago

BoomerArt slop