4 ms·

so as I understand it from reading through but maybe I have made a mistake, they didn't actually unslop anything, they made slop and the best slop won? If it w

so as I understand it from reading through but maybe I have made a mistake, they didn't actually unslop anything, they made slop and the best slop won? If it was to unslop I would expect: 1. Prompts done as in original 2. Stories chosen best of slopped. Then the person who wrote prompt gets to choose someone, not themselves, to take story and "unslop" it. 3. Prizes for prompt. Best unslopped version. Metrics for best unslopped version is of course how good it was, but also how much work was done to unslop it, if you basically rewrote everything and it was as if you took the prompt and wrote your own story that would decrease value of unslopping. obviously above just suggestions for how I think an unslopping contest would actually work.

yreg 4mo ago
I feel like 'slop' increasingly means two separate concepts and it tires me a bit. A) AI produced output that is low quality in some jarring aspects B) Any AI output whatsoever regardless of quality
- bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
  well, I guess it depends on how you use it, is it a noun or a verb. If a verb unslop means to reverse. I thought that was a more interesting idea. As a noun I think you would not use unslop to mean the opposite of slop but rather non-slop. Based on my grammatical preconceptions of how I would use slop I felt that unslop had to be a verb, and the contest should somehow reflect that.
- solid_fuel 4mo ago
  I have tried to draw a distinction between the two but honestly, when it comes to art, I cannot. I have seen LLM generated code that I find acceptable, and don't call slop, but art needs a certain level of emotion and shared experience to be compelling. I have never managed to connect to LLM writing, it always comes off as shallow and vapid.
  - yreg 4mo ago
    > I have never managed to connect to LLM writing, it always comes off as shallow and vapid. Me too, but I would be careful about being too dismissive, because I would totally bet that at some point the models will be able to write top tier stories. And there will be people who will find those stories soulless purely based on their origin (which is completely fine!) and call them slop (which I feel hurts the language).
    - solid_fuel 4mo ago
      > Me too, but I would be careful about being too dismissive, because I would totally bet that at some point the models will be able to write top tier stories. Maybe. I'm not certain that the mathematical average of writing is ever going to be all that great. However I'm willing to update my stance the day an LLM writes a story that makes me cry. Until then I am going to be a bit stubborn about it.
    - slfnflctd 4mo ago
      Let's also not forget that humans are more than capable of creating tons of 'slop' far worse than any current SOTA model would create, and I would argue the majority of what people write is in this category. Models are still improving, and if you can't tell whether one was behind what you're currently reading 100% of the time (which I'm sure you know you can't), the distinction no longer matters except in very specific cases, and you have to go to a lot more effort to uncover that distinction.
  - networked 4mo ago
    What do you think of https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples as a theory of what makes slop art slop? Summary: > AI slop is unsatisfying because there is no there there. It is intellectual junk food that mimics nutrition but delivers only empty calories. Satisfying AI outputs must embed dense information and compute to actually reward a reader's attention. You inject this value through brute-force search, non-trivial prompting, and rigorous curation, ensuring the final result reflects genuine algorithmic effort rather than the zero-shot 'WYSIWYG' default.
- bertylicious 4mo ago
  How would you define high-quality LLM output? How do you differentiate it from LLM slop? I think all LLM output used "as is" for content/entertainment/art is slop.
- rpastuszak 4mo ago
  Another meaning that is becoming more common, esp. among gen-z/booktok folks: overly verbose/poorly structured/flat writing. The example being Duma's Count Monte Cristo.
- rpdillon 4mo ago
  Yeah, the laziness of detractors in their language around "slop" frustrates me. It amounts to a constant stream of shallow dismissals.
  - yreg 4mo ago
    I feel exactly the same. Can I follow what you are working on (in regards the AI-assisted writing) somewhere?

yreg 4mo ago

I feel like 'slop' increasingly means two separate concepts and it tires me a bit. A) AI produced output that is low quality in some jarring aspects B) Any AI output whatsoever regardless of quality

bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
well, I guess it depends on how you use it, is it a noun or a verb. If a verb unslop means to reverse. I thought that was a more interesting idea. As a noun I think you would not use unslop to mean the opposite of slop but rather non-slop. Based on my grammatical preconceptions of how I would use slop I felt that unslop had to be a verb, and the contest should somehow reflect that.
solid_fuel 4mo ago
I have tried to draw a distinction between the two but honestly, when it comes to art, I cannot. I have seen LLM generated code that I find acceptable, and don't call slop, but art needs a certain level of emotion and shared experience to be compelling. I have never managed to connect to LLM writing, it always comes off as shallow and vapid.
- yreg 4mo ago
  > I have never managed to connect to LLM writing, it always comes off as shallow and vapid. Me too, but I would be careful about being too dismissive, because I would totally bet that at some point the models will be able to write top tier stories. And there will be people who will find those stories soulless purely based on their origin (which is completely fine!) and call them slop (which I feel hurts the language).
  - solid_fuel 4mo ago
    > Me too, but I would be careful about being too dismissive, because I would totally bet that at some point the models will be able to write top tier stories. Maybe. I'm not certain that the mathematical average of writing is ever going to be all that great. However I'm willing to update my stance the day an LLM writes a story that makes me cry. Until then I am going to be a bit stubborn about it.
  - slfnflctd 4mo ago
    Let's also not forget that humans are more than capable of creating tons of 'slop' far worse than any current SOTA model would create, and I would argue the majority of what people write is in this category. Models are still improving, and if you can't tell whether one was behind what you're currently reading 100% of the time (which I'm sure you know you can't), the distinction no longer matters except in very specific cases, and you have to go to a lot more effort to uncover that distinction.
- networked 4mo ago
  What do you think of https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples as a theory of what makes slop art slop? Summary: > AI slop is unsatisfying because there is no there there. It is intellectual junk food that mimics nutrition but delivers only empty calories. Satisfying AI outputs must embed dense information and compute to actually reward a reader's attention. You inject this value through brute-force search, non-trivial prompting, and rigorous curation, ensuring the final result reflects genuine algorithmic effort rather than the zero-shot 'WYSIWYG' default.
bertylicious 4mo ago
How would you define high-quality LLM output? How do you differentiate it from LLM slop? I think all LLM output used "as is" for content/entertainment/art is slop.
rpastuszak 4mo ago
Another meaning that is becoming more common, esp. among gen-z/booktok folks: overly verbose/poorly structured/flat writing. The example being Duma's Count Monte Cristo.
rpdillon 4mo ago
Yeah, the laziness of detractors in their language around "slop" frustrates me. It amounts to a constant stream of shallow dismissals.
- yreg 4mo ago
  I feel exactly the same. Can I follow what you are working on (in regards the AI-assisted writing) somewhere?