9 items tagged “slop”
Slop describes AI-generated content that is both unrequested and unreviewed. See Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content.
2024
Facebook Is the ’Zombie Internet’. Ever since Facebook started to become infested with weird AI-generated images of shrimp Jesus - with thousands of comments and likes - I've been wondering how much of that activity is real humans as opposed to yet more bots.
Jason Koebler has been on the Facebook AI slop beat for a while. In this superb piece of online investigative reporting he dives deep into an attempt to answer that question, using multiple Facebook burner accounts and contacting more than 300 users who have commented on that kind of image.
I endlessly tried to talk to people who commented on these images, but I had no luck at all. Over the course of several months, I messaged 300 people who commented on bizarre AI-generated images, which I could only do 20 or so at a time before Facebook stopped letting me send messages for several hours. I also commented on dozens of images myself, asking for any human who had also commented on the image to respond to me. Across those hundreds of messages, I got four total responses.
Jacob also talked to Khan Schoolcraft, a moderator of the Um, isn’t that AI? group, who said:
In my experience, the supermajority of engagement on viral AI Facebook pages is just as artificially-generated as the content they publish. When exploring their comment sections, one will often see hundreds of bot-like comments interspersed with a few ‘real’ people sounding the alarm to no avail. [...]
Whether it's a child transforming into a water bottle cyborg, a three-armed flight attendant rescuing Tiger Jesus from a muddy plane crash, or a hybrid human-monkey baby being stung to death by giant hornets, all tend to have copy+pasted captions, reactions & comments which usually make no sense in the observed context.
Early Apple tech bloggers are shocked to find their name and work have been AI-zombified (via)
TUAW (“The Unofficial Apple Weblog”) was shut down by AOL in 2015, but this past year, a new owner scooped up the domain and began posting articles under the bylines of former writers who haven’t worked there for over a decade.
They're using AI-generated images against real names of original contributors, then publishing LLM-rewritten articles because they didn't buy the rights to the original content!
Content slop has three important characteristics. The first being that, to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that particular content is being created. The next important feature of slop is that feels forced upon us, whether by a corporation or an algorithm. It’s in the name. We’re the little piggies and it’s the gruel in the trough. But the last feature is the most crucial. It not only feels worthless and ubiquitous, it also feels optimized to be so. The Charli XCX “Brat summer” meme does not feel like slop, nor does Kendrick Lamar’s extremely long “Not Like Us” roll out. But Taylor Swift’s cascade of alternate versions of her songs does. The jury’s still out on Sabrina Carpenter. Similarly, last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon did not, to me, feel like slop. Dune: Part Two didn’t either. But Deadpool & Wolverine, at least in the marketing, definitely does.
Open challenges for AI engineering
I gave the opening keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair yesterday. I was a late addition to the schedule: OpenAI pulled out of their slot at the last minute, and I was invited to put together a 20 minute talk with just under 24 hours notice!
[... 5,631 words]First Came ‘Spam.’ Now, With A.I., We’ve Got ‘Slop’. First the Guardian, now the NYT. I've apparently made a habit of getting quoted by journalists talking about slop!
I got the closing quote in this one:
Society needs concise ways to talk about modern A.I. — both the positives and the negatives. ‘Ignore that email, it’s spam,’ and ‘Ignore that article, it’s slop,’ are both useful lessons.
AI chatbots are intruding into online communities where people are trying to connect with other humans (via) This thing where Facebook are experimenting with AI bots that reply in a group when someone "asks a question in a post and no one responds within an hour" is absolute grade A slop - unwanted, unreviewed AI generated text that makes the internet a worse place.
The example where Meta AI replied in an education forum saying "I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T program" is inexcusable.
Spam, junk … slop? The latest wave of AI behind the ‘zombie internet’. I'm quoted in this piece in the Guardian about slop:
I think having a name for this is really important, because it gives people a concise way to talk about the problem.
Before the term ‘spam’ entered general use it wasn’t necessarily clear to everyone that unwanted marketing messages were a bad way to behave. I’m hoping ‘slop’ has the same impact – it can make it clear to people that generating and publishing unreviewed AI-generated content is bad behaviour.
Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content
I saw this tweet yesterday from @deepfates, and I am very on board with this:
[... 329 words]Watching in real time as "slop" becomes a term of art. the way that "spam" became the term for unwanted emails, "slop" is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content