The fediverse used to feel pretty anti-ai, but over the past month or two I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and images, and they tend to have positive votes.
Has there been a sudden culture shift here? Or is there a substantial percentage of people just unable to tell the difference anymore?
“slop” is being thrown around just like “socialist” and “gay”. Save it for actual AI slop. Just because something is made by AI doesn’t make it automatically “slop” 🙄
There’s always been plenty of human-made content that is slop. AI is just another tool to make easy content. Trying to categorize everything done with AI as slop is lazy and shifting blame, ignoring the difficulty in both moderating large volume as well as the lack of a definition of what is and isn’t “good”. Which really ends up coming back to the individual, who has means to shut out places that are regularly a problem to them.
God I remember deep fried memes. That was around when i decided humanity needed to be reset.
I’m referring to stuff that I consider low quality. I don’t mind if something is generated, as long as it is labeled as such and is interesting or valuable in some way.
How would you use that term? Would you call “slop” something that was just mindlessly generated using AI in a single prompt and non-“slop” something that uses AI in more sophisticated/deliberate ways? What is the threshold of something being “slop” ultimately? Is this just result not looking decent enough or amount of effort combined with amount of knowledge and experience that was used to create that? I’m personally conflicted on this, because sometimes even mindless prompt may give great result, and sometimes a lot of manual effort may give shit result. I guess with “slop” I tend to gravitate towards “amount of effort combined with amount of knowledge and experience that was used to create” and perhaps also the amount of content that particular person produces and speed of its production. So if someone is really good with some tools (not necessarily AI) and figured some overpowered shortcuts that allow to produce results very fast with little effort, it also can be called “slop” just for the rate of production alone.
It’s always kind of hard to nail down trendy slang terms, but from what I’ve gathered, and the interpretation I think is useful, is less to do with AI, quality, or effort (although those are certainly common elements of slop) and more to do with what the thing’s role is. What was it made for? What is expected of the audience? Regular art or non-fiction stuff is meant to communicate something to its audience. An emotion, an idea, etc. it requires the audience to engage with it if only in a fairly limited way.
Slop, by contrast, is a product meant to take advantage of the increasingly marketized internet. It’s there merely to capture some small share of the attention economy on a mass scale. It’s not trying to communicate anything to the audience, what it specifically is doesn’t matter, it’s just, to play into the metaphor, feed to fill the trough so people stick around and keep paying, generating data, or looking at ads. All that matters is that it takes up space. It requires nothing of it’s audience, in fact it’s probably advantageous that they don’t spend too much time looking at it, lest they notice how vacuous it is.
Under this definition, we can better sort things out. Someone making art because they want to share an idea or feelings but they use AI because they don’t have the skill to make it themselves? Not slop. Someone making propaganda or misinformation? Not good, but also not slop. It has a purpose which couldn’t be achieved if someone scrolled by it after a second.
Meanwhile, this definition can identify slop, or at least slop-like elements, in other pieces of media you may not have considered. Streaming services have been making movies and TV differently based around the assumption that the audience isn’t actually going to be paying that much attention, so either the content needs to be really attention grabbing, or it needs to be so unremarkable that you get as much out of it while looking at your phone as you would actually giving it your full attention. They make all of this because it’s a cheap way to make it look like their service has a lot to watch so that people keep subscribing. They don’t even necessarily need people to watch it for it to achieve its goal. Just having it existing in the service gives the appearance of value they’re going for.
That output is what matters, because there’s no way for us to see the input. How are you going to know what words somebody used to generate an AI image?
Slop to me is a simple, low-quality, repetitive output. So, it’s not just one simple, low-quality medium but many. Looks at this video for examples. Or just scroll youtube shorts after searching for anything Indian or even literally “omg look at this” for the search term and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
If you have a hard time telling whether AI did it or not, it’s not slop.
I understand your point of view. But would you call something complex, high-quality, but repetitive, slop? And the same question, but if the person who produces it, does it extremely fast.
If you went to a restaurant that made a high-quality, complex soup, for hundreds of customers per day with the help of machines, would you call it slop? I wouldn’t.
If the restaurant however made ramen from packets, threw in some starch to make it thicker, and they had a nice big ladle to slap that liquid into a vessel with a nice sound, I would for sure call that slop.
This is where the fundamental difference in attribution of connotations lies. From what you say, you perceive the term “slop” as a direct synonym to “low quality”, without any extras. I perceive it as something more of a synonym to “repetitive” but with extra connotations, the most accurate common divisor of which is “repetitive content produced at speeds suggesting low effort”.
I somewhat agree. It’s overused