It’s worth noting that ‘slop’ has an earlier, if somewhat related, meaning in describing the base, retention-farming content you find on platforms like Tiktok or Youtube Shorts.
‘Somewhat related’ insofar as I think it’s the case the scripts, or ideas, for content farms that put out ‘slop’ were an early use-case for DNN-assisted content production. Alternatively, you could think of these platforms as maximising for retention, which gels with the analogy of DNNs as highly general optimisers.
A common example is using “oddly satisfying” or “minecraft parkour” or “subway surfer” as background content, then select a recent top post from a popular reddit post and have a TTS narrate one of the top comments.
You can make 10 videos for the top 10 comments on the post, if you go for the top 14 posts and go by “top daily”, you can make 20 posts a day for 0 investment. Most of this can be automated.
There is scripts that will use recent news headlines to pick a topic via ChatGPT and have it generate a script that is then narrated by TTS and videofied by adding more filler content (“minecraft parkour”).
There isn’t even the effort of narrating the video by a VA of any sort (even if it’s the creator themselves) or collecting their own video footage.
The videos tend to be not terribly long, 20-30 seconds or so. The way the topic is picked ensures it is likely to be interesting and the background video tends to keep things more busy than they really are. As a result, they get to take 30 seconds of your attention span in exchange for ad revenue.
They’re farming for the 30 seconds of attention it requires to rake in ad money, nothing more.
Exactly. That makes this proposal not very sensible. It’s like if I said “Swiftie is the new name for a fan of the Swift programming language” or “parallelism is the new name for concurrency.”
my favourite quote on AI-generated content (and if someone can remember who said it i would be grateful!) is “if no one could be bothered to write it, i certainly can’t be bothered to read it”.
reminds me a bit of “laser sludge”, pages printed with every possible font, colour, effect and clipart you could cram in there, just because the laser printer and associated desktop publishing programs made it easy to do. now we are going to have the textual equivalent of that because AI makes it easy to do.
Side note: thank you for talking about AI with some nuance. Feels like everything I read either lauds it as the greatest thing ever, especially In The Future, or the worst thing ever.
He’s proposing “slop” for “unwanted AI generated content” and “slom” for “spam that was generated with AI tools”. The Venn diagram explains this better.
Edit: I think the difference is:
“slop”: I copy your post into GPT, ask it for a smart-sounding comeback, and paste the reply back at you with minimal editing.
“slom”: I write a bot which takes every comment, pipes it into GPT with the instructions to plug AlexVPN as the pro way for marine-based arthropods to browse the Internet.
Like, wanted AI-generated content is a thing that exists?
As soon as I figure out something is AI generated, I skip. In fact the worst thing you can do to me is to have me read something where I’ll assume it’s not AI generated because of the context and then find out later that it was.
I posted this because I personally have been working on an AI-generated podcast. It’s actually not bad, I promise! It just has two “hosts” talking about today’s tech news. But because it says it’s AI-generated, I believe most people just tune it out.
On the other hand, I have an AI-generated band on Spotify and it does ok (about 10k streams per month). I suspect on that platform most people just listen to whatever and don’t read the description or Google the band name :).
Anyway if I can do this stuff in my free time just as an experiment, the internet is going to be absolutely flooded with slop in a few years. Not sure how we’ll cope.
I’m only doing a few small experiments, and I’m disclosing that it’s AI. Also the podcast is surprisingly good, you really wouldn’t know it’s AI unless it told you.
I came up with the following alternative terms a while back:
This is fantastic! I will be using it in a discussion tomorrow.
Whatever you call it, it should be grounds for a shadowban.
Can you work Pink Slime into one of these?
I love this! Spam is so 90s, in 2024 we have Slop.
It’s worth noting that ‘slop’ has an earlier, if somewhat related, meaning in describing the base, retention-farming content you find on platforms like Tiktok or Youtube Shorts.
‘Somewhat related’ insofar as I think it’s the case the scripts, or ideas, for content farms that put out ‘slop’ were an early use-case for DNN-assisted content production. Alternatively, you could think of these platforms as maximising for retention, which gels with the analogy of DNNs as highly general optimisers.
I heard that called ‘sludge’.
What classifies content as “retention farming”?
For me it’s extremely low effort posting.
A common example is using “oddly satisfying” or “minecraft parkour” or “subway surfer” as background content, then select a recent top post from a popular reddit post and have a TTS narrate one of the top comments.
You can make 10 videos for the top 10 comments on the post, if you go for the top 14 posts and go by “top daily”, you can make 20 posts a day for 0 investment. Most of this can be automated.
There is scripts that will use recent news headlines to pick a topic via ChatGPT and have it generate a script that is then narrated by TTS and videofied by adding more filler content (“minecraft parkour”).
There isn’t even the effort of narrating the video by a VA of any sort (even if it’s the creator themselves) or collecting their own video footage.
Why would posting garbage increase retention? Or am I misunderstanding?
The videos tend to be not terribly long, 20-30 seconds or so. The way the topic is picked ensures it is likely to be interesting and the background video tends to keep things more busy than they really are. As a result, they get to take 30 seconds of your attention span in exchange for ad revenue.
They’re farming for the 30 seconds of attention it requires to rake in ad money, nothing more.
Oh, I thought the “retention” implied that they are somehow optimizing to keep their followers.
I’m pretty sure that is meant to say “attention”, not “retention”.
Exactly. That makes this proposal not very sensible. It’s like if I said “Swiftie is the new name for a fan of the Swift programming language” or “parallelism is the new name for concurrency.”
my favourite quote on AI-generated content (and if someone can remember who said it i would be grateful!) is “if no one could be bothered to write it, i certainly can’t be bothered to read it”.
reminds me a bit of “laser sludge”, pages printed with every possible font, colour, effect and clipart you could cram in there, just because the laser printer and associated desktop publishing programs made it easy to do. now we are going to have the textual equivalent of that because AI makes it easy to do.
He seems to have auto-corrected the title of his own blog post, and was in fact suggesting “slom”.
The blog post was about slop. I added the last little bit about slom as an update later on, mainly because I liked the venn diagram I made.
Side note: thank you for talking about AI with some nuance. Feels like everything I read either lauds it as the greatest thing ever, especially In The Future, or the worst thing ever.
Aha! All becomes clear. Thank you for the explanation.
He’s proposing “slop” for “unwanted AI generated content” and “slom” for “spam that was generated with AI tools”. The Venn diagram explains this better.
Edit: I think the difference is:
“slop”: I copy your post into GPT, ask it for a smart-sounding comeback, and paste the reply back at you with minimal editing.
“slom”: I write a bot which takes every comment, pipes it into GPT with the instructions to plug AlexVPN as the pro way for marine-based arthropods to browse the Internet.
Why not slurm instead of slom?
Because that is the perfectly respectable Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management!
Already exists (and named after the Futurama soda): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slurm_Workload_Manager
Like, wanted AI-generated content is a thing that exists?
As soon as I figure out something is AI generated, I skip. In fact the worst thing you can do to me is to have me read something where I’ll assume it’s not AI generated because of the context and then find out later that it was.
There are non-text types of content too, e.g. illustrations.
I posted this because I personally have been working on an AI-generated podcast. It’s actually not bad, I promise! It just has two “hosts” talking about today’s tech news. But because it says it’s AI-generated, I believe most people just tune it out.
On the other hand, I have an AI-generated band on Spotify and it does ok (about 10k streams per month). I suspect on that platform most people just listen to whatever and don’t read the description or Google the band name :).
Anyway if I can do this stuff in my free time just as an experiment, the internet is going to be absolutely flooded with slop in a few years. Not sure how we’ll cope.
why are you helping it along?
I’m only doing a few small experiments, and I’m disclosing that it’s AI. Also the podcast is surprisingly good, you really wouldn’t know it’s AI unless it told you.
Don’t leave us hanging, what’s the band name
The band is Aristocrat Monks
The podcast is Quacker News (it isn’t actually available on any podcast site, have to go to the web site)