<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/19/spam-junk-slop-the-latest-wave-of-ai-behind-the-zombie-internet>
"Your email inbox is full of spam. Your letterbox is full of junk mail. Now,
your web browser has its own affliction: slop.
“Slop” is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence-generated
material up on the web for anyone to view.
Unlike a chatbot, the slop isn’t interactive, and is rarely intended to
actually answer readers’ questions or serve their needs.
Instead, it functions mostly to create the appearance of human-made content,
benefit from advertising revenue and steer search engine attention towards
other sites.
Just like spam, almost no one wants to view slop, but the economics of the
internet lead to its creation anyway. AI models make it trivial to
automatically generate vast quantities of text or images, providing an answer
to any imaginable search query, uploading endless shareable landscapes and
inspirational stories, and creating an army of supportive comments. If just a
handful of users land on the site, reshare the meme or click through the
adverts hosted, the cost of its creation pays off.
But like spam, its overall effect is negative: the lost time and effort of
users who now have to wade through slop to find the content they’re actually
seeking far outweighs the profit to the slop creator.
“I think having a name for this is really important, because it gives people a
concise way to talk about the problem,” says the developer Simon Willison, one
of the early proponents of the term “slop”.
“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 most obviously harmful when it is just plain wrong. Willison pointed to
an AI-generated
Microsoft Travel article that listed the “Ottawa food bank”
as a must-see attraction in the Canadian capital as a perfect example of the
problem. Occasionally, a piece of slop is so useless that it goes viral in its
own right, like the careers advice article that earnestly explains the
punchline to a decades-old newspaper comic: “they pay me in woims”.
“While the precise meaning of ‘They Pay Me in Woims’ remains ambiguous, various
interpretations have emerged, ranging from a playful comment on work-life
balance to a deeper exploration of our perceived reality,” the slop begins."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
