Slop Slop Slop!

There’s a new word in town: slop!

slop is rapidly taking the Fediverse, blogging scene (lol) and Twitter by storm as a term for AI-generated trash text: basically AI spam.

The first mention I’ve seen is of a Twitter post by @deepfates https://twitter.com/deepfates/status/1787472784106639418, which I saw shared on Mastodon by Simon Willison https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/112402587787781767. I like the term, it’s catchy and short and there’s already a ton of slop on the WWW.

Yesterday I quoted “Heat Death of the Internet” and – quoting it again – there’s also a passage about AI in it, which fits the slop problem perfectly:

The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.

via https://www.takahe.org.nz/heat-death-of-the-internet/

While AI is the next cool hype and all is well now (all it is not well), AI companies really need to be careful from where they steal their training data. The point of AI generated content everywhere is approaching, and I can’t wait to see the next big LLM trained on slop spitting out bullshit.