Is "AI slop" enough?
24d 23h ago by lemmy.eco.br/u/flango in asklemmy@lemmy.ml
AI companies and users of AI are littering all aspects of public space with "AI slop", but does this term reflect what it really is? We have terms like visual pollution, sound pollution, etc. In a way, "AI pollution " seems a proper term, but AI also pollutes meaning, like with AI generated text. Is AI pollution a new form of "microplastics"? Everywhere and in everything?
When naming something, not only should you make sure it clearly describes the thing but doesn't describe anything else. "AI pollution" sounds just as much like something that pollutes AI (for example, training it with false information), much like how "air pollution" is stuff that pollutes air.
I think slop is a good word, its funny and condecending. Pollution just doesnt hit the "fuck you and your shitty product" spot the same way slop does.
Yes, slop is good for this purpose. I’m sticking with slop. Slop it top.
Information pollution.
Saying "AI pollution" would be like saying "microplastics pollution" -- we generally refer to the thing being polluted, not the pollutant.
AI slop is called that because it’s meant to be consumed as slop has always meant mediocre food served to the masses. Pollution is not meant to be consumed since it’s a byproduct of consumption.
Thought pollution
I feel like this is another example of a topic title with a different question than the body.
I interpreted the title ask asking something like whether "AI slop" is good enough. Or asking if "AI slop" is where the technology peaks. (As in, is AI slop enough, or can we do more with AI models?)
I feel like it's yet another a thinly-veiled rant disguised as a question. Which is not to say I disagree with their premise, but there has to be a better community for this soapbox stuff.
They should've just made the topic more obvious. I don't have a problem if people want to have a circlejerk around hating AI, even in this community, but make it clear that's what it is.
"Should we be calling it something worse than "AI slop"?"
Then everybody who's into that kind of fun will join, and anybody who's not interested can move on, lol
I think AI is still in its infancy and we have yet to know it's full potential. Nevertheless, I have a love-hate relationship with AI.
Ironically, I see far more visual pollution from people whinging about AI slop than actual AI slop at this point. People will incessantly complain about AI everywhere, derailing conversations and adding noise. If somebody spots an em dash somewhere then a whole thread turns into a discussion of whether something written by an LLM or not, and whether it's acceptable for humans to use em dashes. It's frankly exhausting.
To be fair, I think this is a Lemmy issues moreso than the broader internet. I could be totally off base there, though. It just seems in my experience that Lemmy is particularly anti AI, while the rest of the Internet seems to be fairly neutral towards the technology as a whole, and potentially upset about the environmental impact and increasing prices for computer components.
Again, I may be off base, though, as Lemmy is the only social media I use, so I'm not tapped into that side of things.
I will say, if I notice people use the word "quietly" (as in "it will quietly revolutionize X" or "this has quietly changed my habits") I do immediate assume it's Chatgpt. Lol. And for what it's worth, I'm not against AI in general, I think it's great as a brain storming tool, a useful way to collect your thoughts, to bounce ideas off of, and to use when stuck on a project. But it's uses are so limited compared to what it's billed as that it is in no way this magical gift from on high like some think, but nor is it a completely and totally useless thing. The problem is that it's being shoved down the throat of every website, device, and user of the Internet at such incredible rates that we're choking on it. And the fact that it can "talk" like a person means people are anthropomorphizing it and that is very, very dangerous long term to the mental health of humans as a whole.
My $0.02, anyway
Yeah that's definitely my impression as well. Fediverse as a whole has become a place where people love to come to rant about LLMs now.
Yeah you're going to keep hearing us because ai sucks ass.
People who add vapid noise to threads because of their personal pet peeve suck way more ass than AI ever could.
People who keep engaging while pretending to be the one rising above it. Gotta be my favorite gender.
I'm not pretending to be above it.
Noetic pollution.
I think this is an interesting philosophical question, because I would guess that because I think AI slop and AI pollution are the same thing, I react the same way to either of the spellings. But I can also immediately see how AI pollution sounds worse because it's connected to pollution. In conclusion, I should not think of myself as more "rational" than I am, where by rational I really mean "able to control the meaning categories that my brain uses".
AI corruption
AI slop implies the problem is that the audience likes it, and to some that is the problem, but the real issue is how difficult it makes it to find the stuff you actually want to see. "AI spam" is the term I default to using.
xô, flango
I might just start calling it that.
We might want two separate terms: one for the personal ways that AI slop infects and manipulates your mind, and another for the way it makes the wider cultural landscape difficult to navigate by adding noise and intercepting your attempts to find the original sources of concepts or artifacts which might bring you into a community (and the fact that these communities are now all playing defense because of the everlasting scraping DDoS).
I’m concerned about the former because I think it might make doing anything at all much more difficult.
But I’m concerned about the latter because we… don’t really know how much pollution culture can withstand before collapsing. We may already be in the early stages of something like Kessler Syndrome but for communications.