Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see

Ironically given the topic, the very first sentence on the page ("The size of your plate can influence how much food you eat.") is based on observational research that has not replicated in controlled studies. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2129126/ [1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12966-019-0826-1?u...

Side note: I love the imperfect fonts and old school design of the website. For years I've been looking for ways to re-create old book style text and graphs in the digital era. This gets so close to that vision.

I don't agree with the article that the top couple content creators can walk away and kill a platform. Vine committed suicide for no real reason, it's a pretty poor example to point to. Nowadays on any top social media there's 1-3% of creators making the vast majority of popular content, but more importantly, there's another 15% of people out there who are vying to try and take their spots and will gladly fill the void should the top creators leave. They're mostly just not doing well because the top is being crowded out (and the algorithm keeps it that way), not for lack of trying.

It’s fast food content. Convenient, cheap, fast, tasty, but also monotonous, unsophisticated, unhealthy, habit-forming.

People consume more and more of it until they get sick, and even then won’t stop.

And it's just the beginning, I expect around 95 percent of new content will be ai in a few years. From comments to videos to blog posts

> Outside of our FYPs you'll find a surplus of art, essays, articles, and videos just waiting to be discovered

I like the article, but its annoying to say "it's there!" as if most of these these alternate sources aren't mostly on other social media sites or dying a slow death

From a personal perspective:

I have a niche Instagram account that goes out to find content and then "reposts" it. There were several fun aspects of this e.g. finding good content, writing my own little algorithm to prioritize contents from older posts on smaller accounts etc.

Lately, much as others have said, you are seeing entire accounts of AI generated images that are high quality, near photo realistic and consistent e.g. it looks like the same person in different scenes/times of day etc

You sometimes hear the quote about "pre-war steel" that hadn't been hit by radiation and that's EXACTLY what it feels like looking for an account with posts from before ~2022.

I wonder if the above means that people are going to spend less time online and prioritize "in real life" events or if the slop is just going to get more addicted.

Probably a mix of both in the same way that Tough Mudder/Spartan Races became popular while at the same time the number of other people NOT leaving their houses went up.

The thing I hate and this article kind of gets at in a roundabout way is how much slop is encouraged by the algorithm if you are a creator.

I've mentioned on this account a bunch of times I'm a very small-scale content creator (4 digit follower count) that has never monetized or really tried to monetize - making content, even if no one or very few people watch it is a hobby I just enjoy whether I make money or not.

Recently though it's been pointed out to me in harsh ways I could be easily growing if I tried a little harder, so I've invested more resources into the channel, equipment, actually trying growth, etc.

What I have noticed is that the content I make often or usually has to change in ways the FYP algorithm likes, or it will be lost into the ether, no matter how much money I put into it. So in a way the FYP is deciding which content it likes, which affects what creators put out, which to me destroys the entire creative process and makes slop necessary. I deeply resent it, I don't want to participate in it, and a decision inevitably gets made where you have to be like "do I want to get bigger and make money, or do I want to make the content I want to make?" Only the very, very lucky get both if you're on one of these major platforms.

One thing I particularly hated was as a twitch partner I notice that if I show ads, more traffic is then driven to my channel. That fundamentally compromises my content IMO. I understand why they as a business would want me to show ads, but I very much do not want to show them. Yes, I can migrate or try to host my own content, so I am accepting this reality by staying, but it wasn't always this way.

> We are over consuming content on the FYP. The sudden surge of low-quality, AI-generated content, i.e. “AI slop,” is a byproduct of that overconsumption.

It is worse, because even if you scroll down 1000 videos, human-generated, a few of them may be useful. With AI slop, we now have a spam of low quality crap that just wastes time. They are ruining the world wide web right now. Yesterday was the first time Qwant delivered better results than Google search. I am scared.

Synthetic data for human (machine) learning... We should spend more time outside, we will!

The upshot is that having everything be AI slop could be what breaks our collective addiction to chronic screen time/usage.

> If it were up to TikTok and Meta, our feeds would be exclusively robot-made. Humans are a variable they cannot control, and I think they despise us for it.

OpenAI’s Sora mobile app is the experiment to see if human beings will tolerate total AI content consumption. We’ll see how that will go.

But where we're going, we don't need eyes to see...

AI has made me hate real people even more that I already did. Constantly seeing human behavior emulated amplifies how much real people are on auto-pilot, even (especially?) the parts that make them "them".

>Creativity isn't scalable. Content creation has a hard productivity ceiling. Every human-created video on our feeds require some level of writing, production, and editing. Yet the For You Page has made the content consumption so efficient, that perhaps demand has exceeded supply.

I would have thought the opposite, the supply exceeded demand, driving the price so low so as to not be able to reward quality creators and/or curators. After all, demand has a hard ceiling at 24 hours per day.

I mean sure, this is trivially true, but there's some nuance here. For example, I could find slop in the above threads. Ultimately, while slop, we have to focus on outcomes. If they produce content with some truth in them, they're truthful, regardless of whether an AI agent did or didn't write them. As for 'eyes to see', I think ignorise is bliss here. If a tree falls in a forest, and someone sees it but can't understand the tree has fallen, what's the point discussing the demerits of felling trees?

Off topic and doesn't impact the validity (or lack thereof) of the post. Just reactionary whining really...

For the love of all that is good, "exacerbated" and "exasperated" are different words.

We've already screwed up "home in on" by allowing the horrid "hone in" to horn in our lexicons. On a side note, watch out for those honing pigeons, they've got very sharp beaks.

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If you don't like the "slop" you can probably "avert thine eyes"

From the Article:

> Olive oil, wasabi, saffron, vanilla, Wagyu, honey, champagne, and truffle,...reality TV

from AI:

> lobster was once considered "garbage meat," so abundant in colonial America that it was fed to prisoners, slaves, and servants, sometimes leading to complaints and even laws limiting its servings

The decision that something is slop or good is subjective and ever changing.

If you spend your time worrying about what TikTok videos other people watch you've probably got too much time on your hands.