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Monday, 20 January 2025

So what is slop then?

If you haven't heard of "slop" yet, I am sure you have seen it. Slop is AI generated crap, according to the 'founder' of the term, Simon Willison (Hern & Milmo, 2024). Think religious characters with lobster arms (Hern & Milmo, 2024; see image accompanying this post). Think people with ten fingers and dissolving faces. Think truckloads of babies (Rawhiti-Connell, 2024; see image accompanying this post). Slop. Using lots of generative AI computing power, even the least creative amongst us is able to create "low-quality content [...with a few commands which] allow[s] anyone who don't know a thing about the art to create their own slop" (Zhou et al., 2024, p. 5). Rawhiti-Connell compares the apparently run-away generative AI slop on Facebook to a hydra, where FB's policing people on minimum wage "cut off one head, [only to have] two more ads about witnessing your brother’s best friend masturbating appear" (2024).

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" (Hern & Milmo, 2024). A proxy for interaction, then. What is really interesting is that I don't think answering questions, serving needs or creating interaction was ever the reason for social media: it was always generating money through advertising placement. As Rawhiti-Connell says, we, the grazing herd, "are the product" (2024). 

Meta, dubious owner of equally dubious Facebook, reported the removal of "631 million fake accounts globally in the first quarter of 2024" for creating fake news stories related to celebrities: known as 'Celebcore' (Rawhiti-Connell, 2024), which is also slop. Crap that is all pixels and no actual content, created by generative AI to look like news, but to not actually be news. Apparently FB has become so rife with AI slop that it is turning into an AI ghost town (Rawhiti-Connell, 2024): but I have no personal knowledge of this as I left FB after the 2017 Cambridge Analytica scandal. It appears that social media platforms are increasingly full of "ads, and now, the plague-like sprawl of fake posts, bot-farmed engagement and meaningless imagery" with drivers to engagement being "outrage and anger" (Rawhiti-Connell, 2024). We really are sparking some useful emotions here :-)

Social media always was a "pseudo connection", but it is becoming more so as the clock ticks on. The "lucrative advertising business [of FB] sits flush alongside its transformation from a digital hub of genuine social interaction to a chaotic landfill of misinformation and AI-generated freak shows" (Rawhiti-Connell, 2024).

So I wonder what will happen when social media platforms are so full of slop that people stop coming to look at the ads?


Sam

References:

Hern, A., & Milmo, D. (2024, May 19). Spam, junk … slop? The latest wave of AI behind the ‘zombie internet’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/19/spam-junk-slop-the-latest-wave-of-ai-behind-the-zombie-internet

Rawhiti-Connell, A. (2024, July 9). Fake news, AI slop and little human connection: What is Facebook these days?. The Spinoff. https://thespinoff.co.nz/internet/09-07-2024/fake-news-ai-slop-and-little-human-connection-what-is-facebook-these-days

Zhou, K. Z., Choudhry, A., Gumusel, E., & Sanfilippo, M. R. (2024). "Sora is Incredible and Scary": Emerging Governance Challenges of Text-to-Video Generative AI Models. arXiv, Advance online publication. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.11859

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