The problem is that dopamine addicts generate outsized engagement. I know a literal crack mom who spends a solid 90+ hours a week watching accident videos to keep her brain triggered. The algorithm caters to her. Send promotional emails daily or more, constant notifications, recommend the same few videos over and over. Gotta get in there before she clicks another car crash video.
IMHO: Marketing is a top societal evil right now. If the media machine wasn't so desperate for content, AI wouldn't be a fraction of the problem it is. But with everyone obsessing over the next piece of content, fake AI presentations are mandatory.
Spelled "profitable". This is definitely something that's already happened/happening; see algorithmic timelines and the widespread sudden legalization and acceptance of gambling.
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Though I’m starting to think that AI might improve faster than us so there might only be a diminishing margin of opportunity left to do this.
Eventually we’ll realize we can just send the bullet points and generate the prose on the receiving side. This will be great because most of the time the AI’s will be able to say “let’s just be a nop.”
I am less optimistic than the comic.
The algorithm is being trained solely for engagement. It is horrifying.
The Slop is the wordy vapid garbage that maximizes SEO.
Also, we have to look at the incentives: advertisement. Somehow, this is acceptable to consumers, profitable for companies and profitable for publishers. How, is absolutely beyond me... and it won't change so long as Google has a majority in the "search"-space as they are directly profiting from this.
It’s the reason advertising costs have ballooned digitally, and also the cause of many lawsuits that Google continues downplaying in the public eye.
What kills me is I have to hunt for the answer in Quora now. I just treat quora like I do pinterest, just back out and never return.
For me, it's one of those "quality of life" things that really improves my search experience (and is therefore worth paying for).
(And people have been giving me identical response with "advertising" in place of "marketing" for years now, so I'll say yes to both; the terms are effectively interchangeable in both motte and bailey cases.)
I do find myself sometimes even prompting for a shorter answer after it hits me with a blob of text ;)
Wot now? Somehow I managed to completely miss that.
Edit: ah, seems like it's mainly a twitter thing. That explains it.
But, consider that all that crap ended up on the web for a reason, and wonder how long before AI just injects it itself into its own results.
- 10 seconds intro
- 10 seconds yoooo guys wassss up
- 30 seconds build up
- 30 seconds showing what the answer will do
- 30 seconds encouraging you to post comments to the video
- 2 seconds to explain the answer
- 20 seconds yooo don't forget to pound that like and subscribe
If this is really what's optimal for the sacred algorithm, then that algorithm needs a serious tune up.
My master's thesis was on a topic that nobody else researched (it wasn't revolutionary, just a fun novel gimmick), so I had to write filler just to have a chapter on a topic possible to find references to, in order to get the citations count, even if the chapter wasn't relevant to the actual topic of the thesis
So yes, I think that the push to create slop was there even before computers became a thing, we just didn't recognize it
It make sense to come up with terms to describe common patterns: Chain-of-Thought, RAG etc. are good examples of this. But the passion some members of this community have for being intentionally confusing is tiresome.
They look for detailed pages, so pages are bloated with irrelevant information. They look for pages people spend a lot of time on, so the same thing occurs. Plus, the hellscape that is modern advertising means that rushing content out quickly and cheaply is encouraged over anything else.
AI will probably accelerate the process even more, but it's already been a huge issue for years now.
Google incentives don't matter much for honest website operators. They're only relevant when you want to abuse the system to promote your worthless bullshit[0] at the expense of the commons.
I really wish society started to treat marketing hustlers with the same disdain it has for robbers.
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[0] - If it was worth anything, you wouldn't be worried about SEO all that much, especially back before it all turned into a race to the bottom.
When I was a kid we used to spend summers with my grandmother. It was an idyllica pastoral setting and we used to chase the goats around and catch butterflys.
[snip 3000 words]
...when I asked her for her recipe, it turns out she made cinnamon rolls by buying pillsbury ones at the grocery store! So if you don't want to be like grandmother, use 2 cups of flour...
But that's not the scary part.
The difference with AI slop is just the enormity of the scale and speed at which we can produce it. Finally, a couple of data centers can produce more slop than the entirety of humanity, combined.
At work people often ask me for help with documents or translation. Or I see some friends' conversations. While Polish grammar is pretty difficult, it's not surprising to see messages with orthographic errors in 5 out of six words. You just live in a bubble of people who can read and write well.
But they're saying something. The characteristic feature of slop is not informality: it's fundamental meaninglessness.
There is absolutely everything wrong with that if it consistently invades and drowns out the voices of the well-educated elite.
The worst tyranny in this world is the tyranny of the ignorant against the learned. In its worst form, it can lead to mob justice and other horrible things.
Maybe that's not your worldview, but it is the view of many, and it's just as legitimate as yours.
Think only about your own consumption for a second. You're not going to engage with slop, are you?
I'm imagining that whatever your filter process is, that you manage to heavily engage with content that is mostly good and well-suited for you. Discounting Google search becoming crummy, of course.
AI in the hands of talented people is a tool, and they'll use it to make better stuff that appeals to you.
I wouldn't worry about other people. Lots of people like rage bait, yellow journalism, tabloid spam, celebrity gossip, etc. There's not much you can do about that.
Just like simple template generated SEO, template-written "content", etc. before.
In fact, a lot of writing about AI slop could be considered just as much slop...
Other examples include those books where each chapter generously estimated has a tweet worth of thought padded out with 35 pages of meandering anecdotes that just paraphrase the same idea. Like it's very clearly a sort of scam, the padding is there to make it seem like the book has more information that it does when you look at it in a digital bookstore.
What AI gives us is vastly cheaper slop, so now it can be produced at a scale unimaginable to prior generations. No more paying some schmuck a penny a word to bang out "private label articles," so they were only practical as SEO. Now you can have a unique slop for every spam email, every search query!
Truly, we are making the world a better place.
Its not a horrendous mess for me. It works very well. Everything depends on what content you interact with as the algorithm heavily shapes your content depending on what you interact with. Its no different from any other social network.
But I wonder how much this is AI and how much we've sort of curated a slop pattern even before AI:
- Video game tips web pages with massive chunks of text / ads before you get to the inevitable answer of "hit A when X happens".
- The horrendous mess that Quora became with technically correct in some ways but also misleading answers to historical content.
- Medium articles about coding that are filled with irrelevant pics and blocks of text that are "not wrong" but also "not right" followed by weirdly specific code...
We had all that before AI.