They are already growing up on slop. Look at brainrot and Roblox games, and YouTube shorts. This will fit right in with what they're used to. They won't even notice.

yeah thats true. i should have been terrified earlier.

Remember 2025 when we thought future generations growing up on tiktok was going to be bad? Can't wait to see how 2027 will ruin society even more.

heck i remember before covid thinking that the generations growing up with social media were doomed. social media pales in comparison to what gen alpha is experiencing.

test scores are dropping while the curriculum becomes easier as well.

I share this sentiment. Opened the article and saw the slop art. Closed the article. The future looks bland and bleak when it comes to being human/creative.

No.

I have been slopping out games for years now. The graphics don't matter unless the gameplay does. The gameplay doesn't matter if the game is too hard or too easy.

The games that do well, like literature, survive because they touch the soul.

This is a great comment.

I've seen people turn away from interesting games because of the difficulty.

I've also seen people turn away from genuinely fun games because they didn't like the graphics though.

Every generation believes the next generation is growing up on slop.

There was no generation with AI slop access before.

[delayed]

I think personalised AI gen tiktok is worse than saturday morning children's cartoons.

Maybe I'm crazy though idk.

I can sit in a group of people my age whom I've never met before and share reminiscences of some slop cartoon we all liked as kids. Sharing culture like this helps social bonding and helps create community, imo.

If everyone's having a personalized childhood I don't know if that will happen as much.

> Every generation believes the next generation is growing up on slop.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

I heard this attributed to Aristotle, but apparently it's a fabrication. That's too bad because the quote is hilarious. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go gobble up some dainties.

You registered an account called “slopinthebag” 9 months ago, but you weren’t worried about this until you read this post?

I worry about them never having the satisfaction of working hard on something and truly creating something that is their own. I definitely sound like a boomer (even though I'm a millennial) when I say this but I totally believe that limitations breed creativity. The AI here is just looking at stuff artists from the 90s laboured t create for Arcades and made its own slop version. But then again, one could argue that Mario Paint let you create slop too back in the 90s. Yet, at least with Mario Paint you had to actually hustle quite a bit arranging pixels or musical notes to have something. There was effort and difficulty with overcoming a learning curve and that effort paid off with the creation of something you could be proud of even if it wasn't professional. But here, on the other hand, even a badly generated prompt still gets you a lot.

There's like, no challenge. Reminds me of that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" where a bank robber dies after getting shot by the popo five-o and he is greeted by a man (angel like guy) who takes him to a cool mansion or house where he fulfills everyone one of the guy's wishes: women, money, gambling, etc. etc. And he gambles all day long and never loses but after a while he gets bored and then depressed that he always wins and there's no effort and no risk, and then tells the angel dude that he wonders why he was put in Heaven and that he thinks he doesn't belong there and wants to go to the "other place" only for the angel guy to tell him he is in fact in "the other place".

Stuff that AI generates sorta feels like that. Meaningless and synthetic.

Interesting. I hadn't heard of that twilight zone episode.

My mum liked to tell me, when she was little, she imagined having a magic wand, that she could wave and get anything she wanted. Almost immediately she realized that life would become pointless.

I'm not really sure if that's true. For starters, having too much scarcity and adversity can also make life pointless. You just can't do anything you want. Maybe there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.

For me the most satisfying part of projects has always been overcoming difficulty. Although I had a slightly unpleasant version of that lately, where the difficulty turned out to be a hundred times worse than I anticipated, took years instead of weeks, and by the time I finished overcoming it, AI could make a better project than mine in a matter of minutes...

There's a story I always come back to in my mind, there was a story of a man in the mountains in India, who spent 20 years carving a passage through the mountain — by hand — so that his village would have easier access to the city and the hospital.

It's a very heroic story of course, but it would have been objectively better for all the people who needed the hospital, if he had just been given a bit of TNT instead.

life is best with suffering, but not too much

the "utopia" where AI & robots will do everyone's jobs just sounds like hell to me. humans will adapt and find new challenges, either by finding things ai cannot do, or perhaps like a Butlerian Jihad...

Most games and shows for kids have been slop since long before AI.

Who says it has to stay slop? Nobody is forced to stop at the single, first iteration of something. They can see the outcome, play the game, and then iterate faster than any professional game dev studio could in the past.

Its funny that the same CS saying "garbage in garbage out" seems even more true in the AI modern day.