I have definitely noticed that I will eat more or less depending on the size of the plate. Maybe it only applies to people who were taught to clean their plate, dunno.
For me it would probably depend on if I dished myself. Also at a restaurant taking food to go is pretty normalized. Vs. At a dinner party you might feel like you should just eat the whole dish.
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.
With content creation platforms there is absolutely no way one person or even ten people at the highest levels could kill them by leaving. In fact, as has been shown on Youtube and Twitch it usually makes the platform healthier because there's not one monolith to develop a strategy around bootlegging from. There have been several dozen gargantuan channels and several hundred giant channels on Youtube who have either left or just stopped uploading and Youtube still carries on. Youtube isn't carried by the Mr. Beasts and FailArmies who grab forty million views an upload, it's carried by thousands of smaller channels who get less than a million views per video. With places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur there are no giants, as everything is siloed so much that users in one community don't know much of what's outside that community, making it impossible for a handful of creators leaving to kill it.
I'm not sure if it's an issue of the percentage of users creating content, but rather the percentage of new content creators zooming to the level of average ai copy which is higher than their starting point.
I do wonder if it will limit or improve their growth to learn to communicate beyond it as the drivers behind the seat instead of the passengers.
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.
These are great, but the effect breaks down with digital fonts since every glyph instance is the same. There would have to be slight variations of each, and other imperfections caused by a typewriter or printing process.
I'm not sure I like the effect of the font in the article. The subtle vertical position differences and inconsistent kerning are distracting. Typewriters and physical printing are not sloppy in that sense.
I've written and typeset books. It's not so much that there's no "fl" ligature: it's that with that font the lack of a "fl" ligature really makes it bad looking. With many other fonts it wouldn't be anywhere near that bad (and I'm not just only about monospace).
This is one of the things that I like about BlueSky. The only algorithmic feed I use is one that highlights quiet posters (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/fe...). I’ll go to the main feed once in a while, but the “discover” feed is one I ended up unpinning entirely.
I've personally begun taking an incredibly critical eye at the pop culture I allow myself to consume, and have been recently making a movie playlist from films before 1990 or so.
If we are smart, we will remember this and allow 95% of the consumption to be AI, too. Might as well let the thing talk to itself instead of waste our time.
I mean, there's a decent chance it already is. Advertising platforms are very cagey about just how many ad impressions are actually from bots, but 95% doesn't sound a priori impossible to me. If it's not at that level yet, it probably will be soon.
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.
"More reach" seems a valid enough goal/desire in and of itself (even if you deride it as a shallow form of communication, shallow attention is what provides the opportunity for deeper connections); this sets the goal-activity of creative pursuits apart from "lounging alone at the beach" (which is itself a flawed representation of retirement, but that's another story).
> I'm a very small-scale content creator (4 digit follower count) that has never monetized or really tried to monetize
To my understanding, that's about the size where platforms will typically consider allowing you to monetize through their system (as opposed to rattling a cup at Patreon, Ko-Fi etc.), and no mean feat (while everyone that people can think of listening to might be at least that size, very few people who try to develop and grow a presence succeed to that extent).
thanks, I had a hot start ten years ago with rehosts from very big streamers that led me to the very difficult concurrent viewer averages you need to maintain to get monetization status, since then I’ve put in the hours to maintain the status. I consistently see YoY growth it’s just slow. Overall though I’ve made less than $100 in ten years, which is kind of sad if you consider I haven’t missed a day streaming in several years now. I’ve had well paying jobs I’ve been less devoted to.
But like a sibling comment was getting at, maybe I have everything I want already.
Integrity is good, but the adtech ecosystem isn't designed to reward integrity. It's all about funneling eyeballs and clicks, and doing everything possible to restrict available next actions to a selection of Google's choosing (or Facebook, or Microsoft, etc.) There's a vicious feedback cycle wherein consumers are successively limited in choice, and if it's more profitable to direct them to a competitor's channel that's full of ads and slop than to your channel, they're not only going to favor the competitor overtly in the algorithm, the feedback cycle is going to make the counterproductive things you do (like having integrity) less fashionable overall.
It's their playground, their rules. Fair or right has nothing to do with it.
Replying to my own comment like this in this thread is vain and gauche so I apologize, but as I think more about this conversation, there’s a site I am now thinking I want to build similar to the early twitch days (justin.tv) to where you could host anything you wanted and drive traffic to it as you please without worrying about algorithms. I’d love to build that. Leaving this here in case that idea becomes a reality I can link the post a year from now.
I wonder if the algorithm just encourages engagement with whatever is engaging, and maybe that's an indication of how many users it's still resonating and engaging for.
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.
> 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
People will argue that if a shortform video is human made or AI generated it doesn't matter, it's domamine-triggering filler either way.
But I do think that the parasocial relationships and discovering new influencers is a big part of the hook for many people, and taking that away may cause many to have a "what the hell am I even watching" moment.
It's easier to justify the addiction when it feels like you're "hanging out with a friend." When content is AI generated from concept to production, it's just...talking pixel soup.
First I removed the Instagram app from my phone, because it was full of dark patterns meant to keep users scrolling.
Endless reposted stories from people you follow, endless suggested posts when you ran out of posts from people you actually know, and then the slop bucket known as reels. I found myself sucked in too often.
I used the web app version on my phone for a bit, which has a lot fewer dark patterns, but eventually I ditched that too because I found myself checking it out of habit.
Now I still have a login on my desktop browser, because for whatever reason some businesses insist on only sharing hours/menus etc via an Instagram post. But I'm close to pulling the plug on Instagram altogether.
Is there an xcancel equivalent for Instagram that lets me bypass the login wall in a pinch?
I also added a ublock origin filter list for tuning out social media distractions. Now my YouTube and Reddits are essentially blank feeds - no suggested posts, stories or recommendations.
A large number of extremely smart people are being paid ungodly amounts of money to enhance the addictiveness of AI output. I'm not optimistic about them failing.
Not really? It’s incredibly easy to run an A/B test targeting hundreds of thousands of users to test hypothesis and refine your eventual feature. All these eventually add up. And honestly, the upper management is pretty smart too.
Nothing will happen to it. Someone will eventually complete the loop between slop generators to human reward systems to turn the first order derivative of content supply back up to pre-COVID levels.
For a few perhaps. I finally got mad enough at facebook slop to quit checking every day. I still have an account, but check it maybe once a month if I think of it (generally because my kids do something cute and I want to share the photo with my family). I don't want to see the right/left wing "you need to be outraged about this evil thing the left/right wing just did" (both sides do it, if you don't see it either you need a more diverse group of friends, or you are not honest about people you mostly agree with). There is value in facebook, but it is at most 5 minutes per day - and that doesn't pay their bill so they want the slop.
Of course I lose the most from the above. There are a number of events that are only spread on facebook and so I don't find out about them. Facebook has mostly replaced craigslist.
It certainly offers strong motivation, in my experience, to revisit or commit to analog based hobbies. Recently I did a sewing class at a library. I’ve got a watercolor painting kit for about $30 all in and - as this article indicates - seeking info by surfing the web to use the web as a benefit, well I do recommend it.
There still is plenty of information superhighway infrastructure online - more than ever! It’s a matter of disengaging from the AI “slop trough” as I like to call it. Good article framing the discussion.
> 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.
No, Sora is an experiment if humans will knowingly consume a fully AI feed. But FB, IG, Reddit, Hacker News, etc social media is already full of slop, labeled or not. And it's there because that's what humans are choosing to engage the most with.
Not really, it’s just the interface OpenAI gave for creating short videos with their AI. They push people to it hoping for engagement, but it’s not the sole reason people go — unlike TikTok.
> 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.
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".
> 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.
The authors point is not that these things are “slop” in and of themselves, it’s that the demand for each of these so outpaces supply that the market is full of low quality (sometimes fraudulent) knock offs. AKA… slop.
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?
There is an important question that needs to be asked: why is someone watching content?
There's a big difference between watching something because they are interested and engaged in the topic vs watching because they're doom scrolling. I'd argue this is an important business question as if it's the latter you're very open to disruption.
I think the problem is that many companies have cornered the market and have shifted strategy to wealth extraction. Resting on their laurels. It makes sense from that perspective to trade quality for revenue, as there's no competition, but by doing so you also lower the barrier to entry for competitors while driving demand/motivation for competitors. Striking a balance between aggressive profit maximization and maintaining a cornered market is difficult. The only long term strategy is to play against an imaginary adversary but the short term profit maximization is incredibly tempting. Not to mention highly profitable for those that are at the top before it collapses. Are those people more dedicated to filling their pockets or to the long term survival of the company? It's clearly the former if they do not even consider that the company could lose its dominance.
You're right, we should focus on outcomes, but I don't think outcomes are very easy to measure. What outcomes? Over what time frame?
>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.
The scarcity is in the originality and creativity.
Once you watch LotR, you watched like 20 percent guesstimate of all fantasy content because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough.
Which is why sometime when I wonder why there's nothing to watch on YouTube despite the sheer abundance, it's time to work on something.
> After all, demand has a hard ceiling at 24 hours per day.
I agree consumption is capped. I constantly struggle with whether to watch a given video or read a given article. I have an ever increasing to-watch and to-read list and unfortunately human life is too short to learn all the things I would want to.
That being said, on the production side, it's a complex interplay between quality, quantity and discoverability. If it takes 10x the effort to increase quality 2x, then it might economical to produce 10x the number of videos with 1x the quality. I say might because those videos will be shared less, rated worse and will therefore have lower discoverability. But by how much?
And you can't judge quality until after you've consumed the "content"[0]. So if the goal is to serve as many ads as possible, it's more economical to just make more "content". That's why I much prefer individual "creators" who clearly do what they do because they enjoy it.
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.
When people make these kinds of vocabulary mistakes, I like to at least charitably assume that English is their second language, but I've seen my kid's teachers make these mistakes, too...
One that really gets me that most professional get wrong is jive/jibe.
The last time someone used “jive” when not in relation to music was George Jefferson and other Black folks up to the very early 80s (I am Black before the pearl clutching starts)
To be fair, there is a logic behind “hone in on” that is at least plausible that relates to the intended meaning, and is perhaps somewhat responsible for it sticking around besides simply the similarity between “home” and “hone”.
I actually stumbled on this earlier today! I was reaching for home in on and settled on hone in on as it intuitively fit better to me! I remember thinking "Im trying to express reducing something critically which is like refining". Now I very clearly see the home etymology too though!
I used to feel similarly whenever people would say "begs the question" to mean "raises a question." But now I've just given up. It's more common for people to mess this one up than not.
This lossy mingling of expressions that sound similar is a natural process always present in the evolution of a language. Giving up is a correct and healthy response imo.
"Begging the question" is a great example - its intended meaning as a specific fallacy descriptor lose to face-value interpretations that are "wrong" but also extremely fair for somebody to make. All this means is that "begging the question" is a weak name for the fallacy, because if you don't know what it means, a wrong assumption is easily available and contextually often seems to fit.
The language crushing out these expressions is a feature. Better all around to say the argument is circular or it assumes the conclusion. Doing those things may _actually_ "raise questions" as well as "begging the question" which makes things even worse.
It's not the fault of the casual language users that this expression is poorly understood, it's just bad naming in the first place.
To be fair, the phrase "begging the question" makes almost no sense from a modern English perspective- according to Wikipedia, it's already a bad translation of a Latin phrase that's tied pretty closely to a specific debate format.
By contrast, the colloquial use feels like an abbreviation of the implicit phrase "it begs for the question to be asked", which makes so much more sense than the "correct" meaning that if I'm being perfectly honest, I'd rather use it.
I like Wikipedia's alternate name for the fallacy: "assuming the conclusion", because it explains what's actually happening.
Literally is literally figurative and only figuratively literal, anything remotely unsustainable is a "Ponzi scheme", and factoids are somehow facts instead of fictions... *sigh*
You really can't, not without also swearing off a ton of genuine content. You can swear off the Internet entirely, and maybe that's a net win, but other than that you're almost certain to encounter slop. And it may take longer than you like to sort the wheat from the chaff.
If you like absurdist humor, there's a really good chance you'll enjoy some of the humor focused AI video "algorithm tracks" (what's the proper name?) on TikTok.
Seriously, stop worrying about what people do in their free time, and find you're own joy. It's not like your distaste is going to have any effect on the people who enjoy it, so stop worrying about it.
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...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5598018/
Duelling articles at 50 paces. Same publication channel.
I have definitely noticed that I will eat more or less depending on the size of the plate. Maybe it only applies to people who were taught to clean their plate, dunno.
For me it would probably depend on if I dished myself. Also at a restaurant taking food to go is pretty normalized. Vs. At a dinner party you might feel like you should just eat the whole dish.
That’s not irony. Interesting, perhaps, but not ironic.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-irony-is-not/
It's certainly ironic if an article about slop leads with a tired old glob of pseudoscience slop and the author doesn't realize.
I can't tell if your comment is being ironic or not.
Well played... 4k words
Sorry did that scroll past your little context window?
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.
With content creation platforms there is absolutely no way one person or even ten people at the highest levels could kill them by leaving. In fact, as has been shown on Youtube and Twitch it usually makes the platform healthier because there's not one monolith to develop a strategy around bootlegging from. There have been several dozen gargantuan channels and several hundred giant channels on Youtube who have either left or just stopped uploading and Youtube still carries on. Youtube isn't carried by the Mr. Beasts and FailArmies who grab forty million views an upload, it's carried by thousands of smaller channels who get less than a million views per video. With places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur there are no giants, as everything is siloed so much that users in one community don't know much of what's outside that community, making it impossible for a handful of creators leaving to kill it.
Vine died because Twitter made sure it died. The same with Periscope, nothing more.
Vines back actually by the guy that killed it
https://www.newsweek.com/divine-everything-we-know-about-vin...
I'm not sure if it's an issue of the percentage of users creating content, but rather the percentage of new content creators zooming to the level of average ai copy which is higher than their starting point.
I do wonder if it will limit or improve their growth to learn to communicate beyond it as the drivers behind the seat instead of the passengers.
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.
You might be interested in the resources [1] on the H.P.Lovecraft Historical Society website.
[1] https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php#fonts
Oh thats great.
I also use the wallpaper on https://hplovecraft.com/ as my actual wallpaper.
These are great, but the effect breaks down with digital fonts since every glyph instance is the same. There would have to be slight variations of each, and other imperfections caused by a typewriter or printing process.
I'm not sure I like the effect of the font in the article. The subtle vertical position differences and inconsistent kerning are distracting. Typewriters and physical printing are not sloppy in that sense.
Quickly checked the CSS and the font appears to be "Volume Tc" and "Volume Tc Sans" by Tom Chalky: https://tomchalky.com/product/volume-handcrafted-trio-font-f...
I generally like it, too, but on my iPhone that very first sentence puts a spotlight in the lack of an 'fl' ligature in the word, "influence".
Now I'm reconsidering my resolve to look for AI slop - my enthusiasm for topography is getting in the way.
https://wondermark.com/c/650/
> my enthusiasm for topography
funny topo you made!
I've written and typeset books. It's not so much that there's no "fl" ligature: it's that with that font the lack of a "fl" ligature really makes it bad looking. With many other fonts it wouldn't be anywhere near that bad (and I'm not just only about monospace).
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.
This has already described much of pop culture for decades, though. Turns out that humans actually like slop.
"Turns out humans actually like heroin." -- antisocial scumbag justifying being an antisocial scumbag.
This is one of the things that I like about BlueSky. The only algorithmic feed I use is one that highlights quiet posters (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/fe...). I’ll go to the main feed once in a while, but the “discover” feed is one I ended up unpinning entirely.
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
I've personally begun taking an incredibly critical eye at the pop culture I allow myself to consume, and have been recently making a movie playlist from films before 1990 or so.
The craft is noticeably different.
If we are smart, we will remember this and allow 95% of the consumption to be AI, too. Might as well let the thing talk to itself instead of waste our time.
I mean, there's a decent chance it already is. Advertising platforms are very cagey about just how many ad impressions are actually from bots, but 95% doesn't sound a priori impossible to me. If it's not at that level yet, it probably will be soon.
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.
There’s a neat little story called "Anecdote on Lowering the work ethic" that you might like. You can read the plot on the Wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei...
"More reach" seems a valid enough goal/desire in and of itself (even if you deride it as a shallow form of communication, shallow attention is what provides the opportunity for deeper connections); this sets the goal-activity of creative pursuits apart from "lounging alone at the beach" (which is itself a flawed representation of retirement, but that's another story).
Not the person you responded to, but I very much liked this. Thank you for sharing
> I'm a very small-scale content creator (4 digit follower count) that has never monetized or really tried to monetize
To my understanding, that's about the size where platforms will typically consider allowing you to monetize through their system (as opposed to rattling a cup at Patreon, Ko-Fi etc.), and no mean feat (while everyone that people can think of listening to might be at least that size, very few people who try to develop and grow a presence succeed to that extent).
Congrats.
thanks, I had a hot start ten years ago with rehosts from very big streamers that led me to the very difficult concurrent viewer averages you need to maintain to get monetization status, since then I’ve put in the hours to maintain the status. I consistently see YoY growth it’s just slow. Overall though I’ve made less than $100 in ten years, which is kind of sad if you consider I haven’t missed a day streaming in several years now. I’ve had well paying jobs I’ve been less devoted to.
But like a sibling comment was getting at, maybe I have everything I want already.
Integrity is good, but the adtech ecosystem isn't designed to reward integrity. It's all about funneling eyeballs and clicks, and doing everything possible to restrict available next actions to a selection of Google's choosing (or Facebook, or Microsoft, etc.) There's a vicious feedback cycle wherein consumers are successively limited in choice, and if it's more profitable to direct them to a competitor's channel that's full of ads and slop than to your channel, they're not only going to favor the competitor overtly in the algorithm, the feedback cycle is going to make the counterproductive things you do (like having integrity) less fashionable overall.
It's their playground, their rules. Fair or right has nothing to do with it.
Yea this is the kind of content I am often pushed to make and I hate it.
Replying to my own comment like this in this thread is vain and gauche so I apologize, but as I think more about this conversation, there’s a site I am now thinking I want to build similar to the early twitch days (justin.tv) to where you could host anything you wanted and drive traffic to it as you please without worrying about algorithms. I’d love to build that. Leaving this here in case that idea becomes a reality I can link the post a year from now.
I wonder if the algorithm just encourages engagement with whatever is engaging, and maybe that's an indication of how many users it's still resonating and engaging for.
Could you give some examples?
I noticed recently that some of my older accounts would have a higher quality of recommended content.
And then within a week or two of using them, it would be back to the same slop as my main account.
As far as I can tell this is because I click on what catches my attention. Whatever stands out. Which tends to be the most clickbaity thumbnails.
So I have to wonder if what you're actually fighting against is an algorithm, or the human limbic system...
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 great bifurcation will continue apace
> the great bifurcation will continue apace
The heterofurries and homofurries will be furious.
The only missing piece is hiding the time something was posted :) Why would anyone use any of those crap websites is beyond me.
> 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
The upshot is that having everything be AI slop could be what breaks our collective addiction to chronic screen time/usage.
People will argue that if a shortform video is human made or AI generated it doesn't matter, it's domamine-triggering filler either way.
But I do think that the parasocial relationships and discovering new influencers is a big part of the hook for many people, and taking that away may cause many to have a "what the hell am I even watching" moment.
It's easier to justify the addiction when it feels like you're "hanging out with a friend." When content is AI generated from concept to production, it's just...talking pixel soup.
I dunno. AI slop could become digital fentanyl.
The only winning move is not to play.
First I removed the Instagram app from my phone, because it was full of dark patterns meant to keep users scrolling.
Endless reposted stories from people you follow, endless suggested posts when you ran out of posts from people you actually know, and then the slop bucket known as reels. I found myself sucked in too often.
I used the web app version on my phone for a bit, which has a lot fewer dark patterns, but eventually I ditched that too because I found myself checking it out of habit.
Now I still have a login on my desktop browser, because for whatever reason some businesses insist on only sharing hours/menus etc via an Instagram post. But I'm close to pulling the plug on Instagram altogether.
Is there an xcancel equivalent for Instagram that lets me bypass the login wall in a pinch?
I also added a ublock origin filter list for tuning out social media distractions. Now my YouTube and Reddits are essentially blank feeds - no suggested posts, stories or recommendations.
https://github.com/BevizLaszlo/UBlock-Filters-for-Social-Med...
Perhaps you meant 'upside' .. if so, well played.
A large number of extremely smart people are being paid ungodly amounts of money to enhance the addictiveness of AI output. I'm not optimistic about them failing.
Oh I am. In the end they are just doing what somebody else much more stupid than them is telling them to do. That limits how much damage they can do.
Not really? It’s incredibly easy to run an A/B test targeting hundreds of thousands of users to test hypothesis and refine your eventual feature. All these eventually add up. And honestly, the upper management is pretty smart too.
Nothing will happen to it. Someone will eventually complete the loop between slop generators to human reward systems to turn the first order derivative of content supply back up to pre-COVID levels.
For a few perhaps. I finally got mad enough at facebook slop to quit checking every day. I still have an account, but check it maybe once a month if I think of it (generally because my kids do something cute and I want to share the photo with my family). I don't want to see the right/left wing "you need to be outraged about this evil thing the left/right wing just did" (both sides do it, if you don't see it either you need a more diverse group of friends, or you are not honest about people you mostly agree with). There is value in facebook, but it is at most 5 minutes per day - and that doesn't pay their bill so they want the slop.
Of course I lose the most from the above. There are a number of events that are only spread on facebook and so I don't find out about them. Facebook has mostly replaced craigslist.
It certainly offers strong motivation, in my experience, to revisit or commit to analog based hobbies. Recently I did a sewing class at a library. I’ve got a watercolor painting kit for about $30 all in and - as this article indicates - seeking info by surfing the web to use the web as a benefit, well I do recommend it.
There still is plenty of information superhighway infrastructure online - more than ever! It’s a matter of disengaging from the AI “slop trough” as I like to call it. Good article framing the discussion.
> 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.
And it quickly answered the question - “no”. It was a brief flash in the pan and people moved on.
No, Sora is an experiment if humans will knowingly consume a fully AI feed. But FB, IG, Reddit, Hacker News, etc social media is already full of slop, labeled or not. And it's there because that's what humans are choosing to engage the most with.
"Choosing" is doing a lot of work in that sentence
Not really, it’s just the interface OpenAI gave for creating short videos with their AI. They push people to it hoping for engagement, but it’s not the sole reason people go — unlike TikTok.
Synthetic data for human (machine) learning... We should spend more time outside, we will!
> 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.
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".
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.
The authors point is not that these things are “slop” in and of themselves, it’s that the demand for each of these so outpaces supply that the market is full of low quality (sometimes fraudulent) knock offs. AKA… slop.
Yes, and before modern leisure time, beaches were uncanny haunts. The borderland where shipwrecks were found and dead things floated ashore.
Beaches and lobster are real things in the natural world. Slop is something else.
Ground with shell on I have heard; not prepared in the modern way.
The preparation sounds more classy when you call it "bisque"
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?
There is an important question that needs to be asked: why is someone watching content?
There's a big difference between watching something because they are interested and engaged in the topic vs watching because they're doom scrolling. I'd argue this is an important business question as if it's the latter you're very open to disruption.
I think the problem is that many companies have cornered the market and have shifted strategy to wealth extraction. Resting on their laurels. It makes sense from that perspective to trade quality for revenue, as there's no competition, but by doing so you also lower the barrier to entry for competitors while driving demand/motivation for competitors. Striking a balance between aggressive profit maximization and maintaining a cornered market is difficult. The only long term strategy is to play against an imaginary adversary but the short term profit maximization is incredibly tempting. Not to mention highly profitable for those that are at the top before it collapses. Are those people more dedicated to filling their pockets or to the long term survival of the company? It's clearly the former if they do not even consider that the company could lose its dominance.
You're right, we should focus on outcomes, but I don't think outcomes are very easy to measure. What outcomes? Over what time frame?
>If they produce content with some truth in them, they're truthful, regardless of whether an AI agent did or didn't write them
Nope, they're still slop. Just like a spam message about a product you actually like is still spam.
But where we're going, we don't need eyes to see...
Libera te tutemet!
Apt reference.
>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.
The scarcity is in the originality and creativity.
Once you watch LotR, you watched like 20 percent guesstimate of all fantasy content because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough.
Which is why sometime when I wonder why there's nothing to watch on YouTube despite the sheer abundance, it's time to work on something.
And also why a large percentage of the "content" on YouTube is YouTubers reactions to other YouTubers.
> ... because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough.
I think there is still demand for an elvish court show, somewhere.
Too much elaborate flowery argument. I want to see Orc Court.
> After all, demand has a hard ceiling at 24 hours per day.
I agree consumption is capped. I constantly struggle with whether to watch a given video or read a given article. I have an ever increasing to-watch and to-read list and unfortunately human life is too short to learn all the things I would want to.
That being said, on the production side, it's a complex interplay between quality, quantity and discoverability. If it takes 10x the effort to increase quality 2x, then it might economical to produce 10x the number of videos with 1x the quality. I say might because those videos will be shared less, rated worse and will therefore have lower discoverability. But by how much?
And you can't judge quality until after you've consumed the "content"[0]. So if the goal is to serve as many ads as possible, it's more economical to just make more "content". That's why I much prefer individual "creators" who clearly do what they do because they enjoy it.
[0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...
I suspect slop recognition might become a new skill that has it's own value.
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.
Glad to see someone fighting the good fight, no matter how lost the battle is online. I'd add:
When people make these kinds of vocabulary mistakes, I like to at least charitably assume that English is their second language, but I've seen my kid's teachers make these mistakes, too...Don't forget the worst offender: its/it's
No "effects" discussion is complete without https://xkcd.com/326/
(At least "defiantly" is an actual word, unlike "definately" which doesn't even pass spell check)
Standard excuse: autocorrect must have changed it.
It's all fun and games until it changes the name of a drug on your prescription.
One that really gets me that most professional get wrong is jive/jibe.
The last time someone used “jive” when not in relation to music was George Jefferson and other Black folks up to the very early 80s (I am Black before the pearl clutching starts)
We will never recovered from the fact that "literally" now means "figuratively but with emphasis".
I understand that language evolves and meanings change but we need a word that means “literally”! If we let this one go, the battle is lost.
To be fair, there is a logic behind “hone in on” that is at least plausible that relates to the intended meaning, and is perhaps somewhat responsible for it sticking around besides simply the similarity between “home” and “hone”.
As much as it angers me to say it, I do believe it is an eggcorn.
I agree, though remarkably it’s an eggcorn that is still sort of correct on its own.
I actually stumbled on this earlier today! I was reaching for home in on and settled on hone in on as it intuitively fit better to me! I remember thinking "Im trying to express reducing something critically which is like refining". Now I very clearly see the home etymology too though!
I used to feel similarly whenever people would say "begs the question" to mean "raises a question." But now I've just given up. It's more common for people to mess this one up than not.
This lossy mingling of expressions that sound similar is a natural process always present in the evolution of a language. Giving up is a correct and healthy response imo.
"Begging the question" is a great example - its intended meaning as a specific fallacy descriptor lose to face-value interpretations that are "wrong" but also extremely fair for somebody to make. All this means is that "begging the question" is a weak name for the fallacy, because if you don't know what it means, a wrong assumption is easily available and contextually often seems to fit.
The language crushing out these expressions is a feature. Better all around to say the argument is circular or it assumes the conclusion. Doing those things may _actually_ "raise questions" as well as "begging the question" which makes things even worse.
It's not the fault of the casual language users that this expression is poorly understood, it's just bad naming in the first place.
Yeah, we should probably standardize on "assuming the conclusion" or just "circular logic" when talking about the logical fallacy.
To be fair, the phrase "begging the question" makes almost no sense from a modern English perspective- according to Wikipedia, it's already a bad translation of a Latin phrase that's tied pretty closely to a specific debate format.
By contrast, the colloquial use feels like an abbreviation of the implicit phrase "it begs for the question to be asked", which makes so much more sense than the "correct" meaning that if I'm being perfectly honest, I'd rather use it.
I like Wikipedia's alternate name for the fallacy: "assuming the conclusion", because it explains what's actually happening.
Literally is literally figurative and only figuratively literal, anything remotely unsustainable is a "Ponzi scheme", and factoids are somehow facts instead of fictions... *sigh*
Intriguing. I'm normally pretty careful about this kind of thing but I had thought "hone in" was correct. Apparently not:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/home-in-or-hone-in
Ah yeah I noticed that too while pouring over the post :D
I've got a few well-homed knives in my kitchen. They're really happy where they are. I can leave them hone alone, too, which is nice.
Well, birds aren't real, so there's that.
Now imagine everyone using get only for its true meaning: to receive.
If you don't like the "slop" you can probably "avert thine eyes"
You really can't, not without also swearing off a ton of genuine content. You can swear off the Internet entirely, and maybe that's a net win, but other than that you're almost certain to encounter slop. And it may take longer than you like to sort the wheat from the chaff.
If you spend your time worrying about what TikTok videos other people watch you've probably got too much time on your hands.
If you like absurdist humor, there's a really good chance you'll enjoy some of the humor focused AI video "algorithm tracks" (what's the proper name?) on TikTok.
One might say the same about HN comments.
How dare you!
Seriously, stop worrying about what people do in their free time, and find you're own joy. It's not like your distaste is going to have any effect on the people who enjoy it, so stop worrying about it.