The fediverse used to feel pretty anti-ai, but over the past month or two I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and images, and they tend to have positive votes.
Has there been a sudden culture shift here? Or is there a substantial percentage of people just unable to tell the difference anymore?
That output is what matters, because there’s no way for us to see the input. How are you going to know what words somebody used to generate an AI image?
Slop to me is a simple, low-quality, repetitive output. So, it’s not just one simple, low-quality medium but many. Looks at this video for examples. Or just scroll youtube shorts after searching for anything Indian or even literally “omg look at this” for the search term and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
If you have a hard time telling whether AI did it or not, it’s not slop.
I understand your point of view. But would you call something complex, high-quality, but repetitive, slop? And the same question, but if the person who produces it, does it extremely fast.
If you went to a restaurant that made a high-quality, complex soup, for hundreds of customers per day with the help of machines, would you call it slop? I wouldn’t.
If the restaurant however made ramen from packets, threw in some starch to make it thicker, and they had a nice big ladle to slap that liquid into a vessel with a nice sound, I would for sure call that slop.
This is where the fundamental difference in attribution of connotations lies. From what you say, you perceive the term “slop” as a direct synonym to “low quality”, without any extras. I perceive it as something more of a synonym to “repetitive” but with extra connotations, the most accurate common divisor of which is “repetitive content produced at speeds suggesting low effort”.
Yeah, got a bit carried away yesterday. Ultimately, there can’t be right or wrong, since the whole discussion is simply about individual understanding or even preferences for the term “slop”, nothing more. Some people will try to be as empirical as possible and choose a meaning based on how they’ve seen it being used in the wild, others will try to push the meaning they want for the term, it’s all good and subjective.
Indeed, yes. It’s subjective and we are both somewhere in the middle with a bit of nuance, but there are people who just throw it around willy nilly. The unhinged use is what this post felt like. “I see slop everywhere”. Makes me think of the phrase “if you smell shit everywhere, look under your shoe”.