There have been a bunch of "moderate" AI pieces (including a few that I have boosted) that have objected to being tarred with the term "slop", and I think there's a real effort right now in the AI booster camp to define the term as an explicit *judgement of quality* — i.e. "this is bad, and it was made with AI, so it's slop" — which retroactively allows every "slop" discussion to center around subjective evaluations of quality / merit / utility etc. For me that's not really what the word means.
@glyph thinking of how the boosters created the term "vibecoding", it immediately became a signifier of low quality, so they tried to define it away. the term they invented.
@davidgerard @glyph they tried to adopt 'artificial intelligence' as an indicator of a scifi outcome, but AI now == slop too
Like, sure, slop does *on average* have a bit of a "quality smell", as it were, but the low quality is downstream of the definition, which is that it was extruded through an "AI" in the first place.
To my mind you can make slop that is delightful, inspiring, moving, extremely functional, bug-free, etc. That's a big part of the problem; it's not always possible to tell. You *usually* won't, of course, it's usually bad, but that's not always true.
Yet, if you make something genuinely enjoyable with an "AI", and then you tell your audience about it, as we have seen over and over again, the majority of your audience will not be grateful that you have shown them the error of their ways, *they will be mad at you*. Because it doesn't matter if it's good, it's still slop. You still pointed the slop hose at the audience and sprayed them with it, and the fact that you momentarily tricked them into thinking it was something else makes it *worse*.
There are lots of people right now being coerced into using "AI" tools, who are themselves quite suspicious of the tools in the first place. Not to mention that they don't like being coerced. So they're trying to find the "good way" to use these tools. I am very sympathetic to such people; they are *trying* to walk an ethical tightrope, they believe that if they are being presented with this challenge it _must_ be possible to resolve. So they endeavor not to "make slop" with the slop dispenser.
So I think we need to find ways to kindly, but firmly, hold the line. It's slop, you can't make it not be slop just by thinking really hard about it. You can do what you need to do in order to keep your job, and maybe slinging slop is the only avenue still open to you, and I am not going to judge you for that, especially not in this economy.
