Likely many other, I’ve been grossed out by some of the shit getting churned out with generative ai. But it’s also made me notice some of the existing things that give me the same feeling.
Poorly translated stuff, as often seen on cheap Chinese imports, has the same uncanny valley awkwardness. It sounds like English, but it isn’t what an actual human who spoke English would say. And if we want to talk about an algorithm that’s gone rogue and is destroying the world while trying to fulfill some arbitary metrics, there’s always late-stage capitalism…
Anyone else notice things like this?
YouTube channels that are mostly just reading Reddit comments.
Especially if it’s using that annoyingly upbeat robot voice.
That would be AI slop by most standards since the robot voice is “AI” in a way.
Similarly, youtube channels about disaster events that are just reading the Wikipedia page with some spooky music.
Or reading “am I the asshole” or “relationship advice” posts.
Fuck. I hate so much of this crap.
A lot of these are also AI slop nowadays too
Even if they discuss the content of it?
Those garbage/misleading mobile games in ads
Also why the hell is this a thing? Those ads are showing gameplay, it would be so much easier to make that game and then take a video of it for the advert than to just make an animation of it. So in my mind the game exists. Why is it just Mafia Wars reskinned every fucking time?
Because “mafia wars” makes consistent money, and the games people actually might want to play don’t. Slapping a new coat of paint on the same mechanics over and over again means getting the money maker out there to more people, just gotta lure em in with the promise of a game they might actually want to play, then swap in the game they don’t and hope you snag em with the psychological tricks before they leave.
It works just often enough to make it profitable and easy.
“Silverberg’s Law”
Someone once asked science fiction writer Robert Silverberg why 90% of the SF stories they read were crap.
Silverberg replied that 90% of everything is crap.
And that’s why older media is usually better. Only the good parts have survived and the 90% has been forgotten.
The trouble is that a lot of the good stuff is forgotten as well.
Here are some movies you’ve probably never heard of.
“The Day of the Jackal” [original]
“The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” [original]
“Silent Partner” Elliot Gould
“The 3 Musketeers” Raquel Welch and Oliver Reed.
“Little Big Man”
I never hear them mentioned but people will rewatch a Hitchcock movie fifty times.
Sadly true (and yeah, I didn’t know about those movies)
You mean Sturgeon’s law, right?
SEO slop is the first thing that comes to mind. It’s super-charged in ubiquity with AI now, but it’s been a thing about as long as search engines.
Sometimes you land on a page and you can tell you’re only there because they loaded it with keywords, repeating the same phrases you searched for in every variation.
SEO is actually one of the things that started me thinking about this. Although those dumb overly long cooking blogs were (previously) written by humans, the incentives led to a style that was no longer genuine. Much worse were those shameless fake review sites that existed solely to promote some VPN or antivirus. Sure, a human might’ve put that together, but so many words with so little regard for meaning.
I never understood why we tolerate the whole recipe site bullshit. It’s been a thing my entire life and it would take no effort to make a recipe site that just gives the recipe. You could when keep doing the 8000 word essays for the search engines and just hide it in the background or something.
I believe the important part is to make people scroll, not just the number of words. For some unholy reason google considers that a better website.
That’s also why some sites have a “go to recipe” button at the top now, which auto scrolls you to the recipe. They don’t care that you read the text, only that you scrolled a lot.
https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
My friend (who is an engineer) pointed me at this a few years ago and I’ve been pleased with it.
Oh man, that’s soothing. A recipe, for a meal, and it explains what I need to do, in the order I do it, and the pictures actually show the cooking. This is some next level stuff. I hope it catches on!
I got so tired of them I actually started asking ChatGPT for recipes instead. It’s mostly worked out.
Go buy a physical copy of the Joy of Cooking
The “cooking blog” style where a simple answer to a simple question has to be padded with eight paragraphs of garbage. Like, I just want to know how to put a comment in a YAML file. I don’t need a table of contents for this, I don’t need to hear a brief history of how the comment was invented, just tell me the character to type.
what is the reason behind this? i never understood it. is the garbage supposed to raise the SEO score or something?
More screen length = more space for embedded video ads.
When it was recipes they claimed it was copyright related. If another site stole your whole recipe plus the story you know it’s stolen. Just saying to hard boil eggs, split em, add mayo and mustard… well that’s just any deviled eggs.
If you’re not adding Sriracha to them, it’s not deviled eggs. 😀
Shovelware video games could be included in the slop category.
Also included in this: the thousands upon thousands of mobile games that are literally the same exact game with minor asset switching.
Like, 99% of those “town/castle/whatever building” games that have fixed locations for buildings etc., they’re all based on maybe 2-3 white label game “engines” that are ready to be re-labelled with new assets, new logos, new story (even though the story events driving it are the same, the “side dish” storytelling changes minimally).
This also goes for pretty much any game format that becomes trending. You can bet your tushie that the moment a game format is even just borderline popular… there will be a dozen or so Chinese software houses copying the mechanics and looks and behaviour, and within a week you can buy a white label version of it for a few thousand dollars.
Hallmark Christmas movies are proto-slop. Same goes for Lifetime Original movies. Example with Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig, literally doesn’t feel real.
I think that one is satire, it ought to be.
It’s literally a parody of lifetime movies made by lifetime as a joke.
Background music for all advertising during the holiday seasjinglejinglejingle jazzybellsbellsbellsbells BING BANG BONG BING DING DANG DONG although I suspect this is increasingly AI slop at this point
- Funko pops
- those Hong Kong ninja movies from the 80s that mixed chinese movies and ninja scenes
- food that lost all taste and is basically salt, sugar, water and/or fat
- any movie franchise or TV show that has a 37th sequel or season
- The Loudness War in music
- Fast Fashion
those Hong Kong ninja movies from the 80s that mixed chinese movies and ninja scenes
You shut your whore mouth, those chopsocky films are a treasure! The difference in quality and how the stories barely go together are some of the appeal of those movies. It’s really cool how far some creators go to make their movie and have everything sorta be a somewhat cohesive narrative.
Shit like Kung Pow are great examples of the genre being done very well (even as a parody).
I know what you mean, but I still can’t tell the difference between The Ninja Force, Ninja The Protector, Full Metal Ninja, and Ninja Terminator.
Those movies were produced en masse with little to no regard to copyright, contracts with actors or global quality and that pretty much fits the definition of slop.
Aside from the so-bad-they’re-good ninja scenes (always a pleasure to see a ninja turning into a wooden stick in a park), I just find those movies boring.
I think you’re talking about those like bootleg ones that were hastily assembled pieces of shit from stolen Run Run Shaw films, etc
Right?
I was talking about movies made by Godfrey Ho in the 80s
Looks like we might be discussing the same movies. I checked out the link you included, and he did work at Shaw Studios and was apparently known to splice in footage not filmed by his crew. Nice
Most phone apps, a lot of modern software, SEO bullshit, the current web, virtually every show, the vast majority of Hollywood films, a lot of the music that makes it to the charts, influencers’ “content”, adverts, the overwhelming pile of crap that no one buys on Steam, lots of AAA games that too many people buy on steam, the poorly-written bottom of the barrel fanfiction that passes as books, and a depressing amount of stuff posted on social media, including this comment.
Yes, I am grumpy today, why do you ask?
Removed by mod
Liberty Mutual’s commercials are utter non-sense, no plot, not funny.
Please make them stop the slop.
The Jerry Springer Show
Law and Order, Law and Order Special Victims Unit, Law and Order Organized Crime, Law and Order Toronto, Law and Order Criminal Intent, Law and Order LA, Law and Order Trial by Jury, Law and Order True Crime, Law and Order UK, Code of Law (aus), Paris enquêtes criminelles (fra), Закон и Порядок. Отдел оперативных расследований (rus), Convictions
I kind of like the idea of using the word “slop” solely for AI and finding other words to describe stuff that’s just poorly made. Trying to ascribe “slop” to other things dilutes the word and will help AI companies to keep doing what they are doing.
I agree. It’s a sliding scale with generative AI currently being the lowest point (for now at least, once the dataset is a slop ouroboros, it’s only going to spiral downwards). Lazy, corporate filmmaking is bad, but lots of film noir classics were basically pulp movies knocked out to meet demand and are now widely regarded as classics. Because there’s a difference between even the most committe overseen, cashgrab product that was still made by a human with their own strengths, tastes and biases vs a genai slop factory.
But my aversion to ai slop has heightened my awareness of it, which in turn has made me notice how many things are slop adjacent. I notice myself writing a message and realsing I’m using a bunch of standard phrases and structures. I’m not an llm, but there are times when our individual responses aren’t that different. I look at stock photography, where a complex family dynamic has been reduced to “teen sits on bed looking down, woman gestures angrily” and I realise that we’ve been traveling down this road for a while now, ai has just cut the brakes.
Reaction videos - prime example of slop. WHO DAFUQ WATCHES THESE? Like, am I going crazy by not getting this? Why would I watch some person just sit there and react to shit, often exaggerating their reaction to get attention of a watcher, that brings literally 0 fucking worth to the original content?
Prank videos - only are second to reaction videos. 99% of the time are either fake or they do some questionable stuff to expectorating bystanders.
I dont mind them when the reactor is a specialist (like a physicist or chemist or something) who normally produce their own content reacting to a realted thing. Pure react channels are pretty trash tho
Reaction videos can be done right. There’s a vocal coach on Youtube who listens to and comments on the vocal techniques in use in famous songs, the most fun ones are the ones she’s never heard before. It’s also really easy to do this kind of content lazily, play someone else’s video and remember to say “oh shit” occasionally.
There’s two kinds of reaction videos. The more common type a lot of streamers do is just garbage content stealing. The other is actually interesting or entertaining to watch.
What exactly is good about either of them.
Say, a professional lawyer is making a reaction video to some other video depicting something that breaks the law and gives comments form law standpoint - that is fine. But might as well count as a commentary channel rather than a reaction channel. Also, these are fucking rare!
And then we got trillions of channels that just watch movie/game trailers, funny tiktok/reddit/insta/9gag videos, or worse - movies and just occasionally react in an exaggerated tone to them or dont react at all - that is content cancer prime.
The vast majority of “reaction” videos or streams are garbage. That doesn’t mean the good ones are bad though.
