Slop is Bad
Wednesday August 28, 2024
I found this blog post through indieblog.page. Read that before reading this.
He says that a never ending ocean of AI slop that you can’t trust is a good thing for the web, but I still think it’s bad. The kind of guy that refers to AI generated content as “slop” is the kind of guy that never trusted it to begin with. I am that kind of guy. I also know how to ignore or avoid AI content, but for the most part I’m not hanging around in places where it runs rampant.
Personally, I don’t think all the slop is going to trigger a mass exodus from the services that “normal” people have become acquainted with. It’s easy for nerds like me to write off everyone scrolling through trash on Instagram as stupid, but most people didn’t ask for this shit. My mom made a Facebook account around 2014, because Pinterest required you to sign in with a Facebook account. Now social media is a normal part of her life, and she uses Instagram as a platform for selling handmade hats. I guess the “fee” for using Instagram to run a business is getting slammed with content that makes you retarded. Anyway, both of my parents literally cannot see the brutal compression applied to images sent over MMS. A cable box being hooked up to a super mega 4K HDTV via a coax cable (fucking kill me) looks good to them. How in the world are they going to pick out the increasingly subtle giveaways in AI generated images? Even if this does cause them to not trust anything they see, so what? They’re not going to go elsewhere. They barely know how to use Google. I watched my mom Google “google” to get to Google. My girlfriend hates (and distrusts) the AI generated answers Google answers her questions with, until it says the thing that wins her an argument. A lot of people really like funny AI generated images and ChatGPT writing their resume. Will they ever lose trust?
As I am writing this very sentence, my coworker is watching Instagram Reels on his phone with the volume all the way up. He’s currently watching some shit about rock stars from his time. I am 99% sure the voice narrating the video is AI generated. Does he care? No. I can make a lot of other assumptions about this video he’s watching, like that it probably has flashy one-word-at-a-time captions that are also AI generated. My other coworker showed me a fake trailer for a live action Simpsons movie and was 100% convinced it was real. Another coworker showed me an Instagram post featuring the new (fake) Porsche pickup truck.
I think it’s going to get a lot worse, and most people will probably just accept it. I sound like a huge pessimist, but I’m not saying it just to wallow in pity. This stuff really gets to me for whatever reason. I was in a similar mood when I wrote this post about social media. It’s kind of crazy how in that post I barely mentioned AI at all. At the end of the “Slop is Good” post I linked, he says that we will need a new web. I agree, but the average person will probably never even hear about this new web utopia because it doesn’t have its own app that comes preinstalled on the new Samsung phone. A “new web” filled with only nerds does sound great, and I guess that’s basically what the early web was, but a new web won’t move my loved ones off the current shitty web.
I do apologize for dumping more negative shit here, and I swear I’ll write something positive soon. I recently opened a draft I had forgotten about for a blog post titled “Things That Make Me Happy”, and I laughed out loud when it was completely empty.