YouTube’s AI slop detector incorrectly targets Kurzgesagt as other creators fear same fate - Dexerto
YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.
All of those intents cause the cook to make particular decisions regarding ingredients, preparation, presentation, and so on
Strongly agree!
the decisions’ outcomes don’t matter to this conversation, just the fact that they were made.
Strongly disagree!
The farmer has no intent. He just shovels it into the trough so that the pigs will shut up until they’re fat enough to slaughter.
The farmer absolutely has an intent! Which I ‘highlighted’. The problem isn’t lack of intent, it’s that the intent exists and it’s dark. However, I think this might help with explaining why I call Kurzkesagt slop though.
Their self described intent is to “spark curiosity in people about science, humanity and our future” using “vibrant and striking vector illustrations”. Which seems like a good intent on the surface. “Farmer wants to make sure his pigs are (intellectually???) fat and happy!”
The problem comes from what they call “lies for children”. A principle that is important because children can not ‘digest’ complex ideas, or foods, in the same way as adults. Which is the point of baby food!
The problem arises because Kurzkesagt doesn’t proport to have an “intended audience” and it’s probably not suited for young children due to the sheer number of bird corpses despite the lies they tell catering specifically to that demographic. Their actual demographic data^1^ shows it skews 18-34 and male which could be primarily dads playing it for their kids but I would suspect that’s their true demographic with the true <18 audience being pretty evenly distributed up to the ~54 range.
The intent is to “spark curious” but the reality looks to be a bunch of young-middle age adults slurping on intellectual baby food and lacking the curiousity to move beyond that. If that isn’t slop I don’t know what is.
Maybe this is just a framing thing
Yeah probably. Chili with a good queso mixed in is delicious! Calling it ‘bean slop with leftover nacho toppings’ does make it significantly less appetizing.
In your defense, you were watching Love Island. That probably slows down the brain.
Yep! …and now I need your help designing a test.
Love Island is clearly functional brainrot. Fruit Love Island is more stereotypical brainrot. But is it more, less, or equal functional brainrot? Designing the test ensures you can’t be selected to participate.
^1 it does need to be said that demographic data is suspect as hell, but it’s the only thing I could find and does seem to line up vaguely with other sources, if you find something better please share!^
Wht not spin up their own peertube instance? The tech is there. Idk how it would work out cost wise. 25M subscribers is a lot but how many simultaneous viewers would there be? 1000 is manageable, would probably only need one server. Creators must take distribution into their own hands.
25M subscribers means 25M people getting notified to come watch a video all at once. They could easily end up with a half million requests to buffer the new video all at once, and that would take down anything short of a full CDN to handle local geo-caching. It wouldn’t be cheap to handle the burst loads of new releases.
That seems quite high. How many people would actually watch as soon as they got the notification? Do their videos usually get 500k views in the first hour?
It wouldn’t have to be all or nothing at first. They could still post to Youtube to share the load. Start with 3 servers and see how they get on.
Well, it really depends on how the notification is sent. Most people don’t have push notifications set up on YouTube, so the spike wouldn’t be crazy high there. Even a few 1000 people requesting a video at once could overwhelm a single server’s bandwidth though.
I completely guessed at the 2% number if they were on another platform that sent out emails or push notifications. But I’m sure they’d also lose a huge chunk of those subscribers when moving platforms.
I know KZ sends out notifications via Discord, so I expect they do get some sort of spike right after upload. And, as long as they are on YT, getting a quick post-upload spike also causes the video to be offered to more non-subscribers.
Well I could have said Nebula, except that Kurzgesagt was on Nebula, and chose to leave it because they wanted to leech off of other creators on that platform and everyone else said “lol no”.
Tbh, for me there’s just a couple of ‘creators’ I watch that do it for their careers, and they didn’t start that way; the rest (50 or so subs) still do it ‘right’, even years later. YouTube started as a platform where everyone can create and share, and people who saw an opportunity for money helped turn it into the shit that it is today. When you (them) have multiple sponsorships per video, the production quality matching broadcast television, prominently show off your new car, house, jet… You (them) are the problem.
This needs a reset back to goofy video game machinimas, cyber police, hiiii my name is boxxy, arby n the chief; when people who hit record didn’t want money. They were there to share with others.
With Adblock and Sponsorblock equipped I’m far from the point of just not using it anymore despite Google’s best efforts. It’s not like there actually are alternatives. I mean I could give Nebula a try but I don’t think it has the vast majority of the channels I watch.
I mostly use Nebula these days, but I’ve giving up on finding new content and I think all the creators I follow are on both because you’re unlikely to get many new viewers on Nebula.
PeerTube doesn’t provide a revenue stream based on views. KZ and basically anyone that outputs “professional” animations has to have revenue if they are to pay their workers. Other revenue streams (e.g. Merch) can be distractions from the main task of producing video.
Nebula content is only available to subscribers, so the reach is tiny. Creators are free to mirror the content to non-Nebula sites, including YT, so I guess it could be an option.
Dropout is also subscriber only, and they are more jealous about making sure content appears there exclusively, at least for a bit. “One Backflip” and “Pissing Out Cancer” both were Dropout-only for at least a month before the performers could put the specials on other platforms.
Yes, it is possible. But, it’s really hard to get off YT after building an audience there, and YT seems to have a much lower barrier to entry than other platforms, even PeerTube.
Non-watermarked slop is going to be impossible to detect going forward, and the false detections are going to get worse.
The fundamental issue is the monetization scheme. It’s just too lucrative for spammers. YouTube’s economics are broken, and getting worse.
…Hence, no matter what YouTube says, YouTube is going to double down on “detectors,” because Alphabet leadership couldn’t care less about destroying longstanding creators. Their only objective is to suppress just enough spam to keep ad buyers unconcerned next quarter, no matter the long term damage; that’s someone else’s problem.
Have you seen what Minimax H3 can output, on a desktop? Even dirt-cheap AI video gen is basically undetectable now. I think all YouTube can filter is the absolute “bottom barrel” spammers still using some old model because they don’t know any better.
And if they train detectors on “stereotypical” AI output like Ghibli style or flat colors or whatever, they’re just going to nuke channels like Kurzgesagt while most AI slop spammers adapt to get through. There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.
…But also, YT doesn’t even care.
The filters make next quarter look better because they do catch the bottom barrel, and that’s all that matters.
If the slop videos get through, the average user won’t see the difference either, so why should they care?
I wish more people that oppose ai would actually keep up with it so they don’t regurgitate outdated information, or claims that nobody will use it when it stops being subsidized.
To be fair, people generally won’t keep up with something they aren’t interested in, much less something they are actively disinterested in. That’s reasonable.
I do have an irrational pet peeve of people making claims on something they know little about though, which is why I may have come on as hostile…
Makes me angry my country is now split as far as AI slop awareness is concerned: some are opposed (look up so-called Pax Silica), while others are embracing the garbage full on as if it’s gonna make them more money, and still others unaware it could affect them sooner or later, especially as the government thinks AI is a boon when it’s really not.
There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.
It’s harder for users as well. Even youtubers I’ve followed for a while have started using the recipe of having a ridculous thumbnail such as “WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER BUY THIS” with an arrow pointing to something. After a couple of times of catching me because I own one of the things the arrow is pointing to (and then watching a 10:01 long video not talking about the item in question) I decided not to fall for it. I noticed that discovery of a new channel got hard. They’re all following the recipe now since I guess youtube mandates it, so it’s the same bas relief thumbnails that seem like they pose a question and a video that doesn’t answer it. We’ll end up with a new Betteridge’s Law and the resource youtube once was is lost forever and we’ll stand around making dumb faces thinking how we’re all getting ripped off…
Seems the same pattern at X, probably because they hired in an ex-YouTuber at the top.
Moderation algorithms are universally very poorly written and don’t appear to have gotten better in the last 6-8 years when they began using them to replace human moderators.
On X they seem to have a timer for new accounts that puts a fake label on accounts as if they’re spamming or a bot, when it’s just a real user with opinions the algorithm is trained to dislike. Same exact crap the old Twitter did. They put the source code on the web and it showed how if you posted or replied on any of a broad range of topics, your account was scored lower until you were deemed low quality and made invisible. It’s like they just wanted cat memes and recipes from elderly women, but not many of them on Twitter or X. Probably because they hired in people from companies where non-controversial topics were a much larger share of what was discussed there. 1 trick ponies who weren’t suitable for doing the same job at X.
There’s no way to boost ad views or MAU with that approach. I believe X will never be profitable due to those people running the show and Musk not ever hiring anyone a lot better to run X. Musk had a similarly bad experience with Solar city. Another company he didn’t know enough about to manage himself and the people he hired to do it weren’t good enough either.
Youtube and X is basically a private monopolies. They only care about the profit margins. Any and all extra expenditure to R&D or consumer satisfaction is just a cut to their profits today and since they don’t have any real competition, so why raise quality of service above the bare minimum? Their only real selling point is that everybody uses them, so everybody will have to keep using them, if they want to be seen or access most things. they don’t care if they serve slop, because you and me and the wider masses are going to eat it up anyway.
X loses money so no margins there. Twitter has never made a profit in its history that I’ve ever heard of. Facebook’s on the way out. 20 years ago it was college age users. 10 years ago it was people over 50. Now it’s a lot of commercial accounts posting as they do on other basically dying or dead platforms. The only sign of life is streaming video and chats related to streaming video.
YouTube has been losing users and content creators to both Rumble and Twitch. The right 1/3 of America is on Rumble while Twitch took the gamers. Youtube still has business but they basically gave away enough business to make those 2 relevant.
Alphabet’s dependent on Youtube, cloud services, web search, and related ads to pay for the unprofitable parts of the business, which appears to be where the bulk of their employees work, rather than at the earnings-generators. If they screw up youtube, then they will have to lay a lot of the people in the fun and interesting jobs off, along with the many layers of bureaucracy and non-coders working in jobs that nobody’s quite sure what they do there. They can’t really afford to screw up youtube any more than they have. It can’t merely do well. It has to do great to pay all of their bills. Very similar to the action-hero movies at the movie studio paying for all the unprofitable ones that most people work on
What’s mostly keeping those platforms afloat is, unfortunately, people in developing countries where social media usage is very heavy to the point it’s literally its own internet such as Facebook’s walled garden.
The best solution would be to turn away from detectors, which will always be a losing game, and return to crowdsourced curation through users likes and ratings.
But that would end up with too many of the corporate propaganda videos getting tanked with dislikes so YouTube will never go for that.
For every ten users who decry AI voices and animation, a thousand more will blindly click “Like” and “Subscribe”. The people have spoken, and they want to eat straight from the fertilizer pile.
People only click like and subscribe because their other options were taken from them. They got tired of the people speaking up so removed the options to do so.
I’ve run my own anecdotal and admittedly small blind trials on friends and family. Most people unfortunately preferred the A.I. slop to real human content. My theory is because it tends to be brought and shiny. The only actual study I could find online, told participants which is which, kind of defeating the purpose in my opinion.
There was recently a study using human short stories and LLM generated short stories prompted to write a similar story. The participants where told which stories were AI generated, but sometimes they were lied to, and told a human-written story was AI generated.
The study showed that people liked the AI stories more. It also showed that if someone has a negative bias against AI generated content, they’d claim the AI story was worse, even if it were actually the human story and they were just told it was AI.
Also, another test was performed where they provided a story and asked them if it was AI generated or human generated. The participants could only tell the AI written story 45% to 50% of the time. Essentially, they were guessing.
I think many people have taken a mental snapshot of the quality of AI generated content from a couple years ago and just assumed it hasn’t improved since then.
That won’t work for long. Generation can be hosted in a country outside the jurisdiction.
Current services do need such a law anyway, and many already are watermarked. But I’m just saying it wouldn’t even slow down spammers once they figure it out.
that’s why the law shouldn’t apply to just generation. as long as something is delivered (even if over the internet) to EU places, then the EU law mandating AI labels applies.
Ironically it’s probably because so many of the slop videos try and copy their style. However I would have thought YouTube would be more proactive with a channel with 25M subs.
This makes sense. Kurzgesagt makes low quality content that’s poorly researched and has AI overdub. It’s a channel funded partly by a Bill Gates subsidiary, and has to do propaganda for them to meet its budget requirements. To say, “we established ourselves early” as an excuse is dumb. If we’re banning AI slop, then they should be banned.
I’ve seen this repeated a ton, so looked into it for myself, especially the “Bill Gates influence” angle.
I don’t buy it.
They aren’t perfect, but every Kurzgesagt video I’ve seen is above par for YouTube. And on the few topics I already knew something about, they seem to cover stuff well.
The criticism, on the other hand, was (to me) entirely unconvincing when investigated. It was mostly “I personally don’t like the agenda these facts point to.”
EDIT
And all that aside:
No one should be banned for the wrong reason.
If Kurzgesagt should be taken down, it shouldn’t be from a dysfunctional AI detection filter. It should be over whatever they actually did wrong.
Kurzgasagt makes a lot of cool science videos, but you can definitely predict when their ‘actually we can science our way into only 2c rise in temperature and be alright’ or ‘Africa is only poor because of overpopulation’ videos are going to end in a Gates Foundation disclosure.
I dislike how disenting opinions get downvoted on Lemmy/technology probably more than even on reddit.
Everything you said is factually correct.
I disagree that it means they should be banned but they take money from corporations to produce slopaganda, that’s just true, and even beyond that their videos are well animated but the moment they touch a subject you actually know about you realize they are just internet researched videos that go a little more in depth that reading the Wikipedia page but it doesn’t seem they actually understand what they are talking about, which is fine except that’s not what they present themselves as (same with CPG Greg)
It’s a channel funded partly by a Bill Gates subsidiary, and has to do propaganda for them to meet its budget requirements.
May be technically true, but the implication is conspiratorial.
This:
Kurzgesagt makes low quality content that’s poorly researched…
Is an opinion I would strongly contest. “Slopaganda” doesn’t fit my impression either, especially with what they’ve disclosed about their production process.
And this:
This makes sense… They should be banned.
Sounds like advocating for a ban under false pretenses, which I am vehemently against. That’s what ultimately crosses the downvote threshold for me.
…That came out as more accusatory/singled out than I intended. I don’t mean to pile on the comment.
Is the channel perfect? No. I think they’re citation-lite in the videos, have made mistakes and had bad takes. And it’s a little oversimplified for my tastes.
But on this:
I dislike how disenting opinions get downvoted on Lemmy/technology probably more than even on reddit.
I think a downvote is a fair tool, in this case.
And unlike Reddit (at least in by browser UI), Lemmy doesn’t hide the comment when it’s heavily downvoted, which I like. The comment still gets “fair” exposure like any other comment in this thread, but that doesn’t mean people have to like it.
Other Lemmy/Piefed UIs may handle this differently, though. Not sure about that.
I dislike how disenting opinions get downvoted on Lemmy/technology probably more than even on reddit.
That almost makes it sound unfair, but the technology on Lemmy is doing exactly what each one of us tells it to do every time we cast a vote. It is, as far as I can tell, an exact representation of our own individual votes cast.
I could almost see your point on Reddit because of all the vote fuckery that goes on there, but here on Lemmy blaming a mass downvote on the tech and not on the users casting the votes is a misdirection of blame.
Ah, I see your point. It is a particularly rough crowd. Try commenting how well a disfavored Linux distro works for you and watch the downvotes fly, lol.
c/Technology is the preferred nomenclature I think, or I guess the full community link if you want to distinguish it by instance (there are several).
They are, they’re trying, they’re pushing other platforms constantly. Kurzgesagt already does, heavily.
But are users switching? Nope.
They hardly even know they exist.
Sometimes I even see such a comment on YouTube, a user questioning YouTube; yet they didn’t even watch the video long enough to see the creator promoting an alternative platform.
They’ve already scrolled to the next video, algorithmically fed to them.
YouTube has an iron grip on YT users, and they know it. Even if ALL creators band together, IMO there’s basically nothing the creators can do.
Even if ALL creators band together, IMO there’s basically nothing the creators can do.
Accurate. Even if everyone started uploading to a different platform tomorrow, the catalog of videos already on YT is enough to sustain them for a while
Nothing bad, Nebula is awesome. Kurzgesagt and CGP Grey disagreed with the direction the rest of the leadership wanted to go with it and they jumped ship. Since then it has exploded in popularity.
Yeah, they left, along with CGP Grey, a very long time ago. The TL;DR of why is: as early members of Standard, they thought that they and the other early members should be entitled to take a larger share of the income from Nebula than newer creators. Everyone else thought it should be shared more equitably. Essentially, Kurzgesagt and Grey wanted to be able to leech off of the work of others, instead of operate in a worker-owned business where everyone is paid according to the value they bring in.
I bailed on YouTube a few years ago. I had a video with a very clearly public domain piece of music (both the song and the performance) in it, which I didn’t monetize just because I hate ads and the channel wasn’t very popular anyway. Some bot flagged the public domain song for copyright and YouTube not only gave me a copyright strike but also added paid ads into my video without my consent so they could send the ad money to whoever it was that flagged it.
I didn’t even bother to contest that one, I just deleted my entire channel and sent them a very angry message telling them to go fuck themselves lol.
I will never use them again because of that, and I’m so glad I got out before AI became a thing. Fuck YouTube.
It may not be AI slob but it’s definitely neo liberal slob. Their pure science videos can be pretty good, but they can‘t help themselves producing videos once in a while presenting their center-right politics with the same gravitas and „objectivity“ as their science content.
wealth taxes are nonstarters unless there is a robust way for the government to assess wealth that won’t end up assuming somone with a few memecoins is worth millions or someone with a bad stock day is broke.
Yeah it stopped being a scientific channel and it turned into a channel presenting their opinions, even the one that are about science feel too opinionated.
I’m going to controversially say that I’m glad YouTube is at least trying. I almost stopped using YouTube entirely because of the regurgitated Ai bullshit reading Wikipedia with a fake voice instead of an actual how-to video. Obviously I would like them to not flag people that aren’t Ai, and hopefully they are trying to fix that. But I’ll take it over literally nothing.
The best solution would be to turn away from detectors, which will always be a losing game, and return to crowdsourced curation through users likes and ratings.
But that would end up with too many of the corporate propaganda videos getting tanked with dislikes so YouTube will never go for that.
Propaganda arm? All I could find was that they were contracted for a Gates Foundation video in 2015 and got a big grant from the foundation around that time.
Yeah, of you go to their page to upload content, it now has prompt where you can generate one. It is just a stunt to fool people that they fighting and that it is hard, when in reality they want the slop as it is addictive to kids.
Yeah, I think edutainment in particular should really try to at least mirror on Peer Tube. You don’t earn anything for views there, but you also won’t be subject to centralized content moderation.
But, KZ is, I think, captured by Capitalism, and would be unwilling to be hosted on a site that doesn’t pay them.
Are they so sure that Kurzgesagt isn’t slop? Isn’t it funded by the Gates Foundation? The charity arm of Bill “I’m totally not a creepy pedophile monopolist” Gate’s PR initiative?
Using AI to detect AI has, time and time again, proven to be a broken idea. Here is Google with a genius idea: use AI to detect AI, to prevent AI videos.
Keep in mind folks, this is a global top-three company in terms of revenue.
The tone of their videos shifted noticeably for me, from neutral science information with funny birds, to a more agenda driven tone with funny birds. Like most of the current videos arent trying to explain some cool phenomenon or wacky “what ifs”, but instead trying to scare you into watching the videos with click bait thumbnails and titles like “GERMANY IS OVER!” and “You need to quite WEED” with the thumbnail saying “Youre too old”. There are dozens of others like that but those were just more recent. I don’t need to be made to feel bad about myself to be enticed to watch a video…Its just really off putting.
Sure , I can definitely see some of those frustrations. I focus more on bigger picture though I think and empathize with the creator’s need to still be successful educating people in these fraught times. They have been doing intensive, high quality work for so long now, before the predatory slop era. But they have to exist in it, and know that they are a very plaugerized format through AI theft.
Their magic has always been making complex concepts approachable to the masses, and that is such a vital public service we all benefit from. Those lowest common denominator folks are increasingly lost to chaos though and there just isn’t a “right way” of how you adjust. So I look beyond the “wrapping” you mention and I feel that generally the content itself is still intact, powerful and very well made.
So basically, the click bait headlines/thumbs just aren’t for us, and they are indirectly asking us to understand that without them broadly giving away the strategy. Those tactics just get the kids with broken brains in the room and then maybe they can start to heal or be saved from the edge. Hope you can consider that.
Youtube’s system sucks, but I don’t feel bad for many of these channels. They used to be great. You could learn a lot while eating, or just entertain yourself without brainrot.
For a few years now, however, increasing numbers of their videos have been sponsored by billionaires (or their chains of companies or foundations), either in part or in full. Some extreme cases are just plain propaganda.
Raycons? Established titles? Betterhelp? Not exactly what op said but theres plenty of examples of shitty YouTube selloutry. Here’s a whole dude who made his channel on calling out the shitty sponsors m.youtube.com/@Shane_McGillicuddy
A perfect example is Veritasium’s now deleted video about self driving cars. Entirely sponsored by Waymo, featuring exlusively data provided by Waymo (which coincidentally contradicted all other available data), and the guy acts like the video being fully sponsored means nothing.
Once people called him out, he started acting like a victim targeted by everyone for no reason. Just read his comments under videos on the topic. It’s just pathetic.
Many other channels, like Kurzgesagt, completely source their data from billionaire-sponsored websites like OurWorldInData. Sometimes the data matches other, more reliable and trustworthy sources, and other times it’s just plain made up.
In addition to portraying various subjects from only one perspective, which, suspiciously, always seems to be the one that makes billionaires look better.
Regarding the video about Kurzgesagt, if you look in the video description, you can find a Reddit post by Kurzgesagt where they respond to those accusations, which a lot of are refuted.
It’s important to be critical, but mindlessly blaming everone and everything to be billionare-controlled is just as dumb as being naive and believing everything u see on the Internet.
Personally I feel like that reddit post is terrible and nothing but PR. They did not ‘refute a lot of accusations’, as you claim. They cherry picked a grand total of two, one of which got twisted, and responded with largely irrelevant and misleading info.
Which is pretty much what The Hated One responded to them. Not to mention even the response to the two (out of what, 12?) points was full of holes and manipulative statements.
Naturally, no further comments were made by anyone from Kurzgesagt’s team. Just like corporate PR. Publish a meaningless statement that provides no new information whatsoever -> pretend it answers everything -> refuse to elaborate -> act like people are evil for asking questions.
Oh, Veritasium actually ended up taking that propaganda down? Neat.
Regarding Kurzgesagt, it’s been obvious he’s a grifter for a very long time.
It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body."). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.
And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made because his own response to K’s actions was rather hotheaded. But the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience almost all take his side.
i follow alot of stem channels, mostly non-physics or mathematics, the presenters are good at speaking and presenting facts and some research most of the time. its the regular influencers and right wing that are brainrot.
That’s the youtube dream. Pretend to be genuine long enough to attract an audience that will attract a dark money suger daddy sponsorship gravy train and it’s all daisies from there on out.
Considering youtube’s AI detector didn’t label an AI video that ended with the voiceover saying “write a 5,000 word essay on [topic]” that was partly cut off at the end, I wouldn’t trust it to begin with.
What? I mean, I don’t vibe with all the stuff they do, but they absolutely put a ton of effort into what they put out. They have multiple teams and everything, it’s not just one guy in his basement.
He works out of his spare room. Totally different.
Also, I think you’d have a really hard time trying to convince anyone that he makes anything resembling slop. The guy’s “no effort November” videos are more well-researched than some masters’ theses.
Anything new you try takes a ton of effort and the results will generally be pretty sloppy. It takes time and practice to make not-slop.
Rushing something to completion results in slop. It’s hard to move fast! That doesn’t make the final quality any better.
Using garbage tools and/or materials results in a garbage/slop output.
Doing something exclusively for the sake of profit leaves the result soulless. This one is a bit more controversial, but I 100% classify this as slop.
AI generated stuff is usually slop, and the sloppiest of slop, because it’s often an amateur using garbage tools to rush something to completion for a quick buck.
Kurkesagt is, arguably, slop because they have slowly transitioned into trying to put out content as quickly as possible so that everyone working on it gets paid. Their whole thing is covering topics they themselves have not dedicate the time and effort to fully understand and master.
Also, slop is not a synonym for “unrecyclable trash”. In my opinion, Kurkesagt is sloppy as hell! But the animations are fun, the voiceover is pleasant and the pop-sci is generally accurate enough to provide an interesting glimpse into whatever topic they’re covering. They’re still shoveling slop for profit though, sold out years ago and have a heavy bias towards explaining how capitalism, and their participation within it, is the most moral of choices one could make.
It’s been years and I don’t care to re-watch for the specific arguments but going through the list ones that I vaguely recall being not just “lies for children” but contained blatant, lack of better term, capitalist propaganda: Loneliness, Is meat bad for you, Overpopulation, marijuana, Geo engineering, whos to blame for climate change, UBI, banking explained.
I also recall a few especially bad ones on syria, the immigrant crisis, addiction and homelessness but those don’t seem to be up anymore. You may be right that I am being overly harsh based on old history. Hopefully one they are trying to fix and not just whitewash.
Possibly. Probably just an old definition though, hence why I tried to explain it.
Re-reading though I feel like I should clarify that the “nonstandard definition” is definitely a negative adjective, just not ‘damning’ in the same way it seems to be being interpreted here.
While I can’t speak for @itsjustachairmary it seems there’s at least 2 of us with that, or a similar, definition!
The definition I think most of the internet has settled on is “no-effort, no-value content, about which neither creator nor viewer cares that it exists.”
It has to satisfy all four criteria to be slop (no effort, no value, creator doesn’t care, viewer doesn’t care), but it doesn’t necessarily have to be AI; still, generally speaking, non-AI content is so much more expensive and time consuming that people are unlikely to put in the work (and companies are unlikely to put in the money) to have it made.
Human-made memes and jokes aren’t slop, partially because even when they’re low effort bad photoshops, they make people laugh (or at least think amused thoughts). At the very least, a human can feel gratified to have made a thing they wanted to make. Human-made ads aren’t slop, because the company at least cares that it provides enough of a return to justify paying an employee for its creation.
Honestly it seems like our definitions don’t differ that much. Rephrasing my definition to your format: “little to no-value content, about which the creator cares little about, with the goal for mass appeal”.
I don’t think the amount of effort someone put into something changes it’s value or quality. It feels like some kind of “blood sweat and tears are what’s most important, that’s why blood diamonds are the most valuable” shit y’know?
People can find value in anything, so I’m likely a bit more pervasive on what’s “slop” quality.
I do emotionally agree that most human-made memes and jokes aren’t slop but according to both of our definitions that doesn’t really hold up. If it was just because the creator cared about their creation or the laugh was valuable that “unslops” a lot of, pretty terrible and objectively slop, slop. I think we’re both missing something here, any ideas on what?
I disagree strongly about ads and see those of all shapes and provenance as the quintessential and original slop. The creators don’t care about the ad, they’re doing it for a paycheck with the benefactor only giving a shit about the “engagement” that comes from force feeding the ad to the masses.
No, I think the effort is key here, because the original pitch for calling AI output “slop” was, “if they don’t care enough to make it, why would I care enough to read/look at/watch/listen to it?”
If it’s anything churned out cynically, with only the desire to make money off of broad appeal, then we have to put Sherlock Holmes stories into that camp; certainly from “Hound of the Baskervilles” onward, if not all of it. Doyle cared about the work, and he put in plenty of time and effort to making it, and the readers definitely cared, but at the end of the day he was done with the character and just wanted to give the fans what they wanted so he could make a paycheck. We also have to put basically every movie in that camp, and pretty much every book written before the publishing industry took a nosedive in the late 90s. We have to put a ton of music into that category. Basically, anything other than indie street art.
As for ads never being art: I see what you’re saying, but the “art-nouveau” style and movement began as advertising for theater performances in the 1890s. Similarly and more recently, there’s a seminal and well-beloved Chobani ad from 2021 called “Dear Alice” that has defined and codified a lot of the “solarpunk” aesthetic. Somebody went through and erased all of the brand logos and set it to different music, and it’s legitimately a beautiful little video about a touching parent/child relationship in a solarpunk future, but it was originally made as an ad.
Humans, especially artists, work for ad agencies; and sometimes they make art as a part of their paid work. It’s not common by any means, but the fact that they were paid for it doesn’t make it slop.
If it was just because the creator cared about their creation or the laugh was valuable that “unslops” a lot of, pretty terrible and objectively slop, slop. I think we’re both missing something here, any ideas on what?
I think we need to partially disentangle “bad art” from “slop.”
Slop is bad, but it doesn’t just mean “bad.” All slop is bad art, but we humans can try really hard and make bad or objectionable art with our own two hands just fine. “Birth of a Nation” is absolutely objectionable and deplorable, but it’s not slop because D. W. Griffith truly believed in what he was making. “The Room” is objectively not a good movie, but Tommy Wiseau really cared about it. That doesn’t mean many people are ever going to want to watch it unironically. “Friday” by Rebecca Black is really bad music, but it’s not slop.
(Incidentally, in the same way, “slop” also doesn’t mean soulless, anodyne, corporate, or misguided. Again, all slop is those things, but humans can do that on our own, too; even if we try real hard!)
Not all bad art is slop; that doesn’t make it good art, it just makes it bad art by humans who tried hard (or at least tried a little bit) and did a bad job, or humans who were terrible people and that oozed out into their work.
“if they don’t care enough to make it, why would I care enough to read/look at/watch/listen to it?”
Isn’t that already covered without the additional metric of “effort”?
If it’s anything churned out cynically, with only the desire to make money off of broad appeal
It’s not just that, but I do think that is a large part. The corporate and soulless part you called out.
I think the “just wanted to give the fans what they wanted” and Doyle’s ability to actually do just that saves it from the “little to no value” bit, which makes it pandering but not slop. The same can be said for a lot of movies, music, etc. Meanwhile a lot of street art is sloppy as hell from needing to rush due to illegality but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad either.
“art-nouveau” style and movement began as advertising for theater performances in the 1890s.
I think both that and the “Dear Alice” video are examples of reclaimed slop. Someone saw the “little” value in the ad and opted to amplify it. I would classify those and similar examples as memes distilled from slop.
“slop” also doesn’t mean soulless, anodyne, corporate, or misguided. Again, all slop is those things
“Misguided” doesn’t feel like it’s a necessary part of “slop” but I otherwise agree.
Going the other way with examples, I think we can both agree that Fruit Love Island is absolutely slop, despite many viewers caring a lot about it’s existence. But why exactly? And is it more or less “slop” than the original Love Island? Honestly I’m having a hard time justifying why Fruit Love Island isn’t an example of a ‘meme distilled from slop’ when I really want to call it ‘slop distilled from slop’.
Isn’t that already covered without the additional metric of “effort”?
I don’t think so. The effort is an important part of it.
pandering but not slop.
That’s a good distinction, and I think one we should hang on to.
a lot of street art is sloppy as hell from needing to rush due to illegality
I think we may have hit upon another definitional difference here. “Slop” isn’t linguistically descended from “sloppy,” but rather both are descended from an older form of “slop,” referring to the gooey scrap that is fed to pigs. It is something which exists in great quantities but low quality, and which the farmer quickly and carelessly tips into a trough for the pigs to eat, caring little for it beyond that it exists.
“Sloppy” derived from that word, carrying with it the quick and unappealing connotations, while the modern definition of “slop” brought with it the carelessness, quantity, and force-feeding connotations.
I think both that and the “Dear Alice” video are examples of reclaimed slop.
I don’t think so. I think it was artists doing a job they could get paid for, but making good art within those constraints.
“Misguided” doesn’t feel like it’s a necessary part of “slop”
On reflection, that’s totally fair. I move to have that stricken from the record.
I think we can both agree that Fruit Love Island is absolutely slop, despite many viewers caring a lot about it’s existence.
Huh. Well, today I learned about something against my will.
Anyway, yeah, definitely slop. I think it’s because the creator didn’t care about it, and expended almost no effort toward creating it. You can tell they didn’t care because they gave it all up. This is getting me less certain about the desire of the audience being important to something’s slop status; that’s probably way more subjective than this term needs.
is it more or less “slop” than the original Love Island?
That is an interesting question. Having never watched either, I don’t know that I’m qualified to respond. I will say that the people who work on reality TV are pretty hard-working, though; so I’m inclined to think it’s not slop. Bad art? Yes. But not slop.
Why? If someone is baking cookies it doesn’t improve the cookies if they have to run a mile for each ingredient. What am I missing? Is it just that someone being willing to run and get each ingredient demonstrates a level of care?
I think we may have hit upon another definitional difference here.
Good catch! I do think that’s a big part of the difference! In my old age I’ve definitely seen it go from sloppy->slop and in that process reclaim the old connotation of “low quality, high quantity animal feed”. Specifically, back in my day, it wasn’t uncommon to be using/hearing Microslop to refer to the company and it’s shitty half-ass product implementations since at least 2018 (with Edge and Bing specifically), but it was more about being ‘sloppy’ than ‘slop for the masses’ y’know?
It makes 100% sense that the more popular definition would’ve lost the ‘sloppy’ association and gone back to the ‘low quality, high quantity animal feed’.
However, bringing it back to the original topic, I do think that definition/perspective is more damning of Kurzkesagt. Their videos are rushed but they do take great care to not be sloppy in that way.
I think it was artists doing a job they could get paid for, but making good art within those constraints.
I think this is where we flip sides on the ‘sloppy’ vs. ‘slop’ distinction. I do think that objectively good art (if we pretend that’s a thing) can be slop if it’s purpose is ‘high volume animal feed’. That might be coming from the culinary association of things like sloppy joes, casseroles, mashed veggies, biscuits and gravy, MREs, etc. as ‘slop’ and sometimes even ‘tasty slop’.
I move to have that stricken from the record.
I second that motion! The core concept was valid and beneficial a single extra word shouldn’t detract from that :P
Huh. Well, today I learned about something against my will.
…Sorry to curse you with that… I have a friend who is really into both reality TV and tiktok+Instagram who was absolutely raging about it when it was popular and assumed it was more common knowledge…
I’ve tried watching a couple episodes of Love Island with said friend and, for me, it felt like some of the most soulless TV I’ve ever seen. To avoid cursing you with that experience as well, my experience of it was that everyone on set looks dead inside, they’re all kissing eachother all the time but it doesn’t look like any of them are having any fun. Then the producers intentionally do a “game” that breaks the norms of monogamy and then all the contestants robotically do a big show of performative jealousy, hurt and anger before going back to some of the most depressing and uncomfortable kissing I’ve ever seen.
I was using that and Fruit Love Island as a foil because I half joked that the FLI characters at least had more soul and personality, albeit cartoonish, than the contestants in the original show and my friend agreed.
Sorry I apparently needed to vent about that, lol -_-;
If someone is baking cookies it doesn’t improve the cookies if they have to run a mile for each ingredient. What am I missing?
I had to have a good think about this, because no, performative or unproductive effort doesn’t add anything. But…
Is it just that someone being willing to run and get each ingredient demonstrates a level of care?
…I think this gets closer—that the idea is important enough, that they cared enough, to put in the time and energy. But it has to be meaningful effort; the running-a-mile analogy wouldn’t qualify, but there’s a difference between someone serving me cookies that they worked at for hours to bake, and the same person handing me chemically-identical cookies that they purchased at the grocery store. Knowing that they cared enough to do that means that what they’re trying to express means a lot to them (or at least that I do).
Sloppers don’t have any messages that mean anything to them. They just care about the quantity; and in the case of AI, they literally can’t care about the message. But the Chobani animators and the poster designers in 19th century Paris have a message that means a lot to them, and they bury it under the advertisement so that their art gets out there and they can also feed their family.
back in my day, it wasn’t uncommon to be using/hearing Microslop to refer to the company and it’s shitty half-ass product implementations since at least 2018
Oh man, remember Windows Vista? That was a slop-y and sloppy trip.
It makes 100% sense that the more popular definition would’ve lost the ‘sloppy’ association and gone back to the ‘low quality, high quantity animal feed’.
Yeah, I think partially because it’s superficially quite polished. If you look closely you can see AI artifacts, but on a first glance it looks like an uncanny valley version of a polished, final product.
However, bringing it back to the original topic, I do think that definition/perspective is more damning of Kurzkesagt. Their videos are rushed but they do take great care to not be sloppy in that way.
Hmmm. I’m going to have to think about it, but I really do think that the people there actually are putting in a ton of effort. And sometimes doing a bad job anyway, but I don’t think they put out a large enough quantity to reasonably call it slop. Still, I’m intrigued by the question.
I think this is where we flip sides on the ‘sloppy’ vs. ‘slop’ distinction. I do think that objectively good art (if we pretend that’s a thing) can be slop if it’s purpose is ‘high volume animal feed’. That might be coming from the culinary association of things like sloppy joes, casseroles, mashed veggies, biscuits and gravy, MREs, etc. as ‘slop’ and sometimes even ‘tasty slop’.
Interesting. I don’t agree, but because at the end of the day, slop isn’t made for humans, so it can’t ever be objectively (granting your premise) good to the human palate. Guilty pleasure, sure. Perverse curiosity, yeah. But that isn’t saying much, as the “Love Island” conversation is about to talk more about.
That said, I think I see where you’re coming from. I do like me some sloppy joes and biscuits and gravy. Not all together, though.
…Sorry to curse you with that…
Nah, I knew the risks when I signed up for this gig.
it felt like some of the most soulless TV I’ve ever seen. […] everyone on set looks dead inside, they’re all kissing eachother all the time but it doesn’t look like any of them are having any fun.
Dang. That sounds awful. Why do people subject themselves to that sort of…oh, prize money, right
and my friend agreed.
That is one impressive bit of self-awareness, honestly. lol
the idea is important enough, that they cared enough, to put in the time and energy
That unfortunately tracks with overall American culture and it having deeply ingrained protestant work ethic. I was really hoping there was something more to it though
and in the case of AI, they literally can’t care about the message.
Why? Even my ‘all ads are slop’ position doesn’t preclude ads from having a message the creators and/or artists do care about. I unfortunately do think that most slop peddlers do genuinely, and often passionately, have a specific message/idea/belief they are trying to communicate/perpetuate.
The problem comes from not having rigorously interrogated that message or engaged with it in any fundamental way. I would agree that an issue with AI is that it shortens the time from idea->creation such that the creator has even less time to engage with what they’re creating and is even less likely to interrogate the message being spread. I would point to ‘Dear Alice’ as a perfect example of how that’s not an exclusively AI thing though.
Oh man, remember Windows Vista?
You mean back when windows was good :P
an uncanny valley version of a polished, final product.
Ooh, that’s a real good phrase! I’m stealing that!
I really do think that the people there actually are putting in a ton of effort.
I would agree! And I do understand they do seem to be trying to do their best given the environment they exist within.
Would comparing them to a prison chef be a good metaphor? It’s a hard job that takes a lot of work and they’re doing the best with what they’ve got, but the final outcome is still slop. They’re prisoners like the rest of us and I understand why they don’t defy the guards(funders and platforms) and raid the commissary, serve us the same meals that they provide for the guards, show up in solidarity during a strike, etc. but I do respect them significantly less for it.
I don’t think they put out a large enough quantity to reasonably call it slop.
I can see the distinction you’re pointing at but I don’t see the difference, it ‘feeds’ millions of people.
slop isn’t made for humans
I don’t follow. Then who is it made for?
sloppy joes and biscuits and gravy. Not all together, though.
… On self reflection I might have a problem with high slop tolerance because I immediately went ‘if done right that could actually be pretty good!’
That is one impressive bit of self-awareness, honestly. lol
To be fair, I guess half the ‘fun’ of Love Island is the lack of personality? The explanation I got was that it was like watching someone stream playing ‘Sims’. The streamer then fucks with the ‘sims’ to see what happens giving the audience the ‘whats going to happen next!?’ high. As the audience you can project whatever personality you want onto the characters and the soullessness gives a blank canvas that allows the viewer to fill in the blanks which allows for a better reality tv show with broader mass appeal than could otherwise be created?
… Yeah I don’t really get it, but to each their yum.
That unfortunately tracks with overall American culture and it having deeply ingrained protestant work ethic. I was really hoping there was something more to it though
I’m definitely not a grindset guy. I don’t mean this in a “prove yourself” sort of way, I mean it in a “making stuff that doesn’t matter is easy” sort of way. Maybe I’m too manipulated by the modern world, but I can’t think of a way to show that something matters to you aside from making some kind of sacrifice; of time, or energy, or whatever. I don’t mean “toiling for weeks on a tweet,” I mean “at least thinking about it for a few minutes.”
Even my ‘all ads are slop’ position doesn’t preclude ads from having a message the creators and/or artists do care about.
I think that’s the distinction I’m trying to make, though. If it’s slop, the creator doesn’t care about it. Doesn’t care enough to put in any actual effort, tries to flood the zone instead of thinking about it long enough to produce anything meaningful.
I unfortunately do think that most slop peddlers do genuinely, and often passionately, have a specific message/idea/belief they are trying to communicate/perpetuate.
Yeah, so I think here you’re applying my definition to your example and pointing out that it doesn’t match. Which is what I would expect. Hence the conversation (which is excellent, incidentally).
The problem comes from not having rigorously interrogated that message or engaged with it in any fundamental way. I would agree that an issue with AI is that it shortens the time from idea->creation such that the creator has even less time to engage with what they’re creating and is even less likely to interrogate the message being spread.
That’s more or less what I mean by “effort,” though said in the negative. Well put.
I would point to ‘Dear Alice’ as a perfect example of how that’s not an exclusively AI thing though.
I’m not sure what you mean by that.
[Vista] You mean back when windows was good :P
Oh man, we were having such a nice conversation, and now we’ve gotta fight? Bummer. ;-)
Ooh, that’s a real good phrase! I’m stealing that!
With my warmest regards.
Would comparing them to a prison chef be a good metaphor?
Fantastic analogy. Especially:
They’re prisoners like the rest of us and I understand why they don’t defy the guards(funders and platforms) and raid the commissary, serve us the same meals that they provide for the guards, show up in solidarity during a strike, etc. but I do respect them significantly less for it.
Agreed, same.
But now I think I’m starting to see that our disagreement is more one of very small degrees than of anything substantive. Maybe you figured that out a while ago.
[slop isn’t made for humans] I don’t follow. Then who is it made for?
The algorithm. It just has to pass muster long enough that the algorithm serves it up to a real human. I guess in this analogy, the algorithm is the uncultured swine. I think I buy that.
[sloppy joes and biscuits and gravy] ‘if done right that could actually be pretty good!’
I think the problem there would be the tomato. It’s too sweet and tangy: I don’t think there’s much way to make it work with the creamy flavor of the sausage gravy. Source: sometimes I get a bit of jam in my biscuits and gravy, or ketchup in mac and cheese, with a somewhat unpleasant result.
The explanation I got was that it was like watching someone stream playing ‘Sims’. […] As the audience you can project whatever personality you want onto the characters and the soullessness gives a blank canvas that allows the viewer to fill in the blanks which allows for a better reality tv show with broader mass appeal than could otherwise be created?
When you put it that way, I’m annoyingly much more ok with it. So it’s a dating sim that you’re just not playing.
Not my thing either, but I guess I get it a little more now.
Sorry, definitely didn’t mean to imply you were just meant it in a ‘ah yes that makes sense in a broader cultural context’ way.
I can’t think of a way to show that something matters to you aside from making some kind of sacrifice
That is exactly what I’m pointing at with a ‘protestant ethic’ but it really comes down to specific definitions of ‘sacrifice’. A night out with friends could be described as a ‘sacrifice’ of time and money to show care/affection for those people, but if it’s something you enjoy is it really a sacrifice? As an example, I enjoy making things, and making things for others is a good source of both inspiration and ‘disposal’ for lack of better word. Making sure the things I make find good homes and not just making junk is a form of care in my opinion.
If it is something you don’t enjoy does that sacrifice actually show that care for others? Personally, I can think of few things worse than a night out with someone who doesn’t want to be there and isn’t having fun.
Watching Love Island with my friend wasn’t a sacrifice because I got the fun of watching a psychological horror film, they got their ‘sims’ playtime and we had an interesting/fun/silly discussion afterwards. In the same way that the time I’m spending talking to you isn’t a sacrifice because it’s providing interesting thoughts and perspectives that I might not run into otherwise is a useful challenge to my own beliefs/perspectives. Hopefully it’s the same for you?
It’s hard to understate the damage the ‘self-sacrifice’ mentality can cause. A lot of relationships are ruined by two people trying to show they care for eachother by deliberately and intentionally sabotaging themselves at every opportunity. A lot of ‘activism’ is people sacrificing their time and energy doing things that are well meaning but nobody asked for, help nobody, and often cause harm.
I do think it shows a desire or intent to care, but I don’t think it automatically or necessarily translates.
I don’t mean “toiling for weeks on a tweet,” I mean “at least thinking about it for a few minutes.”
But if they spent a whole week thinking on that tweet then surely it’s more important to them than someone who only spent a few minutes! /s
tries to flood the zone
I think this is a big piece actually! I would agree that spam is incapable of communication a message. Not that it doesn’t have one, but by ‘flooding the zone’ at best it gets filtered and ignored, at worst it triggers a severe reactionary response.
That’s more or less what I mean by “effort”
I do feel like there is still something we keep circling around here but I’m unsure what it is or how to suss it out.
‘Dear Alice’ as a perfect example
The original commercial promotion a company that in reality is the antithesis of everything ‘solarpunk’ and which deliberately and intentionally does everything in its power to prevent the sort of future imagined in the commercial.
now we’ve gotta fight?
BRING IT! :P I think we can both agree 7 was actually pretty good. The extreme drop in quality from 7 to vista was shocking plus it now being old and dated makes comparisons hard. However, I would argue that 11 has more bugs, more adware/spyware, worse performance, less customization and less ‘salvagability’ than Vista. It just doesn’t feel as bad thanks to the slow enshittification that was 8, 8.1, 10.
Maybe you figured that out a while ago.
My original comment was coming from that assumption but you, and others, did not think so and honestly it does still feel like I’m missing something big and important but we’ve spent how many words trying to find it? And I still don’t know what it could be. I do very much appreciate you being willing to explore it with me though! Thank you!
The algorithm. It just has to pass muster long enough that the algorithm serves it up to a real human.
I was definitely coming from the perspective of the humans are the swine and the algorithm was the gatekeeper, logistics, feeding machine, etc. The prison analogy was partially to communicate that humans do often treat other humans like swine.
However I am realizing that’s a bit of a dated perspective and with the modern Internet the ‘algorithm’ is still the gatekeeper, etc. but the goal is primarily to feed bots to better sheepdog the humans. So the root miscommunication comes from conflating ‘slop’, aka “dogfood” with ‘slop’, aka “prison food”. So when I call ‘tablescraps’ slop it’s confusing because that’s neither food for dogs nor low quality dogfood, it’s premium dogfood! Describing the ingredients doesn’t clarify anything because it’s not really any different other than process and packaging. I think that’s the exact sort of insight I was looking for! Thank you! Does that all track for you as well?
I think the problem there would be the tomato
Oh yeah. It’s definitely not a haphazardly mix together kind of thing. But a creamy bolognese sauce on biscuits? It’d be weird. But I’d try it!
So it’s a dating sim that you’re just not playing.
…That’s such a better description of what we took 2 episodes to figure out how to communicate!
A night out with friends could be described as a ‘sacrifice’ of time and money to show care/affection for those people, but if it’s something you enjoy is it really a sacrifice?> > As an example, I enjoy making things, and making things for others is a good source of both inspiration and ‘disposal’ for lack of better word. Making sure the things I make find good homes and not just making junk is a form of care in my opinion.
For the purposes of this definition of slop, yes, that counts as effort! Even if it’s a thing you like, you did put time into it. You did show that it’s valuable to you, and that you care about the outcome. If you’re an excellent cartoonist and a whip-smart comedian, a 10/10 comic strip you dashed off in five minutes about a topic you’ve been thinking on for weeks might well represent the culmination of decades of honing your craft and contain within a great wellspring of thought and consideration. Absolutely not slop.
In fairness, I’m the same way as you, so I might be biased here.
If it is something you don’t enjoy does that sacrifice actually show that care for others? Personally, I can think of few things worse than a night out with someone who doesn’t want to be there and isn’t having fun.
I think that gets more into the weeds about whether or not it’s good art, in terms of the idiom we’ve been using. Because you’re right about that, but there are also few things more comforting than a friend showing up somewhere that they don’t want to be just because they know you need them.
Watching Love Island with my friend wasn’t a sacrifice because I got the fun of watching a psychological horror film, they got their ‘sims’ playtime and we had an interesting/fun/silly discussion afterwards.
But what I’m saying is that it was a sacrifice. Not a large one, of course; and not one that cost you much. But you could’ve spent that time playing video games yourself, or cooking, or writing a book, or hang gliding, or whatever. You also chose to sacrifice that part of you that didn’t want to watch Love Island, which is again not much, but not nothing. You chose to spend it doing something with them; something that it turned out that you enjoyed, though not for the same reason they did.
There’s something to the words “effort” and “sacrifice” that you don’t like, and I think I see why (as we’ll talk about later). Does the word “choice” hit you better? It isn’t exactly what I mean, but I’m starting to think it might have more to do with an opportunity cost that is evaluated and intentionally selected, than more broadly expending some kind of energy. AI has no opportunity cost, at the individual level, which means that no one is choosing specifically to do it. They aren’t putting anything of themselves in it. It has no value because it isn’t them. (This isn’t a framing that I’ve been able to get a good handle on yet, so right now it’s just a topic for conversation. Seems like I can trust you with that.)
In the same way that the time I’m spending talking to you isn’t a sacrifice because it’s providing interesting thoughts and perspectives that I might not run into otherwise is a useful challenge to my own beliefs/perspectives. Hopefully it’s the same for you?
One hundred percent. This has been a pleasure. In a lot of ways I figure out what I think by writing it down, so this has been a very useful challenge. I’m really enjoying and getting benefit from it. But you and I could be doing something else; the fact that we’re both choosing to be here, honing our arguments, is meaningful.
This may be a silly analogy, but it’s kind of like the old phrase, “we know you have a choice when it comes to air travel, and we thank you for flying with us.” It’s not a sacrifice in the sense of giving up something good or deep, but if you select Delta, you’re sacrificing a flight on United. You’re making a choice. With slop, you don’t have to make a choice. You can send an agent on all of the flights at once!
It’s hard to understate the damage the ‘self-sacrifice’ mentality can cause. A lot of relationships are ruined by two people trying to show they care for eachother by deliberately and intentionally sabotaging themselves at every opportunity. A lot of ‘activism’ is people sacrificing their time and energy doing things that are well meaning but nobody asked for, help nobody, and often cause harm.
Yeah, I think that’s definitely the dark side of this conversation. But like eating, exercise, saving money, alcohol, sex, and so many other enjoyable or even good things, sacrifice can become a disorder when taken too far. In the example you gave, I don’t think those two people are sacrificing and sabotaging themselves for each other, but for the feeling of “winning the friendship.” The activist is sacrificing, not for the movement, but just so they can feel good about themselves. So I get why you don’t have a positive association with the word “sacrifice” (because of my upbringing, I don’t see it as a necessarily negative word).
I do think it shows a desire or intent to care, but I don’t think it automatically or necessarily translates.
“Intent” is another good word that we could probably use here for what I’m calling “effort,” though it’s also inexact. Slop has no intent.
But if they spent a whole week thinking on that tweet then surely it’s more important to them than someone who only spent a few minutes! /s
lol. As someone who has labored over a text message for hours that ended up being sent as literally the phrase “ok, thanks!”, I can’t say I entirely disagree, but I do recognize how ridiculous it is and that I’m not normal in that.
I would agree that spam is incapable of communication a message. Not that it doesn’t have one, but by ‘flooding the zone’ at best it gets filtered and ignored, at worst it triggers a severe reactionary response.
This is basically what I meant by saying that Kurzgesagt’s output wasn’t enough to call it “slop.” Though that’s probably subjective.
I do feel like there is still something we keep circling around here but I’m unsure what it is or how to suss it out.
We’re getting close with “intent” and “choice.” It’s not exactly those, or “effort” or “sacrifice,” but almost like…the midpoint between all four terms.
The original commercial promotion a company that in reality is the antithesis of everything ‘solarpunk’ and which deliberately and intentionally does everything in its power to prevent the sort of future imagined in the commercial.
Oh, yeah. It’s a great irony that Chobani paid for it. I suppose it’s kind of the modern version of patronage, though, isn’t it? The Medicis were brutal, violent, and manipulative, but they sponsored some of the most enduring artwork of the European Renaissance, including that of all four Ninja Turtles. That doesn’t make them good, but it does mean that some stuff they did caused goodness as a second-order effect.
I think we can both agree 7 was actually pretty good.
No argument there. Vista was the low point between the high points of XP and 7.
However, I would argue that 11 has more bugs, more adware/spyware, worse performance, less customization and less ‘salvagability’ than Vista. It just doesn’t feel as bad thanks to the slow enshittification that was 8, 8.1, 10.
No argument there, either. I switched to Linux a couple years ago because I was tired of that dance. And now we’ve completed the Lemmy carcinization: all conversations eventually evolve into either Linux conversations or socialism conversations (and the night is still young for us to hit both!).
it does still feel like I’m missing something big and important but we’ve spent how many words trying to find it? And I still don’t know what it could be. I do very much appreciate you being willing to explore it with me though! Thank you!
Very much a pleasure! There are probably as many definitions of “slop” as there are people on the internet, and maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. But I think you’ve got the spirit.
Describing the ingredients doesn’t clarify anything because it’s not really any different other than process and packaging. I think that’s the exact sort of insight I was looking for! Thank you! Does that all track for you as well?
I think so! And with the gift of “intent” earlier, I think we can extend the metaphor a little bit.
The intent of a home-cooked meal is to express love to your friends and family. The intent of the food at a full-service restaurant is to be the context about which you spend time with loved ones, or to impress or experience. The intent of fast food is to impart energy in a way that’s convenient and enjoyable enough that others will pay for it. Even the intent of a dog treat is to encourage or reward behavior in a beloved pet. All of those intents cause the cook to make particular decisions regarding ingredients, preparation, presentation, and so on; the decisions’ outcomes don’t matter to this conversation, just the fact that they were made.
But with slop, the farmer has no intent. He just shovels it into the trough so that the pigs will shut up until they’re fat enough to slaughter. (How’s that for an overwrought metaphor?)
I think the problem there would be the tomato
Oh yeah. It’s definitely not a haphazardly mix together kind of thing. But a creamy bolognese sauce on biscuits? It’d be weird. But I’d try it!
Honestly, reading back on this again, I realize that I was thinking about this like adding tomato to cream. But adding cream to tomato, a la cheese on chili, or tomato soup made with milk, or penne rosa? Or even tacos with cheese and salsa? Maybe this is just a framing thing, or a concentration thing.
…That’s such a better description of what we took 2 episodes to figure out how to communicate!
In your defense, you were watching Love Island. That probably slows down the brain.
You did show that it’s valuable to you, and that you care about the outcome.
Is that what’s ultimately important?
it might have more to do with an opportunity cost that is evaluated and intentionally selected
I think that’s getting closer. I definitely interpret ‘sacrifice’ as suggesting one or both parties is facing an uncertain, likely or guaranteed negative opportunity cost but chooses to engage anyways. One of the ways I show care is trying to ensure that is never knowingly the case and as many unknowns are disclosed beforehand. Informed consent and all that.
I hear what you’re saying, but it feels to me like a very competitive zero-sum game perspective that can be true sometimes but is an exception rather than a universal. I’m trying to figure out if there is a root universal there that I’m just not seeing. Any ideas?
AI has no opportunity cost, at the individual level
I do not see how that is remotely true in either of our frameworks/perspectives. Reduced opportunity cost absolutely, but certainly not zero and different uses will have different costs associated.
They aren’t putting anything of themselves in it.
Anything someone touches puts some amount of themselves in it. It’s a big issue in science, law, testing, validation and politics is that people are unable to not put themselves into their work.
I would agree that AI dilutes and transforms that personal touch and often replaced it with something that has a bit more mass market appeal, but I can’t think of any medium that isn’t true for. I would agree the magnitude of that transformation is fairly unprecedented though. However, I would argue that it would be a lot more valuable if it was capable of living up to that claim.
That does however start to get into the very philosophical and largely unknowable weeds of ‘is there such a thing as perfect information or does everything contain bias and when can that bias be considered negligible’?
It has no value because it isn’t them.
It is a homomorphism of them. Unrecognizable due to it’s transformation into mass-market/slop-space but I don’t think that guarantees any specific direction of transformation on the value.
One of the most problematic issues with AI slop I see is that it allows for the transformation of things that should objectively be disposed of due to being intrinsically harmful into something with marginal value that is then mass-marketed.
Value is largely subjective. Slop is generally valued as a feedstock. There is a wide range of qualities of slop. I do not understand where your insistance that slop universally has no value is coming from other than your own personal value judgements.
This has been a pleasure. In a lot of ways I figure out what I think by writing it down, so this has been a very useful challenge.
Agreed ^_^
the fact that we’re both choosing to be here, honing our arguments, is meaningful.
Yes, and I’m doing so with the belief this is the most valuable use of my time at the moment for myself and those involved. For me the meaningfullness isn’t derived from what else is/isn’t on that list and the ‘sacrifices’ made but from a largely subconscious cost/benefit analysis.
You’re meaningful because you exist, not because I’m neglecting my job to talk with you :P
With slop, you don’t have to make a choice. You can send an agent on all of the flights at once!
But why? The point of a flight is to get your physical body from X to Y.
If you’re spamming flights for the sake of A/B testing I would agree that is slop, but that’s not unique to AI and this exact hypothetical is often done with human agents for the sake of identifying the best options for VIPs
Do the agents clog up seats that impede with the ability of the airline to achieve it’s purpose of transportation from X to Y? Yes! Is that an inherently negative thing? I don’t think so, but I’m hoping you can convince me otherwise.
because of my upbringing, I don’t see it as a necessarily negative word
Fair. And I would believe mine does give it a more negative connotation than it justly deserves.
“Intent” is another good word that we could probably use here for what I’m calling “effort,” though it’s also inexact. Slop has no intent.
I feel like effort was closer. Slop absolutely has ‘intent’, however those intentions often get transformed in a non-deterministic way, or simply don’t translate to the medium. That’s true of any artistic process though, IE Bob Ross sort of ‘mistakes become happy little trees’.
Someone who is a master of their craft with good/reliable tools is better able to translate their intent to medium. Often with less effort and shorter time spent. I think the issue comes from conflating the master and his tools, and in the case of AI assuming the tool has no master.
I understand and partially agree with the perspective that AI, and ‘the algorithms’ in general, are largely independent stochastic processes but I don’t think that changes that they are tools with owners who are controlling/manufacturing them.
I also do see the man in the middle vulnerability within that transformation that you might be pointing at but I don’t think that is encapsulated by either ‘effort’ nor ‘intent’ either.
I do recognize how ridiculous it is
It doesn’t sound ridiculous to me. Being succinct is a valuable skill that often takes time and sometimes the best way to communicate is via short-form. I don’t think I can say for certain that text was any more valuable for having deliberated for hours but it does shape my perception to believe it to be a more thoughtful succinctness instead of a lazy one. Is that part of the misalignment between us? A focus on the ‘packaging’ vs. ‘product’?
the midpoint between all four terms.
Phrasing it as effort/intent/choice/sacrifice doesn’t feel any closer to me. Invested maybe? Has some negative connotations for me but feels like that’s maybe a direction worth exploring?
That doesn’t make them good, but it does mean that some stuff they did caused goodness as a second-order effect.
I do agree that it’s kind of the modern version of patronage but I don’t follow the value judgement/framework to understand how/why you label anything there as ‘good’. It objectively is but I think there is just as much value in the ‘bad’ as the ‘good’, for that example especially.
‘Chiobani funding a team that knowingly and deliberately engaged in blatant green-washing which became a cultural meme that lead to their own downfall along with an era of plenty, community restoration and deliberate ecological restoration’ certainly has strong historical echoes and does seem like an objectively good outcome but I don’t think Chiobani nor most of the designers get the credit for that outcome as that wasn’t their intent/goal/focus.
Vista was the low point between the high points of XP and 7.
Lol, it’s been so long I’ve forgotten the order of things!
Lemmy carcinization
Another beautiful phrase!
all conversations eventually evolve into either Linux conversations or socialism conversations
We’ve definitely danced around them… I use Arch by the way :P (Not usually actually, I’m too lazy. But it is great for old, weird, or custom hardware if you’ve got time and energy to spare.)
There are probably as many definitions of “slop” as there are people on the internet
Everything I’ve seen on mutational semantics applied to any sort of living human language does suggest that all words anybody uses are almost guaranteed to have variations in definition. Usually slight unless two populations that had been previously isolated start communicating again. Thankfully that never happens, and certainly not on the modern Internet!
I guess the only way to be sure is to watch live sporting events. Maybe one of the side effects of this LLM boom is that F1, MLB, NBA, etc will have more viewers.
It would be a lot easier and a lot cheaper, and provide the same results as an AI AI detector, if Google just flipped a digital coin every time a video was uploaded, and marked it as slop if it came up heads.
I have a revolutionary idea. Maybe they should crowdsource the reviews. Some sort of system where people can. I don’t know show how much they like or dislike a video and the overwhelmingly disliked videos don’t get promoted.
Not sure it’s possible to fight machine generated slop on the big platforms now. People who invest a lot of time and effort are being squeezed out. Businesses that don’t give a fuck about quality upload multiple low effort videos a week across multiple channels getting massive views, probably most from gaming the system.
Sad for the people who spend months researching, writing and producing videos but this might be the end of the ride as far as making videos as a day job. The platform doesn’t value them or their loyal viewers.
The creators facing burnout who don’t leave out of disgust will join the slop machine and start championing it. Starting to see it already.
to be fair kurtz does use AI, he admitted himnself though, allegedly only for initial description. i wonder if it will go after people reading off of AI.
plus the hordes AI-SCIFI videos too, which definitely looks like it was created/uploaded by a right winger, because it has a very militaryganda them to most of them. and at least one is sexual too.
ibet it doesnt stop right wing videos or copaganda AI videos.
YouTube’s bullshit is having some interesting effects for sure. Have you noticed how more and more channels are now including short clips of them doing the actual voiceover? It’s usually not even that long, like a second or two or sometimes even less. But apparently that’s now needed to prove that there’s an actual human behind the channel.
I do find it a bit distracting, but I’d rather not lose those channels either…
Even that doesn’t always work. There is one channel I know of that got auto banned despite using live shots of everyone doing live introductions of their stories.
This shit reminds me of that helicopter gunner scene in Full Metal Jacket:
“Everyone who doesn’t show their face is an AI. Everyone who does show their face is a well-disciplined AI.”
Problem is that most people and automated systems are downright terrible at figuring out what’s actually AI. Even AI itself can’t always tell if it’s AI.
I’ve had people accuse my posts on social media as AI, just because I can write more than two sentences without spelling errors. Since they can’t, they think nobody can…
So now I tend to leave the occasional delibarete spelling mistake just so people don’t think this was written by ChatGPT. Unless I put that in my prompt, obviously 😂
I don’t. If they can’t read or spell, fuck 'em. I have no interest in talking to stupid people. Nor am I interested in stupid people that have no interest in continuing to learn and try new things. There are a surprising number of adults that refuse to do so.
This is the shit state of the world now. Everything gets accused of being AI by someone. The AI tech bros have well and truly won. They’ve poisoned everything.
I’d argue that the Fuck_AI crowd who slanders and also sexually harasses people are helping them. I hate this big tech companies just as much as they do. I’m not going to sexually harass someone I think is using their service though.
This is exactly why I hold anti-AI folk in low regard, because they have yet to demonstrate their “detection” abilities to discern between human and generated creations. They are basically psychics and ghost whisperers.
As AI gets better this is increasingly true too. Back when it was irregular fingers it was a lot easier. And tbh, there is plenty of AI content I don’t really mind.
Its often ok. It doesn’t have to be great if there is little to no high quality human made content to compare it to in the same niche. I don’t think any human artists have made an album about the Isstvan massacre.
You might have a point in utilitarian matters where functionality is all that matters, but how can you possibly say that when it comes to art? If I write some software for my boss using an LLM and it works just as well as hand-written software that’s one thing, but if I commissioned some art and got back some prompt-bro’s artefact I’d have a right to be miffed about it.
The intent behind the work matters so much in any work of art, I don’t want to hear AI music in particular because I’m a musician myself and I want to know what a fellow musician thinks, I specifically want to know a small part of the inside of their mind by listening to their works. Even if AI music is indistinguishable from actual music, I don’t care for it because the expressive bandwidth of prompting is tiny compared to an instrument, it tells me nothing of the person who created it. In my opinion nobody can make art of any sort without exposing themselves in some sense, but what is exposed about a person by prompting an AI music bot? People saying ‘well if you can’t tell the difference between real art and AI art you have no business commenting’ are missing the whole point of why people undertake an artistic project in my opinion.
It’s worse than that. They’re not just pretending about their abilities for clout. They’re actively following their emotions and attacking people they don’t like with AI accusations or just plain old harassment.
I’ve been sexually harassed by these assholes.
Reminder that Kurzgesagt is German government sponsored slop originally created by Bill Gates to spread capitalist propaganda (yes, unironically) youtu.be/ZRPcyWNfgxo
I prefer slop to live in its own technical box of generative AI crap instead of broadening the word to the point it’s just another meaningless pejorative like sus.
Knowing how extremely unscientific Kurzgesagt is the accusation of them using AI to create slop scripts is most likely true.
Seriously can anyone the Dyson Sphere video and not come away thinking this is written by morons who have no idea what they’re talking about?
But you say the word “science” a bunch of times with a nice looking, animation as if we have self-replicating robots already, and every Liberal will buy it.
Not really sure what that supposed to mean, as I am sure you are aware since dysons spheres do not exist I’m not quite sure how you’ve come to the conclusion they were wrong about them. You haven’t actually pointed to anything specific you’ve just mentioned two general topics. I want links thank you very much you’re the one that’s making stupid accusations.
I know damned well that the term slop has been used since the 90s for food and at least the late 00s for other things. The term shovelware slop comes to mind. Note I don’t remember the 90s I was a month old when it ended but I did watch a lot of 90s media so yeah.
Ah yes capitalist propoganda like …scrolls most popular… Countering coronavirus disinformation, explaining vaccines and the dangers of the antivax movement, the physical limits disproving the infinite growth lie of capitalism… Yeah, there’s a lot of science fiction/fantasy topics but those are generally what gets views.
If they are pushing propoganda, they’re pretty shit at it and should probably be spending their money on manosphere podcasts instead. Honestly you should be encouraging such inefficient efforts.
This is such a stellar example of the cold war tankie mindset. Anything a capitalist funds must be evil; anything from the west is a lie; it’s my duty to counter everything coming out of their mouths; blah blah blah.
Ah yes, the evil liberal-capitalist climate solutions: shilling solar panels, agriculture tech, electrification, more efficient production of cement and steel
Nothing like the glorious socialist solutions of the proletariat: Chinese solar panels, Chinese agriculture tech, Chinese electrification, more efficient production of Chinese cement and steel
Turns out that every productivist ideology imagines their band-aid efficiency gains will hand wave what is essentially a growth and finite resource problem. So yeah I agree with you on some level, the free market won’t magically save us any more than an AES state market. You’re just mad because you’re hearing it from a video sponsored by the bad team
As someone who likes Tyr, Hulkoff, Skald, and Danheim I swear to fuck I want to beat someone’s head in with my musket stock. Seriously the quality just drops and I can only block so many channels, half tempted to just to download all their music and make a fucked up mega playlist on my phone.
Anyone know a good way to download YouTube music on Linux, preferably a program and not a website.
Up until a few months ago, I would normally use spotDL, a tool you gave a Spotify url and it’d search the same songs on multiple sites and download them, while tagging it with spotify’s metadata, which is quite clean. Absolutely amazing piece of software helped me build a good music library, but Spotify changed their api auth because of Anna’s archive scraping, requiring you to have premium just to have a useful api key, breaking spotdl for pretty much everyone.
I currently use just yt-dlp to pull from yt music, SoundCloud and bandcamp. It’s alright, metadata is bad tho, yt-dlp doesn’t tag very well out of the box. I’ve tried torrenting and soulseek, you can get some good quality (and big!) files, but can be hard to find niche artists (Argentinian hardbass sure is niche as hell)
I’d too be interested in a tool like that if anyone knows one.
i mean this tell you everything that you need to know: as soon as the animation quality of a channel is good enough, it gets accused of being AI. what does this tell us about the quality of AI output?
It sounds like your argument here is that AI animation is so legitimately great that it is on par with talented animators. Quite frankly, fuck that, no matter how visually polished AI animations may look, they are generally quite soulless and flat.
The real issue is that people are so reflexively anti-AI that they accuse anything that registers any doubt at all of legitimacy of being AI, even without evidence. This has hurt many legitimate artists who were forced to reveal more than they wanted to about their creative process just to prove to detractors that they didn’t use AI. While hatred of AI “art” is very defensible, directing that hate any anyone you have a mere suspicion of is just making things worse for real artists.
And yeah, the visual clues that something is slop are getting more and more subtle, and that does pose a problem for our ability to quickly differentiate, but that absolutely does not mean than that the slop has equal value to human-created works. Anyone arguing otherwise is just telling the world that they are anti-Human. I which case, I recommend taking a look in the mirror and considering that maybe not all humans inferior to a GPU, just you.
look i know that this gets a lot of hate but the current trajectory of “you need to prove your worth to the world to have a legitimate reason to exist” is just not sustainable. fuck all that “we support that artist”, we should be supporting the person, whether they output art or not.
the current rage against AI is 90% driven by the idea that humans need to produce output sothat we can donate to them and give them money sothat they can live. and frankly, that’s a dystopian idea in my eyes.
the current rage against AI is 90% driven by the idea that humans need to produce output sothat we can donate to them and give them money sothat they can live.
You gotta work on your communication, I have zero clue what you’re trying to say. You start off heavily implying at AI is of a high quality, saying nothing else, and then go on about being pro-working class/pro person(I think?), but do it in a way that has holes in just the weirdest places.
At the same time YouTube offers a prompt to generate more AI content.
No, this is just a stunt to claim that it is difficult to detect AI slop, when in reality they want that content as it is more addictive, especially to kids.
Intentional stunt? That’s highly unlikely.
It is difficult to detect AI slop, probably exponentially so when it’s a video compared to image or text. I don’t know why you said it like there’s a ready to use solution YouTube isn’t using for some reason.
Vacuum up the internet, provide generative “AI” for people to spew tons of garbage on to the internet. Everyone hates AI, and advertisers don’t want ads showing against AI slop. AI can’t accurately detect AI and kills real content providers that advertisers want to show ads for.
İt feels like humans have no rights to speak or dislike or express any opinion online only fake numbers matters and the best part is ai slop is feeding from ai slop to make more ai slop ı wonder when this nonsense comes to end
DexertoYouTube’s AI slop detector incorrectly targets Kurzgesagt as other creators fear same fate - DexertoYouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.
