“obnoxious in the house style” is hilarious to me, but I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Don’t listen to podcasts on Spotify. You’ll be happier for it.

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.

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.

Totally and completely agree. Though it would’ve been hilarious if she’d hit him with a deep cut like “Oh, Nicholas Hammond, for sure” and then winked. My wife genuinely likes me, but I’d be personally offended if she missed an opportunity like this to at least make a little joke.

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

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.

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.

How about instead of insisting and asserting you actually add something to the conversation by explaining.

I guess it depends on where in the world that person lives. In the state where I grew up, it’d be more like fining a McDonald’s employee $45, at least in terms of raw income. But if you’re talking about how punitive the measure feels, I think it’s more like a $5 fine. Meta budgets and lives in quarters and years; McDonald’s employees budget and live in hours and weeks.

Great way to bring it down to earth, though.

Whether it is or no, that doesn’t make it slop.

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.

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.

I think you’re running with a very nonstandard definition of “slop” here.

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.

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.

8 and 9 digit fines aren’t astronomical for them (which, I realize, is the point of your comment; I’m just saying this fine is even more a complete nothingburger). Even if you go into 10-figure fines, you’re still in the range where they make it back within the week.

You’ve got to get into the 11-digit range before it starts to hurt, and the 12-digit range before it starts to send a message.

But while I agree that we shouldn’t use profits, I’m not sure about revenue. That’s definitely better, but I think we should target the number they’re actively encouraged to pump as high as possible: market capitalization.

That specifically affects how much they can pull in investment and lending, which can keep them going even if they have zeroes or net-negatives at the bottom of their balance sheet; and it’s the number they’re incentivized to make look as big and beefy as possible, so trying to wiggle out of a fine by making that number smaller might well hurt them more than just paying the fine.

A lot of companies since Jack Welch oozed his way into executive roles have lived on market cap and vibes for years without turning a profit or making much in revenue at all. Sure, for younger companies, or newly-public ones, they might have a higher annual revenue than their market cap. Maybe we could say “revenue or capitalization, whichever is higher.”

In the case of Meta, their market cap is $1.5T on $220B of annual revenue. Fining them 15% of their market cap would erase a whole year of revenue; that would send a message.

For companies like this, punitive fines need to legitimately threaten to put the business under. Especially when it’s not their first offense. Fines totaling 15% of market cap, with the percentage doubling for each offense after the first, seem like they’d be effective in changing behavior; and if they don’t, then the company gets fined into nonexistence after two or three strikes. Problem solved either way.

567,000,000 ÷ 228,248,000,000 × 365 × 24 = 21.76

Exactly 21 hours, 45 minutes, 36 seconds of revenue for them. They literally already made that back since the ruling was made and they haven’t even cut a check yet. Cool, I’m sure that’ll totally change things.

In fairness, he looks like he could be about ten years old. Which is still probably too old to need a reminder of the 4 multiplication table, but at least it’s not a high school senior.

This is the entire argument I’m making. HTML makes compromises that makes it harder for the human to read and also harder (or at least less optimal) for the machine to read. Markdown codifies an existing human-readable format in a way that a machine can handle easily, too.