'Slop' has hit the web | LinkedIn
First there were junk mailers, then there was spam, and now there’s “slop” — the new term for poor-quality content generated by artificial intelligence. This content “is rarely intended to actually answer readers’ questions or serve their needs,” writes The Guardian. Instead, it exists because the “economics of the internet” essentially demand it, as it is nearly free to create but can bring in ad revenue. According to The New York Times, awareness of “slop” surged when Google introduced answers written by its AI model, Gemini, into search results.
Have you noticed potential "slop" in the biomedical literature?
i.e. potentially AI-generated summaries that seem to be unusually general but somehow entered into open access journals indexed by PubMed or Google Scholar?
For example, two articles in Medline Publications (UK) that seemed unusually similar:
Remember a year or two ago when comedic writers posted mixed-up non sequitur text and were like "AI wrote this crazy story!"?
And now everything has "AI" and it really does just write mixed-up non sequitur text?
I think that by liking that slop we emboldened Silicon Valley PE to unleash their flawed crap on us all. They thought that's what we wanted.
Getting your law firm noticed with engaging legal content
Have you heard of the term 'slop', AI's answer to spam? According to the NYT, slop "...conjures images of heaps of unappetizing food being shoveled into troughs for livestock. Like that type of slop, A.I.-assisted search comes together quickly, but not necessarily in a way that critical thinkers can stomach." Just as people ignore spam emails, they will also dismiss slop content. To ensure your #legalwriting is actually read, add opinions, thought leadership, and originality to your blogs/articles. As others go low, i.e. using AI to generate lots of generic, bland content, your #lawfirm needs to go high by aiming for quality over quantity. #legalmarkerting
I've been thinking about the early web a lot lately.
I miss it. I know, search was garbage, and it wasn't necessarily a web we could rely on to actually do things, but it was fun as heck.
Search stunk, but discovery totally ruled, and the web was full of surprises. People had links pages, little peeks into their minds and social lives. We followed web rings and found even more interesting relationships. In the 1990s, I even wrote for an online magazine that had a monthly release date!
We had *issues,* not just a content firehose! All most creators had was HTML, and the level of creativity was astounding. I used to regularly visit a site called Beedogs, a website dedicated to honoring dogs in bee costumes. Someone reading this also remembers this site, and is going "Beedogs!"
Now we have every tool at our disposal to make things fun, useful, and beautiful, and we have Internet speeds we couldn't even imagine 20 years ago, and every website looks the same. Sites take 500 years to load even on our miraculously fast connections because of all the ads and trackers, and search is worse than ever. The web has the most potential of just about any technology since the development of language itself, and we stuffed it full of garbage.
There's a whole other thing I want to write about the opportunity space that will be created to clean up the AI mess, and we need to make sure that the AI slopmongers don't get to own that space, too. It needs to be owned and nurtured and cultivated by those of us who truly love the web and the Internet and get teary-eyed about it.
Don't get me started on the AI slop cannon because I will run out of characters and I want this post to be hopeful and fun.
So I have two questions:
- What do you feel nostalgic about from the web, pre social media boom? What brings you joy to remember? (Even if it's not worth bringing back.)
- Is there anything from the early web that you personally feel is worth revisiting, and considering from a 2020s perspective? You don't need data or proof, I just wanna talk about our feelings.
Hashtag hamster dance forever.
Sobering thoughts from John Biggs here about the proliferation of AI-generated slop on the internet, and what it means for the future.
