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(noun) an artificially generated brain-rotting vision of our future
A bizarre photo of a slimy pink Jesus made of shrimp probably wasn’t what OpenAI had in mind when it warned that artificial intelligence could destroy civilization. But this is what happens when you put new technology into the hands of ordinary people and tell them they can make whatever they want. Two years into the generative AI revolution, the era of slop has arrived.
The proliferation of synthetic low-grade content like Shrimp Jesus is mostly intentional, designed through bizarre prompts for commercial or engagement purposes. In March, researchers at Stanford University and Georgetown University discovered that Facebook’s algorithms had been effectively hijacked by spam content from text-to-image models such as Dall-E and Midjourney. X’s “insane Facebook AI slacker” account is still counting. A popular show in the run-up to the US presidential election showed Donald Trump manfully rescuing a kitten.
But slop can also be an unintended consequence of an AI model trained on AI-generated text. This is a form of inbreeding in the dataset where unfortunate births are compared to the Habsburgs.
Accelerationists will say this is just a stepping stone to exciting new user-generated AI content. San Francisco startup Fable Studio has announced a Netflix-style streaming platform for AI movies. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said people can share “an incredible amount of content” on the music service now that the cost of producing music is near zero.
The question is whether quality control will plummet along with production costs. Note the alliteration of slop with spam. This is another form of nonsense that is easily distributed online.
AI-generated watermarks can help address this. Over time, shoddy content may lose traction and die out on its own. Or zero-cost, zero-effort content that permanently destroys information sharing and online trust. Shrimp Jesus may be just the beginning.
