Likely many other, I’ve been grossed out by some of the shit getting churned out with generative ai. But it’s also made me notice some of the existing things that give me the same feeling.
Poorly translated stuff, as often seen on cheap Chinese imports, has the same uncanny valley awkwardness. It sounds like English, but it isn’t what an actual human who spoke English would say. And if we want to talk about an algorithm that’s gone rogue and is destroying the world while trying to fulfill some arbitary metrics, there’s always late-stage capitalism…
Anyone else notice things like this?
The “cooking blog” style where a simple answer to a simple question has to be padded with eight paragraphs of garbage. Like, I just want to know how to put a comment in a YAML file. I don’t need a table of contents for this, I don’t need to hear a brief history of how the comment was invented, just tell me the character to type.
Background music for all advertising during the holiday seasjinglejinglejingle jazzybellsbellsbellsbells BING BANG BONG BING DING DANG DONG although I suspect this is increasingly AI slop at this point
YouTube channels that are mostly just reading Reddit comments.
Or reading “am I the asshole” or “relationship advice” posts.
Fuck. I hate so much of this crap.
Especially if it’s using that annoyingly upbeat robot voice.
That would be AI slop by most standards since the robot voice is “AI” in a way.
Only if they dont add anything themselfs
I started adding my own reactions to certain things since I started narrating for Cocules Reddit Readings (I need to do another one soon).
Bible versions first released after 1871 (NIV, ASV, ESV, NKJV, NASB, etc.) have all become slop.
The a absolute epitome of non-AI slop has got to be these creepy videos that were on YouTube back in ~2017:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
Its exactly the kind of thing you’d expect would be the product of AI, but it actually came before AI. I think a lot of it was procedurally generated though, using scripts to control 3D software and editing software, so different character models could be used in the same scenes and different scenes could be strung together to make each video.
I think a similar thing happens with those shovelware Android games. There’s so many that are just the same game with (incredibly poorly done) asset swaps that I think they must just make a game once and then automatically generate a thousand+ variations on it.
I remember those. Awful.
The Family Circus cartoon (and probably other old newspaper cartoons that never die). I saw a video analyzing how they reuse the same cartoons over the years with small changes to keep them from looking too out of date, but increasingly lazily.
The Jerry Springer Show
DropShipping. Basicly everything made in China
If we want to really strech it: plastic. We should have never invented plastic. The world would be a better one
Plastics are wonderful in certain use cases. Medical, yes please. Automotive, sure. Several layers of packaging on a plastic toy that’s also bound together with plastic wire, no thank you.
“Silverberg’s Law”
Someone once asked science fiction writer Robert Silverberg why 90% of the SF stories they read were crap.
Silverberg replied that 90% of everything is crap.
And that’s why older media is usually better. Only the good parts have survived and the 90% has been forgotten.
The trouble is that a lot of the good stuff is forgotten as well.
Here are some movies you’ve probably never heard of.
“The Day of the Jackal” [original]
“The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” [original]
“Silent Partner” Elliot Gould
“The 3 Musketeers” Raquel Welch and Oliver Reed.
“Little Big Man”
I never hear them mentioned but people will rewatch a Hitchcock movie fifty times.
Sadly true (and yeah, I didn’t know about those movies)
Paper mill challenges: past, present, and future - ScienceDirect https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0895435624003056
That guy in every social platform sharing old ass memes and not apporting nothing else rather than fill the feed with super compressed pictures of an image that you have seen a lot of times before.
Most phone apps, a lot of modern software, SEO bullshit, the current web, virtually every show, the vast majority of Hollywood films, a lot of the music that makes it to the charts, influencers’ “content”, adverts, the overwhelming pile of crap that no one buys on Steam, lots of AAA games that too many people buy on steam, the poorly-written bottom of the barrel fanfiction that passes as books, and a depressing amount of stuff posted on social media, including this comment.
Yes, I am grumpy today, why do you ask?
SEO slop is the first thing that comes to mind. It’s super-charged in ubiquity with AI now, but it’s been a thing about as long as search engines.
Sometimes you land on a page and you can tell you’re only there because they loaded it with keywords, repeating the same phrases you searched for in every variation.
SEO is actually one of the things that started me thinking about this. Although those dumb overly long cooking blogs were (previously) written by humans, the incentives led to a style that was no longer genuine. Much worse were those shameless fake review sites that existed solely to promote some VPN or antivirus. Sure, a human might’ve put that together, but so many words with so little regard for meaning.
I never understood why we tolerate the whole recipe site bullshit. It’s been a thing my entire life and it would take no effort to make a recipe site that just gives the recipe. You could when keep doing the 8000 word essays for the search engines and just hide it in the background or something.
I believe the important part is to make people scroll, not just the number of words. For some unholy reason google considers that a better website.
That’s also why some sites have a “go to recipe” button at the top now, which auto scrolls you to the recipe. They don’t care that you read the text, only that you scrolled a lot.
https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
My friend (who is an engineer) pointed me at this a few years ago and I’ve been pleased with it.
Those garbage/misleading mobile games in ads
Pop music, B movies, and tons of knock off entertainment media the recycles something that worked before but made superficially and without the underlying reason why the prior stuff was good.
