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?
Every annual-ized video game. 2K, Fifa, Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed. Copy and paste, low effort trash that offers nothing new, different, or interesting. They’re designed to be as bland and disposible as possible, to keep you addicted for a year and selling you loot boxes and additions until the next edition comes out.
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Pretty much the entirety of advertising always has been, especially since the fall of the fairness doctrine. With the rare exception of ad agencies that are making artworks to try and win awards once in a while.
In art, this fellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kinkade
It’s the only Wiki entry on an artist that I’ve seen with no examples of his work. The nearest is a photo of a photo of Kinkade with one of his paintings.
I’m not being snobbish - it does give me the same vibe as AI generated images touted as art. Nostalgia, colour saturation, cliché, all dialled up to the max. The man died in 2012 but lives on as a brand.
That’s a really good example, just a mix and regurgitate of older, better work trying to give consumers what they think they want.
YouTube channels that are mostly just reading Reddit comments.
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.
Similarly, youtube channels about disaster events that are just reading the Wikipedia page with some spooky music.
Or reading “am I the asshole” or “relationship advice” posts.
Fuck. I hate so much of this crap.
A lot of these are also AI slop nowadays too
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).
Even if they discuss the content of it?
Those garbage/misleading mobile games in ads
Also why the hell is this a thing? Those ads are showing gameplay, it would be so much easier to make that game and then take a video of it for the advert than to just make an animation of it. So in my mind the game exists. Why is it just Mafia Wars reskinned every fucking time?
Because “mafia wars” makes consistent money, and the games people actually might want to play don’t. Slapping a new coat of paint on the same mechanics over and over again means getting the money maker out there to more people, just gotta lure em in with the promise of a game they might actually want to play, then swap in the game they don’t and hope you snag em with the psychological tricks before they leave.
It works just often enough to make it profitable and easy.
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Super Hero movies
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almost anything Disney produces these days.
I’d say more specifically, Disney’s live action remakes of their old films are slop. Though I’ve not watched a Disney film since Turning Red, they’ve not seemed appealing for a while now.
Oh God yes. The studio push for reboots, remakes and adaptations already runs the risk of by-the-numbers ‘creativity’, but those live action remakes are the natural progression. Not even a new take or reimagining, just a lazy, safe cashgrab.
I’ll watch it but be damned if I’ll pay for it.
these days.
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“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)
You mean Sturgeon’s law, right?
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.
Oh man, that’s soothing. A recipe, for a meal, and it explains what I need to do, in the order I do it, and the pictures actually show the cooking. This is some next level stuff. I hope it catches on!
I got so tired of them I actually started asking ChatGPT for recipes instead. It’s mostly worked out.
Go buy a physical copy of the Joy of Cooking
Ghostwritten sequels to series whose original author is dead.
Sanderson did a decent job with Wheel of Time, though.
He didn’t ghostwrite that, his name is on it. He also worked closely with Harriet, and had access to Robert’s notes including whole sections already written. See also Brian Henson making Muppet Christmas Carol and Treasure Island, or Christopher Tolkien publishing supplements to the Silmarillion. Care, authorship, and intimacy abound. Not slop.
Compare with “New Hardy Boys” or the Dune prequels (which may have Brian Herbert’s name on the cover but was clearly ghostwritten in large part). Slop.
Fair enough
Weren’t the original Hardy Boys slop from the start? It’s been a while since I read about it, but I think I remember reading that they were kind of cynically churned out by some paid hack, and occasionally revised to keep them from getting too dated. (Human slop generating practices have gotten worse over the years, tho)
Shovelware video games could be included in the slop category.
Also included in this: the thousands upon thousands of mobile games that are literally the same exact game with minor asset switching.
Like, 99% of those “town/castle/whatever building” games that have fixed locations for buildings etc., they’re all based on maybe 2-3 white label game “engines” that are ready to be re-labelled with new assets, new logos, new story (even though the story events driving it are the same, the “side dish” storytelling changes minimally).
This also goes for pretty much any game format that becomes trending. You can bet your tushie that the moment a game format is even just borderline popular… there will be a dozen or so Chinese software houses copying the mechanics and looks and behaviour, and within a week you can buy a white label version of it for a few thousand dollars.
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.
Hallmark Christmas movies are proto-slop. Same goes for Lifetime Original movies. Example with Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig, literally doesn’t feel real.
I think that one is satire, it ought to be.
It’s literally a parody of lifetime movies made by lifetime as a joke.
Comedic actors being desperate to take a dramatic turn often leads to this kind of slop, especially in the case of Will Farrell. There’s a whole era of films he did that’s bizarre and “cringey”, including that insane Woody Allen film. He said the lifetime movie was a satire…but there’s a certain amount of hubris involved in believing he could pull it off.
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.
what is the reason behind this? i never understood it. is the garbage supposed to raise the SEO score or something?
More screen length = more space for embedded video ads.
When it was recipes they claimed it was copyright related. If another site stole your whole recipe plus the story you know it’s stolen. Just saying to hard boil eggs, split em, add mayo and mustard… well that’s just any deviled eggs.
If you’re not adding Sriracha to them, it’s not deviled eggs. 😀
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?
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