Let’s think about the catch phrase all the ‘smart people’ in the world have been using for the last few months “AI Slop”. Yeah, “AI Slop!” It has a certain ring about it, doesn’t it? yet the phrase is both meaningless and wrong, just like if I said “Word Processor Slop” or “CNC Mill Slop”; does this really mean that both Word Processors and CNC mills are bad? or does this mean that the untrained ape typing into the word processor, or using the CNC machine is bad?
I don’t really need to take this blog post any further than this first paragraph, because the answer is pretty obvious when you think about it for a few seconds, it is another derivation of “blame the tool, not the monkey”, yes, humans are what cause slop, we have just been given another tool to make it easier!
Remember when Kindle came out, and everyone could publish a book for free, nobody screamed “Kindle Slop” though realistically you now had to wade through a magnitude more books to find the gems (though many established authors were churning out as much slop IMHO). Same with digital photography, I would say that if anything deserves the title “slop” it is the billions of photographs that get excreted onto the internet daily.
I really should just end this post here, I personally find AI extremely useful as a research tool, a meme generator, a knowledge aggregator, and yes, even as a framework code generator; But for some people, AI, it seems, has become the default bad-guy, and thousands of smart people, who are not doing their critical thinking and due diligence are simply repeating it.
I wish it wasn’t true, but yes, AI is certainly going to cause absolutely tonnes more human “slop” in all the fields it touches; and like books, and images, and program code, you are going to be inundated with it. To make it worse, much of this slop is going to be almost correct, artificially or wrongfully marketed, or hyped above the non-slop by people who don’t know the subject, or those with an agenda. For a layman it is going to be very difficult to tell any of it apart, and the testing of assumptions, and critical thinking, rather than rote repeating of something you have read or had generated from a prompt, is going to be essential going forward, just like it was essential in the past before LLM’s existed.
So yes, the water is going to be extremely muddy for a while to come, but just like Kindle books, there will be absolute gems in the slop which will emerge from people who would otherwise not have tried.
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If you are interested in critical thinking, I can heartily recommend Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit” (from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995/1996)
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/
https://centerforinquiry.org/learning-resources/carl-sagans-baloney-detection-kit
