What are some non-AI examples of slop?
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?
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.
Super Hero movies
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.
"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?
Edited.
Thank you.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. 😀
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
The 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.
Edit: I read the comment wrong and replied in error. That's selling it short: I was a dumbass.
Don't comment before coffee, kids.
Mood
No.
Edit: I'm the wrong one here!
I remember those. Awful.
You shut your whore mouth, those chopsocky films are a treasure! The difference in quality and how the stories barely go together are some of the appeal of those movies. It's really cool how far some creators go to make their movie and have everything sorta be a somewhat cohesive narrative.
Shit like Kung Pow are great examples of the genre being done very well (even as a parody).
I know what you mean, but I still can't tell the difference between The Ninja Force, Ninja The Protector, Full Metal Ninja, and Ninja Terminator.
Those movies were produced en masse with little to no regard to copyright, contracts with actors or global quality and that pretty much fits the definition of slop.
Aside from the so-bad-they're-good ninja scenes (always a pleasure to see a ninja turning into a wooden stick in a park), I just find those movies boring.
I think you're talking about those like bootleg ones that were hastily assembled pieces of shit from stolen Run Run Shaw films, etc
Right?
I was talking about movies made by Godfrey Ho in the 80s
Looks like we might be discussing the same movies. I checked out the link you included, and he did work at Shaw Studios and was apparently known to splice in footage not filmed by his crew. Nice
Liberty Mutual’s commercials are utter non-sense, no plot, not funny.
Please make them stop the slop.
100 years of video advertising. Here let me rub this on your eyeballs.
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.
Pretty much any movie franchise on or after the 3rd film (Transformers, Fast and the Furious, etc). If it's based on a book series, then the first one after the source material runs out (e.g. Jurassic Park III and later).
Reaction videos - prime example of slop. WHO DAFUQ WATCHES THESE? Like, am I going crazy by not getting this? Why would I watch some person just sit there and react to shit, often exaggerating their reaction to get attention of a watcher, that brings literally 0 fucking worth to the original content?
Prank videos - only are second to reaction videos. 99% of the time are either fake or they do some questionable stuff to expectorating bystanders.
I dont mind them when the reactor is a specialist (like a physicist or chemist or something) who normally produce their own content reacting to a realted thing. Pure react channels are pretty trash tho
Reaction videos can be done right. There's a vocal coach on Youtube who listens to and comments on the vocal techniques in use in famous songs, the most fun ones are the ones she's never heard before. It's also really easy to do this kind of content lazily, play someone else's video and remember to say "oh shit" occasionally.
There's two kinds of reaction videos. The more common type a lot of streamers do is just garbage content stealing. The other is actually interesting or entertaining to watch.
What exactly is good about either of them.
Say, a professional lawyer is making a reaction video to some other video depicting something that breaks the law and gives comments form law standpoint - that is fine. But might as well count as a commentary channel rather than a reaction channel. Also, these are fucking rare!
And then we got trillions of channels that just watch movie/game trailers, funny tiktok/reddit/insta/9gag videos, or worse - movies and just occasionally react in an exaggerated tone to them or dont react at all - that is content cancer prime.
The vast majority of "reaction" videos or streams are garbage. That doesn't mean the good ones are bad though.
I kind of like the idea of using the word "slop" solely for AI and finding other words to describe stuff that's just poorly made. Trying to ascribe "slop" to other things dilutes the word and will help AI companies to keep doing what they are doing.
I agree. It's a sliding scale with generative AI currently being the lowest point (for now at least, once the dataset is a slop ouroboros, it's only going to spiral downwards). Lazy, corporate filmmaking is bad, but lots of film noir classics were basically pulp movies knocked out to meet demand and are now widely regarded as classics. Because there's a difference between even the most committe overseen, cashgrab product that was still made by a human with their own strengths, tastes and biases vs a genai slop factory.
But my aversion to ai slop has heightened my awareness of it, which in turn has made me notice how many things are slop adjacent. I notice myself writing a message and realsing I'm using a bunch of standard phrases and structures. I'm not an llm, but there are times when our individual responses aren't that different. I look at stock photography, where a complex family dynamic has been reduced to "teen sits on bed looking down, woman gestures angrily" and I realise that we've been traveling down this road for a while now, ai has just cut the brakes.
There is a lot of confusion on this thread between "slop" and "drivel", for sure.
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.
anything made by a boardroom, or"focus tested" or modified to appeal to xyz demographic.
the majority of pop music.
Law and Order, Law and Order Special Victims Unit, Law and Order Organized Crime, Law and Order Toronto, Law and Order Criminal Intent, Law and Order LA, Law and Order Trial by Jury, Law and Order True Crime, Law and Order UK, Code of Law (aus), Paris enquêtes criminelles (fra), Закон и Порядок. Отдел оперативных расследований (rus), Convictions
Adam Sandler films post 2010
Did you see uncut gems? Definitely worth a watch
Try 2006.
There's a ton of stuff that applies to the female demographic - all kinds of stupid words with LED lights on them, idiotic fake wooden plank signs that say wine o'clock, horrible "inspirational" messages in that goofy curly font, something that you'd normally sell to a guy except they hot glued a pink pom pom on it.
Soap Operas
fast food...
at this point can you even call that meat?
I grew up poor where you don't throw away food.
But yeah I'm not eating at Carl's Jr. That shit is nasty.
Fast fashion.
Short form video comedy with cringy facial expressions synced to music is my most hated example
Like a lot of tv shows.
Like... especially those cop shows, "police proceduals", booorrring. Also copaganda.
When I wanna find something new to watch, I basically have this routine where I start reading the plot summary of the thing on wikipedia, and if it sounds too boring, I'll just skip it. If I read like a few sentences and it sounds exciting, I stop reading the rest of the plot and just start watching.
I remember watching a lot of Hong Kong TV shows, those were sometimes fun, but its very like... I can almost predict the plot sometimes, like I just see a character and I know they're gonna flip sides.
But then we get to the Mainland Mandarin TV Shows... omg, okay so this was before I really got into western media.
So the Mainland stuff, its either:
like... I don't think there are even shows or movies from China that are even interesting. I think the politics has to do with it. Like, you can't make anything originak and intriguing without getting censored, so they just stick to "safe" formulas. Thus the boringness.
Like. I tried to watch 3 body problem in the Tencent version.
Omg, why is it so boring?
I'm a native Mandarin speaker and I got to like episode 8 out of 30 and I just gave up... too slow, too boring. I liked the Netflix version better, especially the Cultural Revolution and Struggle Session scene they cut out, cuz Pooh bear said no.
So... I have Cantonese and Mandarin as my languages... that I just have no fun content to watch in... ugh...
But it felt good watching 3 Body Problem Netflix edition, and like being able to hear and understand everything said in both languages, perks of being bilingual xD
Temu dollar garbage. Especially 3D printed stuff
Side qustion:
AliExpress doesnt pretend to be the "THIS ARTICLE HAS A 99% DISCOUNT!!! Buy now!!!" (and I choose to ingore the discount codes which apply at >200€ cart value).
Would you consider their stuff slop?
Trashy sure but some of the stuff is actually better than getting the same on Amazon.
I've been buying from alibaba and aliexpress for years and I've never had anything INAD or otherwise temu style shitty come from there. It's literally Amazon without the middleman.
I mean...There is shit but you can filter it out very easily.
There's shit on there but just don't buy it. Temu actually lies about what you'll get.
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.
The Star Wars knockoffs between ANH and ESB are insanely bad. Half of those movies are basically over-greebled models and cheap special effects without much plot or substance. The other half are just formulaic sword and sorcery 80s movies with a spaceship or lightsaber thrown in.
Of course, George forgot his own advice later on.
The model is old, but direct-to-video sequels were usually always awful. There are 14 Land Before Time movies. 14. Only the first one got a theatrical release.
Recipe websites.
Any trump speech.
*Most recipe sites.
JustOneCookbook is very brief on backstory. Anything mentioned is usually related in context to the dish like culture things or substitutions.
But besides that page? Very unusual to have minimal background info strictly related to the recipe.
For recipe sites use the Broccoli app. Scrapes off the SEO gunk and saves the recipe locally.
shorts, ads, fast food
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.
Anything found on aliexpress, temu or wish. Manufactured trash/industrial runoff that's likely dangerous to breathe near.
Television news. In fact, most of the shit on television these days.
The idea cancer for toddlers section of youtube, which I think they have since cleaned up. The "finger family pregnant elsa kills hitler spiderman" era. Which was kind of fascinating to study, because no one was in charge. iPad children weren't making decisions, they were just letting the colors and sounds happen, and actual people deciding to make the content, sometimes to the point of wearing costumes and shooting live video, were making what the algorithm deemed popular. At least one woman pulled a bright blue dress over a fake baby belly while her husband scribbled a toothbrush mustache on a Spiderman mask and didn't think "What the hell are we even doing right now?"
any maga conspiracy theories
Most songs with lyrics. One that comes to mind is a tune with the line "say what you came to say" that repeats dozens of times in 3 minutes. Dude should take his own advice and actually say something.
Yeah, lyrics are getting more repetitive and angry over time.
Thanks for the link.
Repeat Stuff
The documentary "Exit through the gift shop" will give you my answer better than I could.
Any of the sixteen YouTube channel narrated by Simon Whistler.
It may not be intentional slop but it's pretty much the definition of quantity over quality.
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.
Art pieces that are made and sold as little more than money laundering schemes. Playing GTAO again and am kinda surprised out of all the money laundering operations you can run, a bogus art gallery isn't one of them.
low effort, low quality, for making money because of it. Might not have either low effort or quality "tag" at times, but then its replaced by being harmful, which can be there with them too. So things like what fastfood companies squeeze out, tiktok content, illegal drugs, temu trash.
So maybe also anything that actively exploits humans in some way for monetary gains (ai exploits and harms creators, fastfood and drugs exploit and harm body, tiktok trash exploits and harms mind, temu trash exploits western economy and harms environment).
so in short, shit that would make world better place with its absence
Cars have been a prime example, IMO, for a long while.
Oh, the screen on your center console cracked or is out of date? You can't fix it on your own and you need the dealership to do it and if they can't, you need to upgrade your vehicle because they make the vehicle almost impossible to run without it.
Want to change your oil? A well known brandnI cannot think of the name of right now needs to approve! Heated seats? I think it was BMW that planned on charging you a subscription service for that.
I'm predicting in less than a decade, if things don't change, you'll not only be selling a liver for that car, but also all your healthy organs to be able to afford the subscription service to be able to start your car.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the kids pretending to be adults who own a vehicle so damn tall that they have to climb into it using a step thing in the side. I'm talking average height or taller and no visible signs that they struggle to enter ( other than being too short ). It's like watching an entitled toddler try to walk up stairs for the first time. You can't help but pity them, or at least I can't.
4-packs of 2-TB NVME for $50 on eBay.
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.
Pulp fiction.
Those knockoffs of Disney etc. movies.
Mr Beast.
Just about any short form video site.
Most paperback novels sold in grocery stores
90% of the Steam library
Fast fashion
Kitchen appliances with superfluous electronics
Battery powered scooters that can't handle a mild incline
etc etc
I didn’t know where you were going to go with this…and I’m confused by the rest your post.
…I was going to say everything in the Tom Clancy universe was slop.
Paper mill challenges: past, present, and future - ScienceDirect https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0895435624003056
Influenza.
NFL referees
Bible versions first released after 1871 (NIV, ASV, ESV, NKJV, NASB, etc.) have all become slop.