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(noun) a brain-rotting vision of our artificially generated future
Weird pictures of a slimy pink Jesus made out of prawns probably weren’t what OpenAI had in mind when it warned that artificial intelligence could destroy civilisation. But this is what happens when you put new tech in the hands of the public and tell them they can make whatever they want. Two years into the generative AI revolution, we have arrived at the era of slop.
The proliferation of synthetic, low-grade content like Shrimp Jesus is mostly deliberate, designed via weird prompts for commercial or engagement purposes. In March, Stanford and Georgetown University researchers found Facebook’s algorithm had in effect been hijacked by spammy content from text-to-image models like Dall-E and Midjourney. The “Insane Facebook AI slop” account on X has kept a running tally. A favourite in the run-up to the US election showed Donald Trump manfully rescuing kittens.
But slop may also be the unintended consequence of AI models trained on AI-generated texts — a form of data set inbreeding whose unfortunate spawn has been compared to the House of Habsburg.
Accelerationists will tell you that this is just a bump in the road on the way to exciting new user-generated AI content. San Francisco start-up Fable Studio has announced a Netflix-style streaming platform for AI films. Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek says people can share “an incredible amount of content” on the music service now that the cost of making music is close to zero.
The question is whether quality controls will nosedive along with the cost of creation. Note slop’s alliteration with spam — another form of easily distributed online nonsense.
AI generation watermarks would help combat this. Over time, sloppier content may die out naturally, starved of attention. Alternatively, zero-cost, zero-effort content will destroy information sharing and online trust for good. Shrimp Jesus could be just the start.
elaine.moore@ft.com
