Shrimp Jesus presents: 9 useful ideas against SLOP

There’s a tsunami of cheap AI generated content incoming. Time to check out the surfboards.

Remember that you lived when content created by humans had its finest days. It was the days, when the ubiquity of smartphones bigbanged social media platforms, who made everybody to content creators and unpaid librarians. And then, when we were standing on the shoulders of giants on that mountains of knowledge, ai models became publicly available. It is so much faster and cheaper to ask a chatbot for a drawing instead of making one. It is way more efficient to have a bot write a text and the ai models make even better pictures than many, many photographers.

Some high profile actors, auteurs, illustrators and publishers try to sue the AI companies, hoping to participate from the expected billions, that those companies will earn with content made with models trained with art from those who sue. They might expect a big payout, as soon as the companies consolidate their market share (they are still losing money, because they demand for compute is just excessive). Most other creators were forced to work with the new AI Tools. It did not increase the quality of artistic work, but it enhanced the throughput very much.

There is a new sheriff in town: SLOP.

Behold the peak of human creation. Most people are familiar with the concept of SPAM, the relentless and still undefeated masses of unsolicited bulk email advertising. SLOP is cheaply produced, attention grabbing AI content: images, movie clips and audio that is way more pleasant than your typical viagra ad. SLOP is made from the best ingredients: it’s a mix of shocking, sexy, funny, cute and deeply emotional content, tailored for each individual. And it’s consumed in such mass that you can automate its creation and optimize the hell out of it.

You can create SLOP the expensive way with ❤humans❤ writing and tweaking the prompts. You can set up sophisticated production funnels with dedicated software suites, famously nicknamed “weapons of mass distraction”. You could do some real science when you feed back the results on social media to tweak the models. Nah, I’m just kidding. This is SLOP. It’s all about mass and cheap production. It’s the cheap knockoff version of real content.

This is bad. Content will inevitably go down on every free platform, successful content will be remixed over and over again. People will get stupid, smombies, having their eyes glued to their phones. Mark my words: dopamine addiction is bigger than meth and fentanyl. I would say it’s already pretty bad, like cigarettes and alcohol bad. And it’s 100% legal, so you can still make a ton of money with it. It’s a great time for online salesmen, a bad time for parents.

The worst thing: like microplastics, SLOP gets inevitably into the food chain, it’s digested not only by humans but also by the next AI model together with other “synthetic data”. Optimizing for clicks simply dilutes information until the SLOP fills the internet to the brim with gray goo.

So once again I have to ask the question, what can YOU do about it? I give you some ideas from the top of my head.

1. Switch off

A lot of people might say: I don’t look at my phone so often, I work in my garden, I read books, I’m meditating. I can put my phone away any time. To those people I say: Good for you — keep off the hook. Help yourself before you help others. But online celibacy is increasingly difficult — a strange life of unnecessary hardship. Of course you can join the Amish people altogether but for everyday people I would suggest this: acknowledge that there is danger to some degree, a slippery slope. Give your brain some time off screen regularly — Switching off is like like doing sport or eating healthy food —it can be uncomfortable to change the habit, but you feel just great if you do.

2. Don’t reward the reward function.

If you buy stuff from an SLOP ad, the advertisers will take note. If you klick on SLOP, you will get more SLOP. If you simply stop scrolling when there is SLOP, it may not come as a surprise that in the end you will be rewarded with: SLOP. Try real people, you will be surprised, how complex and deep they are.

3. Ask for regulation and filters

Yes we could insert watermarks into AI generated content, yes we could ban image filters, yes we could put more regulation on SLOP catapults like the social media behemoths. I don’t think this will happen soon, but a soon as the goldrush starts getting weaker and she shovelmakers there will be some blowback.

4. Reward originality and talent

Be creative and add good stuff. Kudos to some really great creators out there. You can find them behind the firewalls of streaming services and premium content platforms. And there are so many. Those platform now song up all the creatores and monetize them. And this will work out fine, like Spotify did wonders for the musicians (sarcasm).

5. Be natural

Ugly people are MADE for the AI era. Beauty Filters can make an average person to the most attractive idol on the web. Sixpacks and chiseled chins, sexy curves and toned muscles, today is the day you can be a real gigachad. People don’t want to meet you, but they may want to meet the people you impersonate on the webs,. But If you want to be authentic you can dial in some of your asymmetries and skin imperfections in. Botox fails also work perfectly if you go for the real person look.

6. Enjoy the SLOP as long as it’s legal

Yeah, I also hate to pay for content when you can get you brain melted with tons of SLOP for free. There were times when people killed each other in duels, when parents and teaches slapped kids, when we smoked cigarettes and when we could say any of the forbidden words. Maybe not on TV but everywhere else. Some day SLOP might be forbidden. But today we can enjoy free SLOP, and it’s still pretty good. So enjoy until you don’t.

7. Go full throttle

Some day we will have played through all the internet an when it starts repeating the same memes all over again, we will just stop buying shit, living in an Idiocracy and listen to the ASMR voices of AI priestesses. Keep going, you are an early adopter, ahead on the curve. First in, first out. Try adding opiates and some minor gambling?

8. Use Sarcasm. AI can’t grok that.

Because nobody can tell if you’re joking, or if you are a dog on the internet.

9. Stop creating SLOP yourself

Simply Put: AI doesn’t need YOU to do it. Other Humans need you to do OTHER THINGS.
Stuff AI can’t do, like calling your mom.
Yourself.

PS. This helpful article isn’t sloptimized or based on AI at all (apart from Shrimp Jesus). Just to prove my point, it was put together painstakingly slow by a human brain, finger typed, hand made and manufactured. It’s likely that it could have been easily improved by proofreading by any common chatbot. Because of that I almost want to apologize for any harm that my sloppiness may cause to any reader who rather enjoys comfortable zero-typo sarcasm-free botext.