AI Slop

Well, thanks, Dan.

Thanks for having us on.

It's been fun to work on this project with Woody.

It's our second of what we think will be a trilogy of papers, actually, on AI.

So where did AI slop come from? When we were writing our earlier paper called How Does AI Destroy Institutions? We were thinking about different manifestations of AI in the world.

And the idea of slop kept coming up in that research.

And so we think the origin of the word is around the early 2022s, maybe.

It's everywhere now, as you said.

People talk about it.

all the time, and it's this sort of careless and effortless and excrement of AI output.

I mean, people think about it as maybe spam, pollution, fast food.

There's lots of different ways of thinking about what it could be, but it is this the excretion of the automated AI systems, whether it's images or texts, sort of done without care, sent out into the world without review, and taking up all of our attention and time.

Woody, do you have anything to add?

Yeah, and we came to this paper because people were using slop in a way that it sounded like it was a distinct phenomenon.

And we wanted to really try and unpack whether it was worth taking seriously as a concept, because there was all these sort of permutations as well, like the Slopocalypse is upon us and Slopageddon.

And there were all these sort of variations of the term.

And so that's really what led us to want to analyze it seriously as a concept that might be useful in both the social research and society, but also in policy.

So you spent a lot of time in the paper focusing on the term, like how do we define it? Because I assume that we want to make a distinction between slop and other stuff because slop is what is causing harm and we're going to identify it as something we need to have an intervention to deal with.

So it's very important that we actually figure out how do we separate the slop from good stuff, right? Because I guess that not everything AI generates is slop.

So what exactly is the way that you define it?