In my opinion, AI Slop is content made with AI that is low effort. People feel and know the quality of something, and if it feels like slop, it feels like slop.
AI being used is not a deal breaker for me as long as the product is good. AI isn’t magic and it takes skills and knowledge to use it and to judge what the model outputs.
You may see it differently however, some might believe that the use of any AI tools whatsoever turns any app into slop the moment the first commit with AI code in it is made.
What do you think, what does AI Slop mean to you?
i agree with you, but i’ll give you a counterexample.
i generate ai images for me. i use only local models and i never share it publically because the output is not really the point, the process is. here is my process:
i come up with a concept, usually a person or a scene. i then take random images from the internet, cut out the parts i think fit together, and add them as layers in a client called “invoke ai”. if needed i color match the parts in krita first. then i describe the scene i’ve made in a prompt, adding the normal positive and negative keywords to steer generation. i also pull the “blur image” ratio down to 40%.
the model then makes an image with my digital scrapbook as a base, melting together disjunct elements into a scene. invoke then allows me to move all the elements around and regenerate the scene, or select a few specific elements to regenerate, or paint on top of the scene and generate something new from that, or select part of the scene and change the prompt for that area. it’s a fun little game, and it feels like collaborating with people who know lighting and perspective better than i do.
most time i’ve spent doing this is half a day, just iterating and tweaking and filling in details. i’m in no way an artist, i’m playing around. it’s basically as resource intensive as playing a video game, and i’m not one to share gameplay footage either.
That sounds like plagiarism with extra steps, and it all starts here:
plagiarism implies a benefit to the plunderer, though. It’s perfectly legal to take images from the internet for your own use - e.g. a sonic the hedgehog themed birthday party for a kid.
It is the AI companies who used the images for training in the first place who are the plagiarisers. People using the AI are just using a plagiarising tool made by plagiarisers. Whether they are fine with that is entirely up to their own conscience.
If that is truly the case, then it wouldn’t matter what anyone else thinks is or isn’t slop.
I mildly disagree. I think its an interesting discussion.
i also think that. and i love having that discussion with people. like, remember the google robot that drew dogs on every picture you fed it? deepdream, i think it was called? was that evil? because it’s the same tech, just trained on… dogs.
That’s okay, you can disagree if you like. It’s not like you’re responsible for the creation, upkeep, and various abuses resulting from, this modern pseudo-AI stupidity. You’re just a useful idiot to them.
i don’t think you should start calling third parties useful idiots, i’m the one who started this.
I’m not calling them anything. That’s just how the techbros view anyone who uses and defends their slopmachine scam.
surely a useful idiot is one who furthers the message and aids in its spreading?
well yeah, sure. not denying that. but i don’t do it for people to see it. i think of it a bit like cutting stuff out of magazines and gluing it together. it’s remix culture.
i’m not a creator in any way, i’m a consumer. i just like blending things together.
I would argue that it is some sort of creation
i don’t really want to class it as such in the current climate.
yeah I can see that, there’s a lot of connotation
Your local chat bot is still trained on data stolen at an astronomical scale, and, even if we accept your use case as ‘less’ bad, it still drives demand for ‘worse’ chat bots owned by oligarchs that want to destroy the world.
The tool is evil even if it has interesting niche applications.
correct. though stable diffusion was initially trained on LAION5, which is a free and open dataset compiled for scientific research which in itself had copyrighted material in it. that didn’t come out until after the model was out there because it didn’t matter to anyone before. scientists had used it for deep learning tasks for years at that point.
and the source images i take i also do without payment or copyright acknowledgement. as is the shows i watch on my jellyfin server, and some of the computer games i play, and the music i used to record off of the radio onto cassettes, and the comic characters i used to cut out of magazines as a child to make my own comics with.
i’m not saying those things are all equivalent. i’m saying that this problem isn’t new. i’ll stand up and defend small artists against big corporations any day, and i’ll gladly pay people for their time. my patreon bill alone is proof of that. i’ve canceled netflix and spotify over their unfair treatment of artists. i’ve written to my members of parliament, both local and in the eu, about how the copyright system is broken, how the slogan “information wants to be free” doesn’t automatically mean that meta can leech eighty terabytes of copyrighted material or that the us government can use any work they want in their propaganda material without paying. i’ve driven discussion about rightsholders and the unfairness of payouts to the little guy both at work and during my off time. i’ve voted against corporate control of media for years. i’ve voted pirate. i’ve voted socialist. i’ve voted green.
but sometimes i just want to dick around.
believe you me i’ve thought about this.