Edit: There's a whole lot of replies trying to sell the idea that AI Slop and pop music is the same. It isn't. You can dislike pop music all you want, you can think it's low effort all you want, but it's not AI Slop. This is a false equivalency.
Personally? I dream of a future where everything is McDonald's. Software, books, articles, artwork, movies, podcasts, music, and basically anything that makes life enjoyable.
Everything will be slop, nothing will be spared. 90% of everything is garbage? That's underachieving, let's improve our slop KPIs next quarter and make Sturgeon's law 100% of everything.
Lots of popular music is slop. Are you saying that e.g. Spice Girls or Coldplay or whatever is not slop? It is certainly popular with people even if it's musically and creatively bankrupt.
AI slop, Human slop - who cares if people are enjoying it.
>Are you saying that e.g. Spice Girls or Coldplay or whatever is not slop?
Your definition of "slop" seems to be "is popular with the mainstream." That isn't the definition used when applied to AI generated music. Spice Girls and Coldplay are leagues beyond anything an AI can currently produce in terms of artistic quality. Yes, there is artistic quality to popular culture.
And to most people it matters that human beings produce it. It may not matter to you - you may only consider music or any other form of art to be nothing more than a means of producing stimuli intended to create a pleasing endorphine response, but most people don't want to process art the way a machine processes data.
But why should you make the distinction between slop that is created by a human or AI? Why should you care if something terrible was created by an AI or a human?
For the same reason some people like buying local, or buying hand-made, or buying "Made in <insert country>". People aren't robots, and we know the consequences of our actions are not limited to the current moment and on the current side of the black box we happen to be on as consumers. Further, even in cases of pure observation, where there is no monetary, verbal, implicit, or indirect support - e.g. just looking at a piece of art we didn't pay to see - we care about things that are not represented solely by the observable qualities of an object, especially when it comes to art and craft and the effort of people we admire.
This is obvious, though. This part of human nature will never change, and there is no argument that can confront it, and no reason to want to formulate one unless:
A. It makes you money.
B. It appears to have dividing lines that match a larger culture war in which you have emotional stock.
There are a couple issues with that definition:
- quality is not always correlated with "cheaply made en-masse"
- actual slop, assuming you are talking about the food, is more about preventing food waste although it happens to also be cheap.
I'm being pedantic AF because most people refer to AI slop as "low-quality or careless work". And AI is just a tool so it's possible to spend a lot of time making something of high quality with it. I get the outrage with respect to copyright and artist rights, but it certainly doesn't look like slop to me.
Eeeeh your definition is as good as mine. To me, slop is used to convey the fact that whatever it is applied to was made with quantity/efficiency in mind rather than quality/purpose, like what is fed to pigs. Indeed, ultimately slop could be good by that definition. Lots of people like McDonald's, but I think most people also realize it is slop.
Edit: There's a whole lot of replies trying to sell the idea that AI Slop and pop music is the same. It isn't. You can dislike pop music all you want, you can think it's low effort all you want, but it's not AI Slop. This is a false equivalency.