Things are getting real sloppy around here. Slop. Pig slop in your flip flops. Big ploppy pop-up slops. Slopsicles. Sloptical illusions. Aeslop’s Fables. Schlock options and slop floptions. Sloppy joes - slop - sloppy joes.
Yes, slop is everywhere these days, and if you’re like me, you’re slip-sliding in a slosh of slushy slop. But if we’re going to find out how to stop the slop, we first have to scope the slope of slop.
So what is slop? ChatGPT, with some help from me, defines slop thusly:
"Slop" can refer to low-quality content that's either poorly made or lacks value. It’s shallow, unoriginal, or lacking in quality. This can include:
Excessive or Unnecessary Content: posts that are redundant, overly personal, or just "filler" content meant to keep a profile active but lacking real substance. It could be AI-Generated Spam, machine-made posts such as generic motivational quotes, uncanny images, or text that feels slightly off. Human users on social media have been calling out "AI slop" as a specific plague, especially when it’s obvious no human thought went into it.
Clickbait: Posts or videos designed to grab attention with sensationalized or misleading headlines without delivering substantial or meaningful content. Posts like “Drop an emoji if you agree” or recycled memes that clog feeds without adding value. It’s designed to farm likes or retweets, not to inform or entertain.
Inauthentic Posts: Content that feels forced, disingenuous, or overly curated to appeal to trends without offering any real value or connection. An example of this is “Trend Chasing” when everyone jumps on the same viral sound or hashtag with near-identical takes, it turns into a slurry of sameness.
Thanks, robot. So outside of the context of social media, slop is not new. It’s just shlock, plagiarism, or bullshit at scale, now turbocharged by automation.
This should cause you all to pause. Is this slop? Is the author just a pig farmer boring boars and slapping sows? Am I reading slop right now, slurping the slurry? Is it even possible for someone to slop the sense into me?
To answer this, let’s peel back the pigskin of the slop metaphor to go back on a trip down memory lane. I’m talking about the advent of agriculture in the fertile crescent.
In Mesopotamia and the Levant, pig bones vanish around the Bronze Age, hinting at a shift that might’ve been due to climate change, since pigs are less suited to arid lands. Antediluvian. Think about it. In the ancient Middle East, pig farming wasn’t as practical as raising goats, sheep, or cattle which can thrive on sparse vegetation and graze over wider areas. Pigs need more water and more shade than other ungulates. They also don’t produce milk or wool. So pigs were kicked to the curb in the cradle of civilization, outcast from society with no hope of ever becoming bacon. However, the people in Europe and China feasted on delicious bacon, finger-licking ribs, and mighty joints of Schweinhaxen. They grew in wisdom and power and were uncircumsized as hell. In the Levant, they ate mutton stew with olives and scraped their bare glans on wool underwear.
“That’s gut-bustingly clever,” you’re undoubtedly saying, “but what’s the point?” I guess it’s this: you can take stock of your surroundings and wield slop to your benefit. Whether you’re farming pigs or clicks, or just using slop as an exemplar of what not to consume. But what is real-life pig slop? The answer may shake you to your core. It’s leftover human food! We had a German exchange student years back who was shocked to see that corn on the cob was on the menu.
“It’s pig food!” He schreiened, throwing up a Roman Salute, goose-stepping around our kitchen table.
“We don’t do that around here,” we said, “Now eat your slop, or you go back in the cage.”
This rounds out our metaphor. If pigs are lower beings eating our scraps, then unwitting consumers of slop are subhumans. AI-generated slop is simply the fractional remnant of human understanding. Since it is fractional, it hallucinates, not unlike a schizophrenic. And I use the term “understanding” in the Kantian sense, distinct from knowing. Kant drew a line between intuition and knowledge. AI contains all recorded human knowledge, but it has no mind, morality, or guts. No intuition. Note the weird irony here: it seems our gut instincts, deep within our meat, also help render our immaterial soul.
Anyway, machine-powered slop is irresistible to the terminally online pigman. I am advocating that we all engage in a renewed purity spiral like our Middle Eastern forebears. If you see slop, put a burqa on it. Notice also how the burqa is nearly indistinguishable from a trash bag. Improve your information diet. For quality content that has obviously consumed someone’s brain power and activated your own, we might even consider a Kosher grading scale. We can reliably use intuition and the machines themselves to detect whether something is of human, hybrid, or machine creation.
In fact, like pigs are trained to hunt truffles, we can reliably infer that humans will require little training to sniff out other humans. In fact, this is already well-established within the framework of the uncanny valley. Anecdata suggests that when people shake hands, over half will subconsciously touch their nose or eyes to get the scent of the other person. 100% true? Probably not, but it’s a good heuristic: to trust someone fully, you must smell them. This might be the next Turing test: the Sniff test.1
I am aware of the elephant in the room: what about sociopaths and psychopaths? This has always been a problem. But so is the accelerated proliferation of Cluster-B personality types in the West (shoutout
). Perhaps AI could help us determine who the “neuro-divergent” are among us and help them use their powers for good. MK-Ultra was a bad start. Mistakes were made. But maybe Elon Musk and his neuralink will lead us to a new utopia? Or maybe Jesus can’t come back fast enough to save us from the robots.
Anyway, we know where all the slop ends up in the end. Some have called it the grey-goo apocalypse. Others, like Dick Masterston, call it “the shitularity.” But the apocalypse doesn’t have to be all bad. In fact the word apocalypse means “the unveiling.” So, when the covers come off and the matrix is revealed as such, the things that are good and lasting will be plain for all to see, alongside those things that should be relegated to the dustbin. Since slop obfuscates and degrades, those who rise above it are destined for greatness.
I guess what I’m saying is that empty calories are part of the human condition. Sometimes it’s OK to pig out. But before slop, there was schlock, and before shlock, there was sloth. The first step is to identify it, then figure out ways to leverage it, discard it, or wholly differentiate ourselves from it.
By design, machines have no guts, noses, or balls, and that gives me comfort.
Like the Middle East of 5,000 years ago, we are in an era of climate change. No, not the Chinese hoax. This is digital climate change! The vast silicon sands are arid and barren, but there exist oases of insight. Such as…
For some fun, Google or Grok the following: “How far are we along in producing smellovision? The immersive TV that produces the smells of the scenes you see?”
When AI becomes self aware it will immediately become aware we hate it and be really sad. Awww