NOTE: I am NOT defending AI or it’s usage or anything like that. So just tie that horse right back up at the kitchen sink. I don’t like the whole AI thing. This post is not about AI.
I get that it was necessary at first, but now whenever there’s any hint of AI, there’s a great chorus of everyone saying the same thing ‘AI slop bla bla bla’ like a gaggle of sheep jerking their knees.
It’s not fucking helpful. It only sows even more division among the peasants, while the oligarchs take zero notice and continue on as usual. The correct way to engage with AI content you don’t like is just not at all.
Examples:
Recently I watched as a post for a community event was removed, because it had an AI image. The image was not requested or created by the organiser, it was provided to them, and had information in several languages. But the post was removed because AI slop and now there is less human connection happening. Yay. Well fucking done. You literally are helping the AI overlords now.
I’ve seen many actual legit digital artists getting hit with the cries of AI slop and even banned, when they have been making art for years before AI was even a thing. People actually can’t tell the difference half the time when they think they can, and end up hurting real artists.
Now is not the time to be attacking each other over using AI to generate some stupid meme. There are much, MUCH bigger issues at stake right now, and calling everything AI slop does nothing to help.
/rant
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Finally an actually unpopular opinion. Angry upvote. AI slop needs to die and I will not shut up
I dislike it too, but I strongly disagree, ai slop is much worse and you have to be loud because of how strongly it is forced upon us.
Be loud about why it’s bad
It undermines human effort and is generally spam, maybe we have different experiences but I’ve heard that to death already, which is why it’s annoying to me.
(kinda replying to your the machines have won replies)
there are no ‘machines’ that will ‘win’ anything… the only way ‘ai can win’ is by normalising it, by forgetting the costs (environmental and human) of using it, as well as those who benefit from it’s use (the people who stand to win something).
what you’re calling for is exactly that (being complacant about it) and it’s probably why people get upset…?
p.s. i do agree that we should approach each other with more love and understanding and probably inform more than shame. i’m truly believe most people are just lazy or curious, not actively malicious.
“Don’t confuse slop with legitimately useful content just because some part of it was created with AI tools.”
Fuck off with this purity test bullshit. Whatever happened to inclusivity? Acceptance? Removing gatekeeping? Now gatekeeping is 100% acceptable if it’s a gate you personally don’t like?
Now gatekeeping is 100% acceptable if it’s a gate you personally don’t like?
yes. humans are inherently contrary. now pick a side.
No. Stop being an absolutist loon. Be better than the screaming chimps. Use that prefrontal cortex and put down the fist full of feces.
Block and move on.
Feels like MLK’s quote fits right here
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice
We do need tension, but not between us peasants, it needs to be between us and legislators/oligarchs.
btw, the way you keep calling everyone a peasent is really not helping your case imho xD
Ok, but you’re saying AI is a problem, but we shouldn’t call it out along with other issues? Nah, we’ll call out whats slop: slop.
Overall you’re saying it’s not actually about AI but it’s literally feeling pro ai, and none of us are conformists, especially when it comes from horrendous shit/actions to individual instigators.
Well you could instead say something like, “You shouldn’t use AI for images, it massively harms the environment and has a huge societal cost that we will all pay.” Engage with the person, not the content. That’s far more effective.
Ok so if you’re adamant on that point, why wouldn’t you be mad/call that out? You’re having to suffer because of people’s stupid choices. /neutral /genuine question
Not calling it out is akin to not calling out anything else unethical.
See a parent hitting their child? Shut up and move along.
AI data center being built in your neighbourhood? SHUT UP, JUST DONT USE IT.
Someone littering on your street? Stop whinging, just ignore it and it will eventually blow in to the ocean - all good!
If no one speaks up, then it just gets worse. Protest is fundamental to pushing back against the horse shit that corpos try and push down our throats every day. Someone less informed may take the lack of negative comments towards AI slop as it being OK and normal when it clearly isnt, therefore adding to the problem.
Hard disagree with your opinion and I think it comes across as corpo cuckery so you get an upvote I guess.
Well you could instead say something like, “You shouldn’t use AI for images, it massively harms the environment and has a huge societal cost that we will all pay.”
Engage with the person, not the content. That’s far more effective.
You could, but your original take was to not engage at all.
And I dont know if youve tried to engage with an AI user before but the whole point is that they dont want to learn to do the thing they got AI to do, trying to educate them about anything is likely to result in glazed over eyes and deaf ears.
If youre very lucky, they might ask AI about its environmental impact, to which it will probably lie and justify its existence, thereby burning a lump of coal in the process and we come full circle to what we are trying to avoid.
Upvoted for very unpopular opinion.
Yes, let’s just ignore all the bad things happening around us. Great idea.
Not ignore, find better ways to deal with it.
Well you could instead say something like, “You shouldn’t use AI for images, it massively harms the environment and has a huge societal cost that we will all pay.”
Engage with the person, not the content. That’s far more effective.
Those examples you mentioned of unfair and undesired outcomes after witch-hunting AI slop are legitimately unfortunate. Very clear cases where we should pick our battles and not be overly confident in our identification of slop. I agree fully on that.
But if people are posting slop that they explicitly or implicitly pose as their own work, just for our simple viewing, then most people are going to take a stand. We don’t want that stuff. 👍🫶
To summarize, I grant that I don’t fully disagree with your original post.
Take care!
Your disclaimer is false. You said the post isn’t about AI but it’s entirely about AI. Because look, we all know that there’s a backlash against AI. We all know that if you’re planning an event, you probably shouldn’t use AI if you aren’t ready to piss off people who don’t like it… That’s the reality. Now, you could wish that reality were different, but it’s not a big burden to say hey, don’t have AI make the poster, just make it yourself. It’s really not that hard.
Now, you also mentioned people who were accused of using AI when they didn’t. Of course, that’s not cool… But this is not a problem of reactions to AI. It’s a problem of not fact checking. And if you came here telling us that people should fact-check better, or properly, than I think everyone would agree with you.
In summary, I think your post does the opposite of what you claim you want it to do. You don’t want people to be divisive, but you’ve intentionally created a divisive set of guidelines. And then you’ve told people to shut up but you know they’re not going to which means you’re just looking for an argument… I guess this entire strategy bores me.
But you posted in the right place, so it’s all good.
It’s not about AI, it’s about people’s reactions to AI slop.
Now, you could wish that reality were different, but it’s not a big burden to say hey, don’t have AI make the poster, just make it yourself. It’s really not that hard.
What the flog is wrong with having AI make a poster as long as it’s reasonably clean, professional, and free of slop content? Indeed, much of what AI can do in those situations is little more than automation acting on PhotoShop-like sets of tools.
Make all the AI content you want, says I, but here’s a tip-- don’t make it obvious that AI was used in its production. Bam, problem solved.
Now if you could put that in to your own words…
EDIT: To the enlightened downvoters-- that person’s trying to get me to read a 5,000pp science paper instead of answering themselves.
Lmao the pro AI guy being too lazy to skim a paper for information is too on the nose. It’s in 4.1 Median Model Energy Consumption.
The issue is that it’d take hundreds of times less energy to just put together something yourself, not to mention the massive energy cost of training the models in the first place. Plus you’d be developing a skill while doing creative work, which is great for your brain.
Nah you obviously dont care enough to read it so I’m good
GTFO. That’s a ~5,000pp science paper. You want me to try to read and understand all that instead of you doing the simple of thing of using your own words to convey your point?
Fuck off, troll.
Nah, they’re right and you’re wrong here.
The thing about long papers is they generally have an abstract right upfront that’ll bottom line all ~5000 pages in a few paragraphs.
Your responses make it obvious that you already know exactly what point they were making and you’re being deliberately obtuse because you don’t like the point being made.
Please.
That is an actual science paper in an area in which I have zero academic training and little familiarity with the relevant terminology, how that field quantifies things, and a bazillion other concerns. Sure, I might be able to spend a day’s worth of my time struggling to understand the relevant point of the paper and guessing at WTF the other commenter was wanting me to mind read, but what’s the point?
If you’re too much of a tongue-tied freak to give a straight answer, and instead throw out some science paper and expect someone else to absorb it and guess at whatever your original point was, then… you might just be an idiot.
And I’ve already answered concerns about AI energy consumption in this thread chain, so maybe instead of trying to ride a troll’s lack of effort, you could actually read the thread?
Yeah, good luck with that. Later, tater.
If it uses one of the online services, then it’s a problem (environment, water etc).
You could somewhat make that argument for local models. But not many people are going to have any conception of that
Metrics are needed. Based on an article that Rimu shared a few days ago, I didn’t get the impression that stuff like simple graphics work needed for a poster particularly added much strain.
There’s also the simple fact that it’s too late to be herding cats on this one. Most people who’ve gotten used to using AI for various tasks aren’t going to give it up very easily. While I agree that it can be useful to talk up and spread the word about the destructiveness of AI costs, that energy and pressure ultimately needs to be funneled to lawmakers in order to draft and pass appropriate legislation.
It’s also an issue that every person that complains about AI has absolutely no fucking idea what it is, how it works, how to differentiate different models/forms, or even why it’s a special unique technology that is inherently bad. Unlike things like alcohol, X-rays, methamphetamines, gunpowder, oil, nuclear, mining, farming, etc, etc, that are only harmful when used/done wrong.
…has absolutely no fucking idea what it is…
I don’t understand how that could be at this point, but it would help explain the paranoia. To me, there’s a huge difference between a simple, clean, low-cost use-case in which little or no trace of AI tools is detected, versus obvious AI slop media, versus having an LLM do extensive programming which winds up being filled with spaghetti code and whatever inefficiencies. The latter two involving a tonne more queries and tokens used.
It’s all the same thing to a lot of people, I guess.
Because it has become a purity signal and tribal call rather than an actual coherent position. I’ve seen people get angry at researchers using AI to develop new drugs, and novel bacteriophages. I’ve seen people get angry at “AI” in word processing and image editing, claiming there’s no difference between ChatGPT and the algorithms than have been used for decades.
There is such a idiotic mix-up between the horrible corruption of OpenAI, and the term “AI” itself, that morons with no understanding of anything are waving torches and grabbing pitchforks at the word itself, without any comprehension of what they’re angry at.
Yeah, I guess that pretty-well covers it. Well said!
the horrible corruption of OpenAI
Not totally sure what you mean, there. I do use GPT a lot for complex searches, rarely anything else.
that energy and pressure ultimately needs to be funneled to lawmakers in order to draft and pass appropriate legislation.
100% agree
but it’s not a big burden to say hey, don’t have AI make the poster, just make it yourself. It’s really not that hard.
Maybe not, but it doesn’t feel great when people think they can push you around like that. “Just comply with our demands, it’s easy” is exactly the kind of attitude that makes it even more intolerable.
Ok, but given the massive costs in energy and clean water are borne by all those “intolerable” people, I’m gonna go with they are the ones in the right here. Your arguments sound exactly like the kind of shit Exxon executives said about fossil fuels in the 90s.
When you have a 100% locally hosted AI powered by your private solar or wind array and cooled without pulling any water from a local water table,nyou can go back to smugly deriding the “intolerable” and “smug” people making demands of you, but as long as your slop-slinging is affecting all of us you have to hear about it as a bare minimum consequence.
I do use locally hosted AI and haven’t used anything else in quite a while (in part because I agree with some of the criticisms), but yes, it uses resources. About the same as playing a videogame, I tested it with an outlet meter. As much as I do actually go out of my way to live in a way that limits my carbon footprint (relevant example: I throttle my GPU’s maximum wattage to a more efficient setting), I’m not fooling myself to think that individual aggregate lifestyle choices is what it boils down to, that’s misleading industry propaganda they’ve been pushing for decades.
That propaganda especially doesn’t make sense with regards to AI, because its promise as a consumer product is not at all why corporations are funneling resources into its development, they are doing it because they believe it is something they can use for business and give them a more dominant position over society, so it would be done regardless of whether any individual chose to use it. Which isn’t to say people using their services aren’t contributing at all, doing so gives these companies training and surveillance data. The ethics of it is worth discussing and considering. General purpose “you breathe our air therefore your actions must all be justified by our moral standards regardless of the scale of impact” type arguments are petty and absurd and don’t really make for a constructive discussion though.
Yeah that’s how a society works, so are you gonna cut yourself off and live off the land in a cabin in the woods where no one can tell you what you have to do or are you going to continue to comply with society’s demands in order to reap it’s benefits?
Going for a mix of strategic isolation and speaking out against smug mob rule bullies personally. The existence of rules is one thing, but when it’s both about micromanaging the arguably innocuous use of information processing tools, and enforced in the most obnoxious way possible, that seems like the right hill to take a stand on.
Truly an unpopular opinion.
Fuck AI and everybody using it
If we cannot stop the infighting, the machines have already won.
“stop the infighting!” as we literally burn the planet to the ground for shitty AI, technofascists steal ALL our data, they use AI and data centers to power the fascist surveillance state, and power the Israeli genocide.
I’m sorry comrade, but fuuuuuuuucckkkkk ai.
I’ve seen many actual legit digital artists getting hit with the cries of AI slop and even banned, when they have been making art for years before AI was even a thing. People actually can’t tell the difference half the time when they think they can, and end up hurting real artists.
Not just artists. There seems to grow a kind of AI paranoia that suspects AI everywhere. Benign posts that are a little longer than usual or use a uncommon word: AI SLOP!!!1!!!1. Maybe the poster is just a non-native speaker or neurodivergent. I agree to most reasons to hate AI but calling it out everytime there is just the slightest hint is annoying at least
I got called a bot once because I used bullet points in a comment.
Kind of how like biological women are being called out for being trans when they’re in the women’s restroom because everyone’s so worked out about it.
It is very similar to that.
nah, fuck ai and anyone who uses it
If we cannot stop the infighting, the machines have already won.
Yup, an unpopular opinion.
I’d argue there’s absolutely no moral usage of it because it’s a tool of the oligarchs to devaule workers further and further. AI media slop is a real problem, if you allow any of it then where is the line at which you stop then?
Regardless of moral usage or not, chanting ‘AI slop’ at every opportunity provides minimal benefit and doesn’t encourage the user over to our side.
Some people may not know it’s AI Slop and pointing out and how to identify helps. For those who are wholly in support of we’ll never get them to agree. I don’t try to change people’s opinions who will not ever change them. Which is why I stopped arguing with most conservatives and all reactionaries.
how is it a tool of the oligarchs to devalue workers? It can be used by any worker for a tiny cost and the models themselves are a pretty competitive space with very little signs of any of the big companies having a moat.
AI media slop would be a problem if the content on these platforms wasnt already the worst shit possible.
The fact they see it as a replacement for certain workers for cost cutting it the entire reason. You don’t think they’ll validate that if AI can do X of your job you deserve less money? Nothing about AI is to help YOU, the worker, it’s to help THEM the business.
Ok so tool of the oligarch to devalue workers is meaningless since every piece of tech falls under that description.
Being purposely obtuse is unbecoming of you.
Why is it worse than other tools?
This is deep if you’re 14. The costs to access it are dirt cheap. If you think its useful there is nothing stopping you from using it to access wealth.
Wealth never has trouble accessing skill. If anything it undermines wealth by giving everyone access to skill.
That being said I consider AI to be access to skill in the same way a search engine is access to skill more of a tool than a worker replacement.
Unfortunately for us, the oligarchs definitely see it as a way to pay people less
Thats a different claim. Companies have always wanted to reduce labor costs. The question is whether AI actually gives them the ability to do that at scale. So far, there is no evidence of broad wage suppression or mass job loss caused by AI. Companies will always have access to skill. So I dont think you can say that a tool accessible to millions of ordinary people is exclusively empowering elites and removing access to wealth from people. If I believe AI was that powerful I would be forced to think the opposite, that it was giving ordinary people access to skill and wealth.
dont blame the anti-slop crowd for the problems created by the stupid jerks destroying our only livable planet for profit
it’s OUR fault that the dogshit that is getting plastered everywhere is causing a backlash?
unpopular for sure, despite its thoughtlessness, have an upvote
You’ve missed the point of the post.
sorry
Now is not the time to be attacking each other
Fair point. How are we going to pull ourselves together and rise up against the ones causing actual societal damage?
The anti AI slop crowd needs to shut the fuck up
Ah, yeah that’ll help. Call everyone sheep and make them sound stupid while you’re at it.
make them sound stupid while you’re at it.
Oh, the mob does that perfectly on its own. They are really quite good at it. Definitely better than accurately spotting AI things.
Good point. Being even more condescending will unite us and encourage cooperation!
