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AI makes creating digital content very cheap, so lots of low-quality work, called “slop,” appears everywhere. Though slop can be annoying, cheaper creation allows more creativity, diversity, and new voices to emerge. To handle slop, we need better tools to find good content and be careful about what we choose to watch or read. [!note]
Interesante el punto, pero no considera que la gran mayoría de la gente queda expuesta y establece una relación con la chatarra del slop, generando consecuencias negativas en el desarrollo personal de las masas.
Highlights
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Slop exemplifies everything wrong with the modern era; it signifies the gap—some would say the chasm—between what technology enables and what promotes human well-being.
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Whenever the cost of creation in a medium falls, the volume of production greatly expands, but the average quality necessarily falls, because many of the new creations are low-quality. They are low-quality because they can be—because the cost of creation no longer prohibits them. And they are low-quality because when people aren’t spending much time or money to create something, they don’t feel the need to invest a lot in it. When you can quickly dash off a tweet, you don’t need to edit it or fact-check it, or even have correct spelling or grammar; when you can quickly create an AI illustration, you don’t need to hold it to high standards of composition, color, or even the right number of fingers. Hence slop.
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Lowering the bar for creation allows for more experiments, more chances to create something high-quality.
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Lowering the cost of production allows these experiments to be incubated for years, kept alive by love and sweat, until they evolve into a more valuable form or catch their break.
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Slop is at best annoying and frustrating, and at worst a tool for scams or propaganda. But the overall process will, I believe, usher in a golden age of creativity and experimentation.
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The explosion of content raises the bar for everyone to be more conscious in your media consumption. The more stuff is out there, the more of it will be like junk food: enticing, tasty, but not nutritious and ultimately unfulfilling. We all need to be mindful in how we direct and spend our precious, limited attention in a world of increasingly unlimited choice. This is a call to action for every individual, and by extension to parents, teachers, psychologists, and moralists.