I’ve come back to this because I was thinking about slop.
The story goes: back in the pre-internet era, art was good. Then, with algorithms deciding which stuff to promote, it got worse (in some sense) and with AI it’s got even worse. The word used for the new, implicitly bad media is often slop.
Slop content has a bunch of different definitions, but the particular trend from the pre-internet to the algorithm-internet to the AI-internet is one of exchanging control for selection.
In, say, the 90s, a huge amount of control effort went into, say, films and TV shows. Only a small number made it to the TV/cinema, and the selection pressure after that operated on the level of ~hours of content, with a feedback loop of ~months to ~years in terms of what stuff gets made.
With YouTube, a thousand different videos get instantiated. The algorithm can select between the actual finished products using a direct feedback loop from users.
This does seem to produce qualitatively different media.
I’ve come back to this because I was thinking about slop.
The story goes: back in the pre-internet era, art was good. Then, with algorithms deciding which stuff to promote, it got worse (in some sense) and with AI it’s got even worse. The word used for the new, implicitly bad media is often slop.
Slop content has a bunch of different definitions, but the particular trend from the pre-internet to the algorithm-internet to the AI-internet is one of exchanging control for selection.
In, say, the 90s, a huge amount of control effort went into, say, films and TV shows. Only a small number made it to the TV/cinema, and the selection pressure after that operated on the level of ~hours of content, with a feedback loop of ~months to ~years in terms of what stuff gets made.
With YouTube, a thousand different videos get instantiated. The algorithm can select between the actual finished products using a direct feedback loop from users.
This does seem to produce qualitatively different media.