I disagree with this. I mean, I read it and felt mildly insulted, so higher than baseline chance I’m rationalizing, but
I’m somewhat suspicious of the “slop” label in general. I don’t have a crisp description of the general underlying cognitive phenomena, but calling stuff slop seems to me to come from the same place as people calling industrially produced furniture or clothing bad, or people calling stuff made in china bad.
Part of the phenomena is probably that
1) you have an expensive and arduous way to make a thing
2) → you find a less expensive/arduous way to make it
3) → people don’t want to admit that the expense was unnecessary.
Ie, I buy an expensive clock. Then someone coming along with a identical clock, saying they found some way to get it for way cheaper. I can very clearly imagine myself feeling bad, and a part of my mind coming online that grasps for reasons why I didn’t actually make a suboptimal choice
There are/were some not entirely senseless criticisms of industrially produced goods, and stuff made in china. But like, AIs write code that works. I think people are stopping calling AI code slop, or will stop soon. Writing is harder to objectively evaluate the quality of than code, which makes it hard to make AIs good at writing, but also makes it easier for people to rationalize why AI writing is bad.
I don’t think the complexity thing actually makes sense. Ie saying “But the actual range of flavors is a lot less rich or varied than a real hamburger”. Is this true? I’ve eaten meat burgers before, and the meat they’re made of has been ground up, so the taste variation within a single burger is pretty narrow. I feel most of the variation in taste comes from different bites having different ratios of different parts of the whole burger. Ie if bite two has some mustard on it or some fresh onion, which bite one didn’t, that dominates the variation of taste within the two bites of the meat part of the burger.
If you’re just talking about the complexity of the taste of the burgers themselves, then I don’t think that makes sense. Like, how would you objectively measure the complexity of the taste? Like the ingredients list of an impossible burger is longer than the ingredients list of a hamburger. Maybe meat itself is very high complexity, it contains very many different molecules. But the impossible burger contains stuff like yeast extract which I think contains a bunch of different molecules too
If you’re talking about variation between burgers, that’s fair if you’re talking about just the impossible burget. But between different vegan burgers, and different meat burgers, I’d say there’s more taste and textual variety between the vegan ones. Eg, a lentil burger, a mushroom burger and an impossible burger have more taste variation between them than three meat burgers.
I disagree with this. I mean, I read it and felt mildly insulted, so higher than baseline chance I’m rationalizing, but
I’m somewhat suspicious of the “slop” label in general. I don’t have a crisp description of the general underlying cognitive phenomena, but calling stuff slop seems to me to come from the same place as people calling industrially produced furniture or clothing bad, or people calling stuff made in china bad.
Part of the phenomena is probably that
1) you have an expensive and arduous way to make a thing
2) → you find a less expensive/arduous way to make it
3) → people don’t want to admit that the expense was unnecessary.
Ie, I buy an expensive clock. Then someone coming along with a identical clock, saying they found some way to get it for way cheaper. I can very clearly imagine myself feeling bad, and a part of my mind coming online that grasps for reasons why I didn’t actually make a suboptimal choice
There are/were some not entirely senseless criticisms of industrially produced goods, and stuff made in china. But like, AIs write code that works. I think people are stopping calling AI code slop, or will stop soon. Writing is harder to objectively evaluate the quality of than code, which makes it hard to make AIs good at writing, but also makes it easier for people to rationalize why AI writing is bad.
I don’t think the complexity thing actually makes sense. Ie saying “But the actual range of flavors is a lot less rich or varied than a real hamburger”. Is this true? I’ve eaten meat burgers before, and the meat they’re made of has been ground up, so the taste variation within a single burger is pretty narrow. I feel most of the variation in taste comes from different bites having different ratios of different parts of the whole burger. Ie if bite two has some mustard on it or some fresh onion, which bite one didn’t, that dominates the variation of taste within the two bites of the meat part of the burger.
If you’re just talking about the complexity of the taste of the burgers themselves, then I don’t think that makes sense. Like, how would you objectively measure the complexity of the taste? Like the ingredients list of an impossible burger is longer than the ingredients list of a hamburger. Maybe meat itself is very high complexity, it contains very many different molecules. But the impossible burger contains stuff like yeast extract which I think contains a bunch of different molecules too
If you’re talking about variation between burgers, that’s fair if you’re talking about just the impossible burget. But between different vegan burgers, and different meat burgers, I’d say there’s more taste and textual variety between the vegan ones. Eg, a lentil burger, a mushroom burger and an impossible burger have more taste variation between them than three meat burgers.