Is also a term recently coined for the tidal wave of generative AI created trash content that is fucking everywhere in current year. It is so called because like the stuff that is fed to pigs, it is a meaningless, artless, pointless, random melange of any old nonsense that is thrown together, blended, and served.

You know it when you see it. Slop articles always look the same. They start "Thing is (potted history that's usually wrong). This is widely considered (or other passive voice weasel words) to be so because: (list with bolded, bulleted phrase titles)." Slop images tend to have an excessively polished digital look to them, usually centre on a single item which is expanded out of proportion and with an unrealistic number of background objects. Text will be munged in a distinctive way, with repeated letters and half cut off letters and glyphs that look like katakana crossbred with Cyrillic. The image will always be square. AI can do fingers now, but hair, especially women's hair, often loops back on itself. Clothing tends to have too many belts. You get the idea. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Slop music (yes, it exists, step forward Suno) gravitates towards pop punk even when you tell it not to. Though to be fair, slop music can be actually fairly good. Here's an AI generated pop punk love song dedicated to murderous nurse Lucy Letby and I'll be lying if I said I hadn't been caught humming or singing it absently in places. "Lucy Letby, won't you let me in?" Immature and 3edgy5me? Yes, yes it is. But my friend who thought that was a good idea was a bald Brummie, what do you expect from such a specimen.

The fact that at times, slop can be good enough to pass muster and find its way into actual commercial use, though, is arguably the most pernicious aspect of it. If someone presented me that Lucy Letby song linked above, I would think it was a real person who did it. I've also seen a monster truck event advertised near here with an obviously slop poster with some text slapped on it. Because generative AI is trained by scooping up other content and basically sorting them into piles of "relevant" and "not relevant" and then averaging the "relevant" pile to create the item the prompter is seeking, and then tossing it if it might offend the creator's moral compunctions (Bing Image Creator, now Copilot, is terrible for this; anything and everything ends up giving you the flattened dog and the po-faced "unsafe image detected" excuse), slop that finds its way into the greater online content corpus means it's recycled into the generative AI models and the result is that the next iteration of slop becomes... even more sloppy slop. Eventually no doubt we will run into slopception and eventually we will end up with literally everything having the unmistakeable confidently incorrect house style of generative AI.

Yay.

This is to me of serious concern though. I keep getting spam emails in my work inbox about the latest AI trends that I "must" use to avoid "falling behind." For those of you who don't know, I'm a lawyer. I experimented with generative AI for creating documents. It was, shall I say, confidently wrong. It often conflated different legal regimes and even jurisdictions; a lot of the time it was confidently incorrect and referred to very American legal principles as if jury selection is a thing here, or as if our own Supreme Court can rewrite primary legislation. That's when it doesn't just make things up out of whole cloth. But I can see people relying on AI slop to produce things other than memes and shitposts though. In fact I've seen it already; it is amongst other things my lot in life to bail out one person who used AI to create a sublease of commercial premises. That is going to potentially find its way into public record somewhere, that document will, and will be scraped by ChatGPT or whatever and taken into consideration when some other person tries to use generative AI to do a human's job. Result: slopception, and it's people like me who have to clean up the mess.

(This isn't to say that AI is bad in and of itself; I think AI can automate away a lot of the scutwork in my job like trawling through disclosure or picking out relevant details from a pile of crap that a client's sent me, but it must be verified by a real person. I know for a fact that at least one firm near where I work has told all its staff that using generative AI in their job is gross misconduct.)

As for me, well, I'm going to call out slop whenever I see it. Including here. I mean, cut and paste writeups will die, yes? What is slop but cut and paste writeups but with the words changed around to look real.