YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.
YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.
No, I think the effort is key here, because the original pitch for calling AI output “slop” was, “if they don’t care enough to make it, why would I care enough to read/look at/watch/listen to it?”
If it’s anything churned out cynically, with only the desire to make money off of broad appeal, then we have to put Sherlock Holmes stories into that camp; certainly from “Hound of the Baskervilles” onward, if not all of it. Doyle cared about the work, and he put in plenty of time and effort to making it, and the readers definitely cared, but at the end of the day he was done with the character and just wanted to give the fans what they wanted so he could make a paycheck. We also have to put basically every movie in that camp, and pretty much every book written before the publishing industry took a nosedive in the late 90s. We have to put a ton of music into that category. Basically, anything other than indie street art.
As for ads never being art: I see what you’re saying, but the “art-nouveau” style and movement began as advertising for theater performances in the 1890s. Similarly and more recently, there’s a seminal and well-beloved Chobani ad from 2021 called “Dear Alice” that has defined and codified a lot of the “solarpunk” aesthetic. Somebody went through and erased all of the brand logos and set it to different music, and it’s legitimately a beautiful little video about a touching parent/child relationship in a solarpunk future, but it was originally made as an ad.
Humans, especially artists, work for ad agencies; and sometimes they make art as a part of their paid work. It’s not common by any means, but the fact that they were paid for it doesn’t make it slop.
I think we need to partially disentangle “bad art” from “slop.”
Slop is bad, but it doesn’t just mean “bad.” All slop is bad art, but we humans can try really hard and make bad or objectionable art with our own two hands just fine. “Birth of a Nation” is absolutely objectionable and deplorable, but it’s not slop because D. W. Griffith truly believed in what he was making. “The Room” is objectively not a good movie, but Tommy Wiseau really cared about it. That doesn’t mean many people are ever going to want to watch it unironically. “Friday” by Rebecca Black is really bad music, but it’s not slop.
(Incidentally, in the same way, “slop” also doesn’t mean soulless, anodyne, corporate, or misguided. Again, all slop is those things, but humans can do that on our own, too; even if we try real hard!)
Not all bad art is slop; that doesn’t make it good art, it just makes it bad art by humans who tried hard (or at least tried a little bit) and did a bad job, or humans who were terrible people and that oozed out into their work.
Isn’t that already covered without the additional metric of “effort”?
It’s not just that, but I do think that is a large part. The corporate and soulless part you called out.
I think the “just wanted to give the fans what they wanted” and Doyle’s ability to actually do just that saves it from the “little to no value” bit, which makes it pandering but not slop. The same can be said for a lot of movies, music, etc. Meanwhile a lot of street art is sloppy as hell from needing to rush due to illegality but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad either.
I think both that and the “Dear Alice” video are examples of reclaimed slop. Someone saw the “little” value in the ad and opted to amplify it. I would classify those and similar examples as memes distilled from slop.
“Misguided” doesn’t feel like it’s a necessary part of “slop” but I otherwise agree.
Going the other way with examples, I think we can both agree that Fruit Love Island is absolutely slop, despite many viewers caring a lot about it’s existence. But why exactly? And is it more or less “slop” than the original Love Island? Honestly I’m having a hard time justifying why Fruit Love Island isn’t an example of a ‘meme distilled from slop’ when I really want to call it ‘slop distilled from slop’.
I don’t think so. The effort is an important part of it.
That’s a good distinction, and I think one we should hang on to.
I think we may have hit upon another definitional difference here. “Slop” isn’t linguistically descended from “sloppy,” but rather both are descended from an older form of “slop,” referring to the gooey scrap that is fed to pigs. It is something which exists in great quantities but low quality, and which the farmer quickly and carelessly tips into a trough for the pigs to eat, caring little for it beyond that it exists.
“Sloppy” derived from that word, carrying with it the quick and unappealing connotations, while the modern definition of “slop” brought with it the carelessness, quantity, and force-feeding connotations.
I don’t think so. I think it was artists doing a job they could get paid for, but making good art within those constraints.
On reflection, that’s totally fair. I move to have that stricken from the record.
Huh. Well, today I learned about something against my will.
Anyway, yeah, definitely slop. I think it’s because the creator didn’t care about it, and expended almost no effort toward creating it. You can tell they didn’t care because they gave it all up. This is getting me less certain about the desire of the audience being important to something’s slop status; that’s probably way more subjective than this term needs.
That is an interesting question. Having never watched either, I don’t know that I’m qualified to respond. I will say that the people who work on reality TV are pretty hard-working, though; so I’m inclined to think it’s not slop. Bad art? Yes. But not slop.