Slop, slop, slop, each day its more of a effort to not step in the GenAI slop. Can Gump wisdom be any help?
The gaffe by the Chicago Sun Times is an easy target, for publishing insert of summer features a list of books to read… that mostly do not exist. It’s almost too easy to jump on the social media pile on.
I listened today to the 404 Media podcast recap in the episode titles AI Slop Summer.
The 404ers did track down the person who “wrote” the feature (good luck on the career, eh?) who pretty much swept it away as “a mistake”. The newspaper slid the blame to a large Hearst org that creates this insert content (and syndicated it to other newspapers). The blame goes all around.
The real slop here is on the human side.
Yet still, it’s not quite that simple a brush. This is all the outcome of the erasure of print media “news” as it is not always read/reviewed, there is the rush to print, and the slashing of jobs here puts insane pressure on lowyl paid grunts who have to somehow spin stuff out under crazy pressure.
It’s cracked all the way down.
And yet, it’s not much of a stretch to extend a similar set of pressures and decay systemically on higher education. The AI slop summer reading list might not be all that far from the bro driven dreams of a GenAI generated degree program.
What can one do? I took the image of list of books shared in an X post that called it out, grabbed the text in the OSX Preview app (my fave tool to get text from images). I found 5 were real, but took the rest as a list and spun out a DS106 Daily Create (hitting the streets June 2) asking to generate a book cover for a fake book.
Heck, the best use for GenAI is for totally fabricating stuff. Y’all get in a bind trying to do real stuff with it, go for fake, all mirage, Nate, and you are golden.
I have to say the GenAI image stuff does get better, the look is still the tired look of a sad robot, but it can be surprising.
I look forward to GenAI fake reviews of GenAI fake books that maybe end of on fake TV talk shows.
But really, all this stuff being sold as freeing time and doing mundane tasks so we can do more lofty things, it’s a con and a smokescreen for gutting society.
And the wiping away of getting caught slinging slop just as “a mistake” is hard to swallow.
I’ll be in a hammock, reading “Migrations” by Maggie O’Farrell, “he story of a wildlife photographer documenting the last migration of a bird species thought to be extinct, parallel to her journey of loss and discovery.”
Featured Image: Dreaming of Slop flickr photo by DoubleGrande shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
