The Opposite of Slop Is...

The opposite of slop is care. View Tweet

“Mode collapse” refers to LLMs models losing their creativity after being post-trained (RLHF, SFT etc.). Slop is what happens when mode collapse happens to society and culture at large. View Tweet

‘Lemon gochujang creamy miso pasta’ is slop food, spiritual-pseudo-western-self-help-buddhism is slop religion, most modern new builds are slop architecture, Netflix is slop TV, GPT poetry is slop poetry, AI art is slop art, etc View Tweet

You could read all of Christopher Alexander’s work as saying modern architecture is slop, the opposite of slop is care, to create anything worthwhile you basically have to put God into it View Tweet

Burning Man is an attempt to create a slop-free zone and the inefficiencies (no money, handmade everything, etc.) are deliberate anti-slop mechanisms. It’s popular with tech people because tech people spend their lives surrounded by slop and have to escape it every now and then View Tweet

James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like A State” is about government as slop. Just take in metrics and output policies without caring about local circumstances, traditions, etc. Left is not slop, right is ~slop (still pretty mind you, because the individual trees are not slop) View Tweet

The movie Koyaanisqatsi (1982) is a poetic documentary about what happens when literally everything becomes slop. e.g. 1:45 here is just slop (sausage) production: https://t.co/nrGXhCZxlh View Tweet

Slop wins when you let go of taste entirely, because it’s more efficient to produce. Median person prefers AI-generated poetry to TS Eliot or Walt Whitman already. View Tweet

In his essay “Towards Benchmarking LLM Diversity & Creativity”, gwern speculates that slop could create a terrible feedback loop: more slop → people start preferring slop → even more slop → people forgot what really good stuff looks like. https://t.co/4YeWkYfuzk View Tweet

Shein, H&M, Zara, etc. are the clothing versions of slop. View Tweet

This is why celebrating the peaks & enshrining human values (cultural criticism) becomes more important as the world becomes more sloppified. Harold Bloom did this for literature in his day, tylercowen does it on his blog, menswear guy does it for clothes, we need more of those View Tweet

I don’t feel particularly doomy about this, btw, I think the overall direction is up and quality wins in the end, at least as long as people remain good at discerning it. But who knows. View Tweet

Btw, “AI generated” and “slop” don’t have to be the same thing. Left is GPT-2 (2019) and right is GPT-4 (2024). Right is slop, left is… not? View Tweet

The Borges story “Library of Babel” is about taking sloppification to the absolute limit. Literally every single sequence of characters that can be generated, is. The whole world becomes that. It tries to figure out what happens to religion and meaning in the resulting world. View Tweet