NOTE: I am NOT defending AI or it’s usage or anything like that. So just tie that horse right back up at the kitchen sink. I don’t like the whole AI thing. This post is not about AI.
I get that it was necessary at first, but now whenever there’s any hint of AI, there’s a great chorus of everyone saying the same thing ‘AI slop bla bla bla’ like a gaggle of sheep jerking their knees.
It’s not fucking helpful. It only sows even more division among the peasants, while the oligarchs take zero notice and continue on as usual. The correct way to engage with AI content you don’t like is just not at all.
Examples:
Recently I watched as a post for a community event was removed, because it had an AI image. The image was not requested or created by the organiser, it was provided to them, and had information in several languages. But the post was removed because AI slop and now there is less human connection happening. Yay. Well fucking done. You literally are helping the AI overlords now.
I’ve seen many actual legit digital artists getting hit with the cries of AI slop and even banned, when they have been making art for years before AI was even a thing. People actually can’t tell the difference half the time when they think they can, and end up hurting real artists.
Now is not the time to be attacking each other over using AI to generate some stupid meme. There are much, MUCH bigger issues at stake right now, and calling everything AI slop does nothing to help.
/rant
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Yup, an unpopular opinion.
I’d argue there’s absolutely no moral usage of it because it’s a tool of the oligarchs to devaule workers further and further. AI media slop is a real problem, if you allow any of it then where is the line at which you stop then?
how is it a tool of the oligarchs to devalue workers? It can be used by any worker for a tiny cost and the models themselves are a pretty competitive space with very little signs of any of the big companies having a moat.
AI media slop would be a problem if the content on these platforms wasnt already the worst shit possible.
The fact they see it as a replacement for certain workers for cost cutting it the entire reason. You don’t think they’ll validate that if AI can do X of your job you deserve less money? Nothing about AI is to help YOU, the worker, it’s to help THEM the business.
Ok so tool of the oligarch to devalue workers is meaningless since every piece of tech falls under that description.
Being purposely obtuse is unbecoming of you.
Why is it worse than other tools?
This is deep if you’re 14. The costs to access it are dirt cheap. If you think its useful there is nothing stopping you from using it to access wealth.
Wealth never has trouble accessing skill. If anything it undermines wealth by giving everyone access to skill.
That being said I consider AI to be access to skill in the same way a search engine is access to skill more of a tool than a worker replacement.
Unfortunately for us, the oligarchs definitely see it as a way to pay people less
Thats a different claim. Companies have always wanted to reduce labor costs. The question is whether AI actually gives them the ability to do that at scale. So far, there is no evidence of broad wage suppression or mass job loss caused by AI. Companies will always have access to skill. So I dont think you can say that a tool accessible to millions of ordinary people is exclusively empowering elites and removing access to wealth from people. If I believe AI was that powerful I would be forced to think the opposite, that it was giving ordinary people access to skill and wealth.
Regardless of moral usage or not, chanting ‘AI slop’ at every opportunity provides minimal benefit and doesn’t encourage the user over to our side.
Some people may not know it’s AI Slop and pointing out and how to identify helps. For those who are wholly in support of we’ll never get them to agree. I don’t try to change people’s opinions who will not ever change them. Which is why I stopped arguing with most conservatives and all reactionaries.
Well, I am stumped.
Do I downvote this because I disagree, thus telling OP that it isn’t an unpopular opinion, or do I upvote the post because it is an unpopular opinion?
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it’s something that’s widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
You upvote if you disagree, and upvote if you think it is an unpopular opinion. Downvote if you agree
Downvoted because I agree.
What if you agree, but think it is an unpopular opinion?
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it’s something that’s widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
You’re absolutely right. Whining about AI is not going to get people to stop using AI. I mean honestly if you really hate it, you should use it as much as humanly possible because of how insanely expensive it is. If everyone that whinged about AI slop spent an hour a day hitting the max limit on the free accounts of the main AI providers they’d be forced to reduce the usage of free accounts which would hinder the dumbasses using it instead of thinking.
That is actually a decent strategy.
It is actually not. It damages the environment, deprives people of drinking water, is addictive and makes people dumber as they begin to rely on it.
Seeing how quickly it makes people dumb makes me want to say it should be avoided at all costs.
PieFed users: if you don’t want to see any AI generated images, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings/filters and set the “AI-generated posts” setting accordingly. Also if you see a slop image without an ‘AI’ tag, report it.
No need to abuse the poster about it.
https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2304120/piefed-1-7-12-detects-ai-generated-images
Also if you see a slop image without an ‘AI’ tag, report it.
How does one know if it’s an AI image?
AI images include some special metadata in the file. It works sometimes!
Some AI providers add that metadata, yes. It’s what piefed searches for with its automatic filters. But metadata can be stripped, or not added at all in the first place.
My avatar image is AI-generated, for example. I did it using local AI models, edited it with image editing tools, converted formats, and so forth. I doubt it’s got anything the automated filters would recognize on it. If I didn’t tell you its pedigree would you know to report it? What if it actually isn’t AI generated after all, how can your report be tested for accuracy? That’s the sort of problem that OP is calling out here.
it doesnt need to catch 100% of cases
False positives are fine?
Some artist spends days working on some bit of art, posts it, gets the scarlet letters “AI” hung around their neck and now they not only have that particular post taken down they’re a “suspect” from then onward.
Yes it is fine. Posting is not a critical thing. If its falsely flagged they can submit a report to the mods to get it removed and everyone continues living.
Ah yes, mods are famously level-headed and will take the word of the person objecting to their actions. Same with the general commenter population of art communities.
When automated detection fails then it’s up to people to manually report it and mods / admins to manually apply the label.
I was talking about screening and reporting posts and you’ve moved to profile pics for some reason?
When automated detection fails then it’s up to people to manually report it and mods / admins to manually apply the label.
Which is not reliable, and which therefore leads to the witch-hunting problem.
Whether an image actually is AI and whether some random person thinks it “looks” AI are not always in alignment. Especially considering that “is AI” has shades of grey too, given that lots of images are made using AI tools for only some aspects. And even “AI tool” is open to interpretation.
I was talking about screening and reporting posts and you’ve moved to profile pics for some reason?
It was just an example of an AI-generated image that I could point to that I’m quite sure doesn’t have any special metadata attached to it. If for no other reason than I generated it years ago.
People are stressed out and taking it out on each other. People are desperate for any kind of solidarity. The result is this. The revulsion with ai will die down as soon as it stops destroying lives on this scale.
as soon as it stops destroying lives on this scale.
Somehow I don’t think that is going to be very soon. And I doubt the scale is going to trend downwards either.
People are stressed out and taking it out on each other.
Exactly, this is what needs to stop
I’ve seen many actual legit digital artists getting hit with the cries of AI slop and even banned, when they have been making art for years before AI was even a thing. People actually can’t tell the difference half the time when they think they can, and end up hurting real artists.
Not just artists. There seems to grow a kind of AI paranoia that suspects AI everywhere. Benign posts that are a little longer than usual or use a uncommon word: AI SLOP!!!1!!!1. Maybe the poster is just a non-native speaker or neurodivergent. I agree to most reasons to hate AI but calling it out everytime there is just the slightest hint is annoying at least
I got called a bot once because I used bullet points in a comment.
Kind of how like biological women are being called out for being trans when they’re in the women’s restroom because everyone’s so worked out about it.
It is very similar to that.
AI slop has stopped being commentary on slop being bad and is now just the popular clique people want to be seen as being involved. It happens to a lot of things, unfortunately it usually eventually gets recognized in the same way you have here in a wider audience and starts to make the people with legitimate points look bad by association.
Yep I’m just playing my part trying to get us past the point where the slop is mistaken for the actual problem
While I agree in spirit, I think when it’s been shoved down our throats as aggressively as it has been for the past few years while nobody asked for it, a similarly radical reaction in the opposite direction is only natural. Fuck AI.
Yes, but the reaction shouldn’t be to antagonise other people
Now is not the time to be attacking each other
Fair point. How are we going to pull ourselves together and rise up against the ones causing actual societal damage?
The anti AI slop crowd needs to shut the fuck up
Ah, yeah that’ll help. Call everyone sheep and make them sound stupid while you’re at it.
make them sound stupid while you’re at it.
Oh, the mob does that perfectly on its own. They are really quite good at it. Definitely better than accurately spotting AI things.
Good point. Being even more condescending will unite us and encourage cooperation!
Not calling it out is akin to not calling out anything else unethical.
See a parent hitting their child? Shut up and move along.
AI data center being built in your neighbourhood? SHUT UP, JUST DONT USE IT.
Someone littering on your street? Stop whinging, just ignore it and it will eventually blow in to the ocean - all good!
If no one speaks up, then it just gets worse. Protest is fundamental to pushing back against the horse shit that corpos try and push down our throats every day. Someone less informed may take the lack of negative comments towards AI slop as it being OK and normal when it clearly isnt, therefore adding to the problem.
Hard disagree with your opinion and I think it comes across as corpo cuckery so you get an upvote I guess.
Well you could instead say something like, “You shouldn’t use AI for images, it massively harms the environment and has a huge societal cost that we will all pay.”
Engage with the person, not the content. That’s far more effective.
You could, but your original take was to not engage at all.
And I dont know if youve tried to engage with an AI user before but the whole point is that they dont want to learn to do the thing they got AI to do, trying to educate them about anything is likely to result in glazed over eyes and deaf ears.
If youre very lucky, they might ask AI about its environmental impact, to which it will probably lie and justify its existence, thereby burning a lump of coal in the process and we come full circle to what we are trying to avoid.
To be fair, I wouldn’t want people to stay silent about it, either.
I mean the event post is kind of a relatable example. But there is a good way to deal with it. Removing the human-written(?) text because of an attached image seems to be too much to me. We could ,though, just send some backlash. Have it stay there but the first post is always some “Slop image” comment with a healthy dose of upvotes.
I’ve been in similar situations before. You’d have an event that targets artists amongst other people. And for some reason the organizers think it needs to go with some slop image… But wtf? Don’t they know lots of artists don’t agree with the way those generative AI models are made? Why affront their target audience? What we did, wasn’t boycott them. But we sure demanded an explanation. Which was: It was quicker to cook up something with AI, than talk to the humans who’ve drawn the promotion pictures in the time before.
And for some reason the organizers think it needs to go with some slop image…
Yeah that is so stupid, I would believe that it probably happened at some point.
I don’t think it’s a big problem for normal consumers to use LLMs to generate content, no artists are losing their jobs because of that and most people have other vices that are more problematic to the environment etc.
The main issue I see with it is the normalisation of AI which could affect adaptation elsewhere but I think these greedy corporate fucks will go 100% no matter what.
Consumer choice, based on morals or ethics, has very rarely been a major motivator to production (I think, honestly I have no idea).
Anecdote:
I have heard drawing/painting artists discuss losing customers because people generate a slop replacement and call it good instead of paying for commissions.
“Why would I pay $15 for your version when I can just make one myself?”
I was more thinking of scenarios where you wouldn’t hire an artist anyway. But undoubtedly there’s a gray zone there and risk that it’s moving.
What I was trying to say is that if I would’ve just handslopped together an invitation card to my party before, it’s not that big a crime to let an LLM do it now. Even though I would be much happier to see a sloppy handmade card than genslop.
This is a fair take. I think AI slop is AI slop even if it has cinnamon in it. But I completely agree that a handmade card is always better.
Posting ai in the first place is retarded
The last one I saw made me cringe so hard I needed reconstructive surgery.
It was of a woman on a bed reading the bible to her kids while shielding them from the trans rainbow.
Yeah, I know, it hurts, I hope you have cheap medical care.
dont blame the anti-slop crowd for the problems created by the stupid jerks destroying our only livable planet for profit
it’s OUR fault that the dogshit that is getting plastered everywhere is causing a backlash?
unpopular for sure, despite its thoughtlessness, have an upvote
You’ve missed the point of the post.
sorry
Upvoted for very unpopular opinion.
Yes, let’s just ignore all the bad things happening around us. Great idea.
Not ignore, find better ways to deal with it.
Well you could instead say something like, “You shouldn’t use AI for images, it massively harms the environment and has a huge societal cost that we will all pay.”
Engage with the person, not the content. That’s far more effective.
Those examples you mentioned of unfair and undesired outcomes after witch-hunting AI slop are legitimately unfortunate. Very clear cases where we should pick our battles and not be overly confident in our identification of slop. I agree fully on that.
But if people are posting slop that they explicitly or implicitly pose as their own work, just for our simple viewing, then most people are going to take a stand. We don’t want that stuff. 👍🫶
To summarize, I grant that I don’t fully disagree with your original post.
Take care!
