You have to know that isn't what anyone means by "Slop".

Slop is *low effort* by definition, and whatever you think of the long list of technologies you mentioned none of them were remotely low effort, never mind "Tell the AI to do it for you" levels of lazy and thoughtless.

What makes AI music slop in a way that crappy pop isn't comes down to human involvement and expression. Do you know why there are fans of B-Movies and terrible movies? Because they're still an insight into the minds of the people who made them. If AI's wrote great code, if they made work so much more efficient (for everyone, not just the person generating crap for others to deal with) then it would at least be a useful utility, but that's not how it works or can work: hallucination is inevitable and impossible to fully stop, so all outputs must be carefully checked.

It wastes energy, it wastes money, and then wastes your time or someone else's when your substandard efforts require human intervention.

▲

legitster 8 hours ago | parent [-]

????

The whole point of tractors, trains, and casting iron was to remove effort. Asking an AI to do your bookkeeping for you is not any more lazy than driving a car or sending a voice text.

I think generative LLMs and their usefulness is a different topic. But if we're talking about "slopware" we're talking about software applications designed to handle menial tasks.

▲

EA-3167 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Asking a machine to think for you is absolutely different than asking it to expend physical effort for you. If you can't see the difference than frankly this is kind of pointless.

▲

legitster 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Having a calculator add numbers for you is having a machine think for you. Your computer is doing an awful lot of creative problem solving on your behalf to serve this page to you.

It sounds like you don't see a difference between thinking and creativity?

	▲	jaggs 25 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You're arguing with a bot probably. :) And I think you're right. The word 'slop' has become a lazy way to indicate that one is anti AI. Fair enough, eh? I have a growing stable of self made 'slop'. products on my phone and computer which I use happily and productively every day to save time and provide assistance.
	▲	EA-3167 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Calculators don't think for you any more than a slide-rule or a pen and paper does. It takes values and operations that you instruct and then all it does is the part that's entirely deterministic and repetitive. My computer is an extension of the same thing, and most of those extensions don't reflect a replacement of anyone's thinking. No one was previously able to send electronic signals and reconstruct them into web pages for example, that's a new and unique capability that augments our own. "Write my blog post or my code for me" is an entirely different prospect which yes includes, but isn't limited to creativity.