Comment by supern0va
5 days ago
>"AI slop" caught on but "clanker" did not.
It caught on, sure, but not exactly in the way I expected. The wild popularity of "slop" as a term for AI eventually gave way to the genericization of the word "slop" to mean "content of low quality, regardless of source", and is seemingly being used as just a derogatory term for anything that people dislike (particularly by folks in left leaning communities). For example, I've seen people refer to (clearly human written) commentary from some political commentators as "slop".
You comment kind of reinforces the idea by the fact that you have to now say "AI slop" specifically to disambiguate it. It's kind of a fascinating little turn.
But "slop" has meant low-quality stuff for a very long time. See also "swill", both analogies to pig feed.
The earliest OED2 citation of "slop" for the sense "figurative. Nonsense, rubbish; insolence" is 1952. Slop was slop long before "AI slop" was coined, and AI slop is slop from an AI.
"Slop" originated on /pol/ but I'm not gong to try to tread the needle by of the rules by trying to explain it without being offensive or triggering some filter: The first related term here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/AI_slop#English
You have this backwards, as Simon could tell you. In fact, Simon coined “AI slop” to mean “low quality AI output.”
I didn't coin it myself, but I did help amplify it at the moment it started to take off.