iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Reproducing this excellent comment by @frank.computer here because I don't want to give more oxygen to the blockheaded post it's responding to

Frank Elavsky
Incoming Assistant Professor of Data Science, Cal Poly SLO. I work on interactive visualization + accessibility, systems and tools.

I don't call it "slop" because of arbitrary "taste." It is slop because I am a consequentialist and I observe what it does. It produces a firehose of impossible-to-follow information (worsens my experience of finding things) and because it contributes to environmental/ethical problems (makes the environment worse, IP theft, and so on). The slop is slop because it has material impact on the world, not because I think it is bad looking or low quality. I actually *love* some low resolution, janky stuff. Hito Steyerl's "In Defense of the Poor Image" is a cornerstone piece for me, in that regard. But I despise the impacts that massively-produced media has on the world. And this is also why I don't find modern LLM/genAI slop to be particularly novel kind of slop. We already had this problem! Social media had this issue in the past decade and decades before that the problem was (and still is) mass-produced plastics. It's just even worse in magnitude now. We produce immense amounts of waste and damage for our lived environment and the costs are significant. Arguments about industry or market forces are also funny because we are just getting better at hiding the damage/risks/costs or offloading them elsewhere.

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Summer 🏳️‍⚧️ @artgirlsummer.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

It’s not just slop, it’s dishonest slop.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

This is really the entire problem in a nutshell. It's doesn't make anything new; it's a machine for scaling up what already exists, and (due to forces that predate AI and will live on after it) what exists is crap. AI will go away soon, but slop is here to stay.

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Data Rocks @t.datarocks.co.nz · 16/07/2026

I saw the original post and it was such a bizarre take it took me a few reads to try to wrap my head around it. But it seems the point was something like, unless a thing is hugely popular and has market value, it is not worth pursuing and if you argue against slop you are a snob. 🤷‍♀️

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Cook Ting @cookting.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Really knocks it out of the park at the end, imho, with the comparison to mass plastics an externalities. We can't outrun our problems.

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✨Esca_F (they/them) @subtlesinner.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

oh, hey, Frank is actually a friend of mine, and a really great guy!

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