this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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Is nobody exasperatedly tired of comments calling anything remotely related to AI 'slop??'
Yes.
Lemmy is just by default super AI-hating. I wonder what they felt when Linus Torvalds said that LLM are actually useful tools.
We felt like he's right about it being useful tools but the ethical aspects are hard to ignore. Yes, many ethical aspects.
You're likely conflating the tools with the implementation or the implementers. An open source model on local hardware has next to zero ethical concerns.
There are MANY ethical concerns about the actions of the big players in AI, their data centers, and to some extent, the original, bootstrapped training data sourcing.
Well, yes and no. Even open source models had to consume a lot of power for the training, including the use of non-owned data
Note a key point of contention is how the training data is used and whether it is effectively discarding copyright. If you invested time making an open source project to do something people appreciate and you get attribution as a result, you may be unhappy that a model trained on your stuff can let a user prompt up an embedded implementation of what your project does without any attribution.
This pretty much applies to all models. No one limited training data to explicitly public domain stuff.
I don't think so, no?
I don’t really care what Linus Torvalds has to say, unless it’s about the Linux kernel, and I don’t think his opinions matter outside of that. Being a great programmer doesn’t mean he’s also an intelligent, socially aware person.
He did an interview with Linus Tech Tips a few months ago, and when asked about artists being “upset about the large scale theft of work” coming from AI, he said “that’s reality, deal with it” and even went on to talk about photographers that are out of work because “you can fake pictures so much better now” while, within the same breath, saying programmers wouldn’t lose their jobs because he wants to have his cake and eat it too. (Obviously I’m paraphrasing a bit)
I do agree AI can be a useful tool, and it’s a position I’ve held since OpenAI was first starting to become recognizable. But anything that’s generated by AI is slop, and I’ll continue to call it such even if nobody else will.
The movie “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” used AI tools to place random blemishes and marks (that the artists created) on characters faces across multiple frames. I don’t really feel like finding a source for this one, but I’m sure you could fairly easily if you’re that curious. I think that’s an actual use for AI. Streamlining and speeding up the creation process to give creative people more time to do actual creative work. I don’t think asking an LLM to generate or “create” something for you is anything but slop.
Slop isn’t about quality, it’s about the morality. The, again, large scale theft of work required to get to the point of being able to generate something of a passible quality level, plus the destruction of the environment in the process. I think it’s pointless to reject AI tools entirely due to how prominent and widespread they are, but “creating” something with AI will always be slop.
Source for the LTT interview: https://youtu.be/mfv0V1SxbNA
About 33:10
I think broadly most people are less bothered by what the GenAI can do, but more bothered by what experiences are inflicted upon them by other people using the tech.
All well and good if it can so code reviews and code gen at your behest and you can evaluate and get as much as you think you can out of it, but other people are enabled to be amazingly more obnoxious about it.
"Slop" is mostly because people were inclined to do the slop level quality, but were self limited by the reality their poor ideas were roughly as hard to do as much better ideas. Now AI accelerates people that are not concerned with quality or specifics way more than it can accelerate people that care about specifics and quality.
I'm conflicted about it too. But there is a useful software development tool in there. Its a beige mind good at regurgitating cookie-cutter work. Its pretty good at scaffold and cookie cutter unit tests.
I hate how it makes my colleages behave, but I can totally see the legitimate $500M/yr industry worth of software in there, under all the BS.
There's a Jetbrains or Atlassian size companies worth of product here.
Many people are incapable of nuance.
I think it has some use cases, but it’s like religion: Don’t cram it down my throat, keep it to yourself, and I don’t mind it if it’s on my terms.
Totally get what you mean and I can fully respect that stance. In recent times, it was more like a “let’s bash all the people who think slightly positive about AI”, so kind of the same indoctrination, just the other way around.
It has nothing to do with the subject of the article. Are you blind? It’s the exact same bland, AI regurgitated writing style as every other AI written article.