We need a definition for when something is AI slop or not because people just throwing the word around when something is AI generated while there still is often much work behind it. And with much work, i do not mean just entering thousand prompts to get something right. That's actually AI abuse imho.

So, proposals, when is something AI slop? What is the definition?

I think when the """author""" doesn't even know what the code does and the README contains shit like "production ready", "extremely efficient", "fully featured" then it's definitely slop

Also a bunch of emoji spam

I find myself watching YouTube videos to the end hoping something interesting will happen but it never does

I find myself scrolling twitter endlessly because I think it will give me something interesting but it never does

similarly, I listen to AI music thinking something interesting will come up but it never does. I converse with AI over topics it has read numerous high quality books on and think it will say something interesting about the topic but it never does

whereas human music has twists and turns. it goes deep. whereas human books surprise you, thrill you

hell talking to a real person they have texture but YouTube and Twitter it's like someone went over everyone with a smoothing tool

it's like it's stuck in just one mode. be predictable, stereotypable. easy to consume. it's like being stuck in a white hospital room. you just want to pull your hair out to have something different. the output is "perfect" for the input, and there's nothing else to it

in terms of code I'm one of those weird people that always thought computer science was an art. I said it in class back in my first semester of school and a teacher was pleasantly surprised at it. but since then I don't think I encountered someone having this perspective

the thing with it being art is nobody knows it's art or views it as art. maybe they did when it was more of a budding discipline

if you write magnificent code nobody sees it and nobody values it. even if a dev inherits your code and is amazed, such a thing is so rare now that that is unexpected and will probably be the only time they experience such an experience. you're like a mythical ghost, a mirage. blink twice, and then you forget it ever happened because there's nowhere to put such an occurrence in your head so it falls to the wayside, a forgotten exception

programming is for the ends of the business. whereas before if you saw it as art you could learn the intricacies and integrate them lovingly into your neurons, and as such this gave you an edge over those who had less love because they had less art, and as such were more fixated on the frustrations and bitching of greedy corporate slop and what have you, slowed by these frictions. a new era began where rumours of high pay meant MBAs and ambitious brogrammers entered the field to make a quick buck, disparaged populations around the world, and boot campers viewing it as their own personal lottery. the understanding of and quality of code went down, and we developed more robust processes to catch the faults of those who didn't view coding as an art -- tests, memorizable design patterns, frameworks galore, goddamn leetcode

AI slop in coding is just a natural progression of this. coding is for the end product, not the art. the art is forgotten. it's not needed. we have more than enough repositories on GitHub to teach the machine (for now)

slop is all the hallucinations and bugs it delivers because we hadn't found more robust processes to catch the faults

When I read jestdotty's walls of text, that feels like AI slop.

Ok, I admit, I don’t read them.

@jestdotty, please put the last few lines on top the next time :P

@12bitfloat that are ways to recognize POSSIBLE slop but does not have to be at all. Also, the README.md could be the only sloppy part about it. I also let it generate it with AI. I let AI scan project and let it generate it. It's very convenient when you let it remove the emoticons and suck. I tell it in general to make it professional, no emoticons, concise. This looks just nice right: https://retoor.molodetz.nl/retoor/...

See my last comment on bottom, as always :P

I think it's perfect feature of AI if used well.

My own definition of AI slop is when it's build with no actual input or preferences. So, "create me a webdav server', is not the same as having a few hundred lines of prompt with technical preferences and behavior descriptions / where to focus on.

So, the definition in my opinion if is when it does not have real human input, so autonomous by AI generated.

But also would like to add, slop does not have an use case. So mainly pictures / videos are made with low effort.

Oh, and everything built in nextjs is slop for sure, no programmer with self respect will use it to develop software. I wish i could say the same about react :(

"AI Slop" is low effort rejection of everything AI. At least as how I see it used in general. Its a conformist phrase and not objective at all. At least when I see it used on reddit.

When I use it on devrant I am being tongue in cheek. Making fun of the phrase.

What you do is not slop. I apologize if this hit a nerve.

> 'That's actually AI abuse imho.'

"Dear LLM. Show us where you had been touched. Use this puppet over here."

/jk

@retoor Yeah but you hopefully know what your program does :P

I mostly object to a bunch of outlandish claims in the readme that are just lies

Slop is slop. Bad code is bad code, bad art is bad art, effortless crap is effortless crap.

AI slop is everything that's slop, but made by AI instead of a human.

There's another word used for slop made by humans specifically in the software world: "Shovelware".

But in general you can think of AI slop as being low effort, low quality, high quantity, without thought, unfinished, half-assed...

The issue is that almost all AI generated content is slop by default. It only looks right on surface level (especially in visual art you can see the horrible artifacting, nonsense shapes and smeared oil-coated detailing). That's slop. In code it's harder to spot, but you can still see it in larger projects, especially if the person didn't know what they were doing or if there was a lack of direction and scrutiny.

As a rule of thumb, if it took 15 seconds to make, and it also looks like it, it's slop, AI or otherwise.

@retoor your definition of "ai slop" is close to mine, but I personally think the effort put into the prompt doesn't mean the result can't be slop. I think output quality control should be a major factor. Whether something is slop or not should be a function of both the output quality itself + the effort put into increasing the quality.

Someone can have an AI farm where they spent months optimizing the prompt, and still the AI farm is then used to produce millions of similar, bad outputs. Essentially a long and elaborate spam email isn't any better than a short low-effort spam email. It has to be something more to not qualify as spam anymore.

I'm sure there's a deeper philosophical debate here and one could probably write a 100 page thesis on this topic...

@Hazarth "if it took 15 seconds to make" hey now, there are people that fall into this category. Dad's skills aren't the entire determining factor here.

@YourMom nah, it was not a nerve. I just know see it getting tossed around in general. I just think there must be a definition of it. It's important to me because I am far from lazy and invest the sick insane amount of working hours (as seen on my site under log, i can make 72 hours days confirmed) into AI applications now. You can imagine, with those amount of hours in pure prompting and investigating, it would be a bit sad to get it called slop. I do indeed produce years of work using AI but get 100% expected results, and not only that, it's even working without errors. I got to the point that i can prevent AI to even produce them by instructing it exactly to operate. I have one application I am working on using AI so massive sick that I won't even tell about it. With AI, the small person can think extremely big. Actually, AI COULD take all jobs if everyone was doing this. I have just a lot of time on my hands that nobody has. It gives results :)

@Hazarth I myself could almost such a thesis on the subject. But for now I keep how I generate structured maintainable code spread over 23 directories and 84 files in C without human intervention to myself. Based on Reddit posts or posts here in devRant it seems that it's very rare. Not long ago I said so myself that AI is only capable of small apps with low quality and limited complexity.

AI can't generate a decent sudoku solver on itself if the sudoku have multiple ways to be resolved. This has to do with using the recursive way the LLM's use in their output scripts. The art is: how to get a decent sudoku solver then? Well, by stating that it's not allowed to use that method but literally everything else and give it the known results and later add time limited usage of the original way (because it sitll resolves the most sudokus). That's an option. The trick is never let the LLM choose something, like never. At the end, you can ask it to optimize that and

in the end you could end up with the best sudoku resolver ever and thus yes - something new invented by an LLM what people do not think is possible often. Creativity is something only a live create can have, but the LLM can perfectly simulate more creativity than the average person for sure. You just have to push it in some direction to make it think about it in a certain way.

Actually, I gonna try this. Stay tuned.

@retoor the key here is that you have pre AI development skills. I have heard horror stories of people without those skill trying to start or run companies that create services. They run into intractable bugs and problems in the service. Then when a dev shows up to fix it they have to start over.

@YourMom yeah, but how to distinct these days?

I don't want to:

- be known as a sloppy monster

- be known as someone who still did not invent the power of AI

It would be nice if there is a term to distinguish from the low effort vibe coder (AI slop is fine term) that is clear to everyone to distinguis that you could teach a reqruiter. Since even devs are not able to do that often (or are just AI haters). In this case i mean code projects.

What i am looking for: a definition of slop for AI code that is explainable to a lesser technical person within IT such as a reqruiter. But i think it's a very hard task.

How not to be dinosour and not to be known as a vibe coder while having around 20 years professional experience? I think it's a issue that more people face. Let's end the issue now here on dR :P Else I have to ask perplexity. Should have considered that in the first place.