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Comment by cess11 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the difference. An email that pretends that I need to buy some pills and turns out to be a card collecting scam is obviously of low quality and not something I have requested.

Computer generated fake texts are spam, doesn't matter if they're selling pills to me or my attention to ad networks.

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Spam = unwanted and against what you asked for, trying to sell you something or get you to do something

Slop = technically what you asked for, but intentionally created just to fill space and increase traffic/hits, generally of the lowest quality rendering it unusable

Then, to me, it's spam. The only times I've asked for fake text generated by a computer I stitched together some markov chain library and a corpus myself, and then it was to make the point that some people are so badly affected by ads and political propaganda that their contributions to the texts of humanity could easily be replaced by my code.

The problem is that sometimes slop looks like content from a far enough distance. And to the untrained eye, it is indistinguishable from real content. For example, a Kafka tutorial could start with pages about other irrelevant technology before getting to the real material. But you wouldn't know which content is useless at first.

Could you define "content"?

Ok, think about it like this. It's your anniversary with your partner so you decide to commission a drawing from an artist as a gift. However, when you receive it, it's clearly an AI-generated image that was printed out.

Would you still consider that "spam"?

Yes. I also call the music-reminiscent sounds played in shops in malls spam.

Sounds like you'd prefer to interpret slop as being a subset of spam. So all slop is spam but not all spam is slop.

I see 'slop' used more often in contexts where, say, you look up a problem you're working on, find an article that seems to be relevant and may have the answer you want, but at some point turns out to be devoid of content and possibly AI-generated.

That's spam. That's like the messages in your inbox of yesteryear that tried to entice you to look at them but they'll just waste your time or worse if you do.

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