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Comment by pmtcc | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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