Since the advent of artificial intelligence, content generated from scratch has proliferated on the web. These sites, articles or fake videos are everywhere, and especially where no one expects them. According to New York Timeswhen “Google suggests you add non-toxic glue to make cheese stick to a pizza“, or that you come across posts that seem to appear out of nowhere from your news feed, it is probably content generated from scratch by artificial intelligence.
What is slop?
Appearing on online forums, the slop designates “poor quality content, fake news or fake videos and images generated by artificial intelligence (AI), which we find on social networks, in art or literature and, increasingly, in Search results“, summarizes the NSS magazine. Theorized in particular by the British programmer Simon Willison, the phenomenon is increasingly worrying.
Unlike a conversational bot like ChatGPT, this AI-created content gives the appearance of human-created content, and plays on the “clickbait” (push a user to click on a mediocre content, but with a catchy titleand often misleading) to generate advertising revenue and fool the search engine algorithm.
The successor to spam is here
Like spam before them, slops promise to become omnipresent in our browsing habits. In reality, the phenomenon is already well established, but Internet users still struggle to identify it as such. The problem is that since May 2024 and the deployment of Gemini, Google’s conversational bot which draws on web resources to construct its responses, has been largely inspired by slop content, by asserting for example that the astronauts had found cats on the Moon. And this is the whole danger of the phenomenon: between a sourced article and artificially generated content, without any human supervision or verification, it is impossible for the bot to tell the difference.
On May 30, Google announced that it intended to reduce certain features of Gemini, in order to improve certain errors and inaccuracies, and to highlight the shortcomings of its chatbot in terms of data verification.
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