As a disclaimer, I’m not actually anti-AI, but tons of slop is made with it. It’s the same as those TTS Reddit reading videos from back in the day or any other shitty trend from the last 10 years.
I’m old enough to know to dismiss internet noise as vastly out of touch with the actual silent majority of internet users, so this moral panic over slop to me was just zoomers who grew up on reaction videos thinking that wasn’t slop to the folks who came before, but I was on a train, looking around, I saw like 4/5 people I could see were on their phones, watching clearly AI-generated content, on TikTok or something similar based on the UI elements, one of them even had it on speaker for some reason.
All of them seemed around my age in the mid-20s.
Thing is, I don’t really understand it, what’s the appeal? I’m not asking about being on your phone, but specifically short-form videos about nothing specific.
When I looked it up, lots of talk about addiction and dopamine loops, but I can’t relate to that, I assume this maybe has something to do with me having ADHD and the theory that my dopamine system doesn’t really work “normally”.
I tried watching TikTok before, but it definitely wasn’t stimulating for me, I got bored pretty quick. If I was on a train and really bored looking out the window listening to music, I’d whip out a Wikipedia page or read the comments on Lemmy or look up a random question on my mind.
Why? Well in my experience - text is a lot easier to consume you can consume more information faster, hence to me - it’s more stimulating. Works both ways too - It’s just easier to express yourself quickly and clearly in text than by speaking. Even typing on my phone feels a helluva lot less taxing and more stimulating than speaking/listening.
It’s not like I don’t watch videos, I do have videos on in the background sometimes when I’m tidying up or whatever, where I prefer long-form stuff so it just fades into the background and stays consistent and non-distracting. If I watch a movie it’s often something I kinda need to mentally work myself up for. I definitely wouldn’t be able to pay attention to a video playing on my phone.
So my question is - what’s so stimulating about this type of stuff in particular?
I want to hear about your experience so I can understand it better.
I’d like to understand it, because otherwise it feels like most people are weird aliens, driven by forces beyond my comprehension, and it’s not nice :(
Aside from what others are saying, I think you’re also making a mistake in interpreting people’s interest in generative AI. Most people making/using AI art aren’t looking for “good art”, they’re looking for a “good enough asset” to fufill a niche they don’t or can’t value. For example, a small buisness owner might use AI to create their logo. It won’t be good, but its only competing with what they can draw as a non-artist. It only needs to be passable, not good. Similarly, big buisnesses like it because it can create images to add visual flair, without the cost and personality of stock photos. In the same vein from the viewer perspective, they often aren’t looking for something high-quality or thought provoking (esspecially on a platform like Tik-Tok). Generally, people scrolling on Tik-Tok aren’t looking for something good, they’re looking for something mindless to distract them, thus the emphasis on mindless scrolling over guided or curated content.
Yes I understand.
But what I don’t get, is why are neurotypicals so inclined to look for “something mindless to distract them, thus the emphasis on mindless scrolling over guided or curated content.”?
That’s like the entire question no one has answered ITT.
They’re just bored.
Why would you assume it’s neurotypical specific? I’m neurodivergent and I like generating AI videos and images, as it allows me to visualise stuff that was in my mind.
Because I have ADHD and can’t relate, it’s in my post.
My gf who also has ADHD also cannot relate. We both tried TikTok, which showed the aforementioned slop, and we found it unstimulating as fuck and got bored very quickly. I
Your logic is flawed.
You have 2 samples of people with ADHD. And because of that you make the assumptions that all other people with ADHD react exactly the same. And all other neurodivergents, also those with something completely unrelated to ADHD, also react like that.
And then you also conclude that everyone without ADHD would react the complete opposite. As if there is 0 nuance to people without neurodivergence.
That is a lot of assumptions based on basically nothing.
It’s an observation, not a conclusion ya nitwit.
The absence of scientifically rigorous, high sample size experimentally proven, well substantiated, documented reproducible conclusions does not render the observation wrong in and of itself because they’re just not in the same category.
Observation is the first step to formulating a theory, which leads to a hypothesis, which can be experimentally tested.
Observation is the first step to formulating a theory, which leads to a hypothesis, which can be experimentally tested.
That would be valid if it was what you did. Except it wasn’t. You assumed the hypothesis to be true and asked us why it’s true. You should instead be asking whether or not it’s true.
Lmfao, you take your ADHD diagnosis too seriously.
Like half the planet has ADHD or undiagnosed ADHD, your not neuro atypical, you’re pretty normal.
Yeah most of those people aren’t on amphetamines that they require to do basic functions, are they?
The diagnosed ones generally are, the others are generally self medicating in a variety of other ways, from caffeine to alcohol to nicotine to marijuana to illicit amphetamines.
As others have pointed out, I don’t think you have solid evidence to suspect that this is a neurotypical vs ADHD thing.
Personally I think it’s just a matter of poor taste. The sad truth is most people cannot appreciate good art, and the only reason why most works of art are as high quality as they are is because artists make them, and artists do appreciate good art and have high standards. From the artists point of view, their piece needs to meet criteria X, Y, Z, etc. to be a good satisfying piece. But from the point of view of the tasteless plebian masses, it probably only needs to meet criteria X. I first noticed this when I saw that almost every highly upvoted artwork on Reddit years ago was a really hyper realistic pencil drawing, usually of a pretty girl. Most people don’t appreciate form, composition, subtle meanings, abstraction, etc. Those things require more thinking and are therefore too difficult for many people to engage with. Instead, “how hard does this seem to make” and “how much do I like this at first glance” become the proxy standards used by tasteless lazy people to judge art, and hence the “best” art by those standards is a super realistic pencil drawing of a pretty woman became “zomg I thought this was a photo!!!” and “I couldn’t do this in a million years!!! So impressive!!!” As if the point of art is just to flex on people?
But it gets worse, because even when people decide to half-ass their ingestion of art by flattening it down to a single dimension of “how realistic is it”, again, because people aren’t artists and have never even tried to engage in art (and this I actually don’t hold against them, unlike their prior laziness), they don’t have a trained eye. So sometimes you’ll see just a mediocre pencil drawing of a pretty girl, and people with less art skills will be like “wow 10/10 it’s perfect!!!”, but people with art skills will be able to notice things like “well if the shadow on the neck is like that the shadow on the nose should be going the other way, you mixed up your light sources”, or “the perspective is off on the angle of the eyes here”. Sometimes these improvements would be subconsciously picked up by the masses, but many times not. Often the subtleties that make an artwork go from mediocre to amazing are lost on the masses. As a result, the masses are equally satisfied with poor quality AI-generated images as they are with high quality human-generated images.
TLDR; The lack of media literacy among many people strikes again
Is “AI slop” synonymous with AI content in general? I’ve always thought it to mean bad AI content specifically.
I don’t consider myself neurotypical yet I see our current AI progress as net-positive. I don’t like AI slop either in the sense that I understand the term but I’ve encountered a lot of good AI generated content.
I think there is a differentiation that needs to be made here. Your described experience with short form video/ social media as a neurodiverse person and the response to AI generated content. To my knowledge social media and short form video platforms are designed to release as much dopamine, but whether the type of content is AI or not isn’t necessarily important here. I am not sure about this, but I believe many of my peers who are neurodivers enjoy tiktok. So there may not be a clear difference between neurodiverse and neurotypical people, not to say that your experience isn’t valid. It is.
Instead I think tech literacy and political believes might be at play here. First of to identify well made AI content as such and secondly, the general response to it (intrest/no interest/political and moral concerns). Further more I think AI content might be pushed to users due to their controversial standing which might result in lots of discussion in the comments. TikToks users are on average also fairly young and might not filter content as much as older users would. Lastly it is easy to publish a lot of AI generated content due to automation. The more AI content gets uploaded the higher the likelyhood of it being recommended to users.
It seems overconfidence in the output, laziness, underconfidence in writing things themselves, and offloading responsibility of thought are a few of the many reasons that come to mind. There is a minority of people who achieve better results and after gaining expertise in prompting using AI and give false hopes to the rest. Then there are the loud tech executives who promote AI with the help of amplifying media.
There is also the fact that you can quickly generate images and videos which a normal person without the proper tools and photoshop/photography knowledge would not be able to easily achieve.
I have had to spend time re-engineering AI output code. I know I’m not an expert but the output and time it takes to write long, prompts with sufficient context and detail is not trivial. A single prompt is not sufficient. Better outputs are achieved through several structured prompts for every “job” in a “team” needed to achieve the outcome (product owner, project manager, software engineer, quality engineer, UI engineer, etc). for writing articles or a book, I would expect a similar set pattern to achieve better results.
And then there is the whole thing about “hallucinations” which undermines quality.
