Slop Images Are Bad Optics, Including for Perl.org

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 23, 2025

Related: Rethinking AI images on The Cybershow ("Another fact is that the cultural tide is turning around AI. People generally dislike and fear it. Like social media, AI is concentrating still more abusive power into the hands of the incumbent tech oligopoly. Its potential as an equalising force seems already dead, and it seems ever more like a technology aligned with all the things we are against.")

Slop images, with many links to theweeklychallenge.org^*, are overwhelming blogs.perl.org (that's about 70-80% of the output in it this past week). Those boil down to one user:

At least he admits what he did, e.g.:

I have much respect for this person; but the blog being filled with slop images might not have the effect he had in mind. In the past, based on our observation, every blog that started using slop images sooner or later died (we've named examples in the Linux spheres). Some also resorted to LLMs, but not all.

Slop devalues one's genuine work. It makes former writers gravitate towards laziness.

An associate thinks similarly of slop images; when people see these they immediately rush to assume all the text too is LLM slop. They quickly lose interest, it's just off-putting. They say that "once you slop you can't stop"; it does have a "slippery slope" characteristic. █

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^* This past week:

1. 2025-03-20 [Older] Docker Secret

2. 2025-03-19 [Older] Build Docker Image

3. 2025-03-19 [Older] How would you read a really large file?

4. 2025-03-17 [Older] git show ...

5. 2025-03-16 [Older] git bisect ...

6. 2025-03-16 [Older] Promise in Perl

7. 2025-03-15 [Older] Scientist in Perl

8. 2025-03-14 [Older] Text Extraction in Perl