Using Slop for Images Does Not Make Your Site Look Advanced or Witty, It Just Makes Your Whole Work Look Like Presumed Plagiarism
Someone asked me today if Conde Nasty or Condé Nast (company behind Reddit and Ars Technica among many other sites) had begun using slop. We recently did in fact confirm that The Register MS uses slop, including for images (sometimes the filenames are a giveaway; unless it's "shutterstock" and if it looks like CG fusion, then it's almost definitely slop).
A couple of years ago The Cyber|Show adopted slop for images and later regretted this. 1.5 years ago Dr. Andy Farnell wrote a detailed and well-worded explanation about why it was a mistake. Weeks ago he elaborated on this in a new episode with Kim Crawley, which we covered [1, 2]. Quoting Andy: "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."
Since then it has only become more true. Lazy slobs and Serial Sloppers use the guise/excuse of "AI" to plagiarise and spam the Web. In the process they also help stage DDoS attacks on legitimate and truly important sites. It is a net loss for society, without any doubt. It's really bad for you unless you extract and sell fossil fuels from beneath the ground. █
