Slop Turns People Off (LLMs Lack Intelligence, They're Just Plagiarism Powerhouses That Fail to Deliver Any Real, Measurable Value)
"More" (or "MOAR") isn't always better
A long time ago I read the famous sayings about how the complexity of planes (or helicopters, virtually anything in aviation) wasn't to be assessed by absolute mass. In order to fly, vessels must be light. We're not measuring planes by their weight but by metrics such as speed and efficiency. Making planes bigger and heavier isn't the goal. They're not tanks or armoured vehicles. Similarly, birds have more hollow bones, light feathers, and organs that are meant to be powerful yet not oversized. That's necessary for survival (of the fitting, a la evolution). Bald eagles weight at about 3 – 6.3 kg, but they have a wingspan of 1.8 – 2.3 m (more than the height of an average human being).
On a "per weight" basis, planes are incredibly expensive, especially military jets. If an F-35A's empty weight is 29,300 lbs and it costs $81.1 million per aircraft, that'd be about 5 million dollars per ton or $5,000 per kilogram, almost 3 times the price of pure silver.
Similarly, sites should not be measured by the number of words in them. If the words are random permutations based around existing text/s (but distorting meanings and facts from the originals), what is their underlying value? Maybe a net negative.
Put another way, go to the originals. Slop won't replace search as long as LLMs cannot outdo the accuracy of actual experts.
Or... put another way, LLM slop and slop images (quantity of objects, such as pages, images etc.) will not improve a site.
"Slop" as a term became more widely used. We see more and more sites using the term. "Slop" is an unflattering label. And that is intentional.
People won't bother reading sites that resort to "slopping". They have other options and other sites to turn to. Slopfarms are a symptom of sites (or domains) that simply gave up.
In Techrights we've all along rejected LLM slopfarms. "Slopwatch" was born out of frustration, seeing that more domains threw in the towel and foolishly believed that publishing some fake articles would be better than publishing no new articles at all. Inactivity is vastly better than fake activity, as it does not tarnish then status and reputation of older works.
Society must not value false metrics. So-called 'AI' (slop) takes up a lot of bandwidth, RAM, computational capacity, water and electricity. So do fake currencies [1, 2]. In wars, "gains" typically mean the destruction of things. It inverts the lexical meaning of the word.
We must build a society around value, not sheer waste. █
Image credit: The Bald Eagle Wingspan: How does it compare to other Birds of Prey