Maybe Obvious, But Merits Repeating: A Lot of "Demand" for Slop is Faked, Manufactured, Fabricated by Dark Patterns, Bundling, Media PR (Deception/Hype) Campaigns
I am casually reminded that what "goes without saying" often goes unsaid.
So let's say it out loud again.
Over the past few years many products and services got rebranded as "AI". In many cases, nothing changed except the label.
Over the past few years many user interfaces got slop prompts inside them, some passively invoked (without the user requesting that), sort of "running in the background".
Like various fake currencies (that are valued by inertia rather than formal recognition), slop activity was basically manufactured, wasteful, misleading since 2022 if not a bit earlier (Microsoft started chanting this buzzword around 2020 and even tried to justify layoffs that way).
In the case of Microsoft, it is reported that as real usage of its slop heads downwards the embedment (UI embedding) of slop things (they call it "AI") increases. If they put the slop stuff in more and more things and usage still goes down, then there are two possibilities: 1) the number of users of Microsoft products/services is collapsing; 2) the users are appalled by slop and go out of their way to disable it (e.g. using unofficial third-party tools).
Sometimes (2) results in (1).
This is not sustainable.
There's a soft limit on how much pushing can be done. When you cross some boundaries and thresholds the users walk away entirely, they don't just try to avoid slop "features".
In recent months Microsoft tried to blame the "users" for not adoring the slop Microsoft shoves down their throats. Worse yet, the CEO resorted to language policing. They're basically trying to censor or control the dialogue about this problem. SUCH PATRONISING ATTITUDES BACKFIRE. █