Not all procedurally generated things are slop, and not all slop are made via procedural generation.
And popularity has nothing to do with private, subjective quality evaluations of the individual (aka, what someone calls slop might be picasso to another), but with objective, public evaluations of the product via purchases.
I was thinking about this, and the definition I came up with for slop is 'aspirational and highly detailed content that resolves its details in an uninteresting or nonsensical way'.
For example, an AI picture of a bush is not slop, because we don't expect much from a picture of a bush (not aspirational).
A hand-drawn picture of a knight in armor by an enthusiastic, but not very skilled artist is not slop either - it has tons of details that resolve in an interesting way, and what it lacks in details, it allows the viewers to fill in for themselves.
A 'realistic' knight generated by AI is slop - it contains no imaginative detail, and allows very little room for personal interpretation, and it's not rewarding to view.
Slop doesn't need to be AI - creatively bankrupt overproduced garbage counts as slop in my mind as well.
'aspirational and highly detailed content that resolves its details in an uninteresting or nonsensical way'.
This is a great definition. All the AI text I read is somehow missing the "meat" you find in good writing. All the right parts are there, but the core idea that makes me interested is just missing.
It's pretty much the same thing Linkedin has been full of for years. No one can bear to say anything controversial, so it's all just empty platitudes and junk.
Procgen has nothing to do with AI in terms of slop, for a good reason: procedural generation algorithms are heavily tuned by authors, exactly to avoid the “dull, unoriginal and repetitive” aspect that AI produces.
And popularity has nothing to do with private, subjective quality evaluations of the individual (aka, what someone calls slop might be picasso to another), but with objective, public evaluations of the product via purchases.