[frereubu]

I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.

[latexr]

At the start of Good Omens, there’s a scene where demons are sharing their recent misdeeds. A couple of them are sharing “classic” demon stuff like killing and possessing, but Crowley (the protagonist demon) shares more modern evil deeds, such as creating traffic jams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens

I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.

[kombookcha]

It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of really intense suffering.

[philipallstar]

I thought it was that he altered planning documents and even went and moved physical markings to make the M25 the shape of the ancient evil sigril Odegra (this is from memory; I just read it a lot as a teenager) so every angry drive round it powers that sigil.

[latexr]

Yes, I think you’re right. And if I recall correctly, near the end he’s trying to get somewhere but gets stuck in traffic by the same problem he caused.

[summa_tech]

In all fairness, he gets stuck trying to do something good, which is not the standard "evil trapped by its own design" moral.

[kombookcha]

Ha, that's right! I forgot about that bit.

Man. I do miss Terry Pratchett.

[globular-toast]

Whoever decided adding silly audio effects to an operating system is surely one of these lesser devils. Just think of how many people have been aggravated by a colleague's laptop when it "wakes up" every day, or an inappropriate notification sound during a presentation or something. On any desktop PC I interact with I do my bit by disabling all sound effects before I continue.

[Maken]

The real genius was whoever decided to add fake typing sounds to virtual keyboards on touch screens.

[plagiarist]

Blessedly everyone around me has disabled these, I had forgotten how enraged that makes me. Even though I don't think physical keyboards bother me at all.

[shagie]

https://youtu.be/M0S3a32RzEo with David Tennant as Crowley.

It's a well done scene that is properly faithful to the original.

[nephihaha]

I think Good Omens may have been influenced by the 1960s version of Bedazzled. In that, Peter Cook's version of the Devil spends much of his time creating petty annoyances such as scratching vinyl records and putting them back on shelves, breaking parking meters so drivers get fined, and ripping the last pages out of Agatha Christie whodunnits etc. Definitely a touch of Douglas Adams in there as well.

[siddboots]

For a long time I thought that the AdSense business model was ultimately doomed because I assumed that people hate ads as much as I do. It turns out I was just wrong about what most people are willing to put up with.

[latexr]

I remember visiting a friend over a decade ago, and for some reason I had to use their computer for a bit. I was immediately thrown aback by all the ads everywhere and installed an ad blocker before anything else. They were very grateful, but the part that surprised me was they were annoyed by the ads but never thought to look for some way around it. It never even crossed their minds it could be done or to search for it.

[dmd]

All human progress in history has been due to a VERY small handful of people who think “this is bullshit, things could be better”.

The vast majority of people accept what they see as the way things are and it never occurs to them that things could be different.

[globular-toast]

Similarly, when my partner moved in I told her about the network-level adblocker and she kinda scoffed at it saying ads don't bother her. A few years later she started complaining that when she's out of the house she gets ads.

[thevillagechief]

It's always absolutely shocking using a regular person's computer. How can they live like this? I have lived in this ad-free bubble for so long that I forget that's not the real world. If I had to live without adblockers, I don't think I'd ever visit the internet.

[lesuorac]

I really doubt it's going to die out.

I think a lot of the value in these AI Podcasts is just the self-validation of the listener. It really doesn't matter to the listener if there's nothing between Egyptian socks and Revelry because the point was to feel good not to learn.

But also because I've had a long standing pet peeve with news articles that include random ass stock footage in articles. If humans can get away with include a picture of _any_ ship when talking about a specific ship (that may have never been in the harbor the picture shows) then why does the AI need to be correct?

[nilirl]

I'm afraid it'll lead to a weird music-ification of content.

Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition.

AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention.

Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.

[pjc50]

It's definitely the sort of thing that Crowley from Good Omens would be working on.

[Tade0]

Just like Big Tobacco moved onto greener pastures in the developing world, Big Slop is not targeting specifically us, but the billions of new internet users who connected over the past decade:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS

There's this (now old) meme called "Italian brainrot" - AI generated characters with vaguely Italian-sounding names like Bombardiro Crocodilo (note the incorrect spelling of the Italian word for crocodile).

One character stands out - Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Not only does it not sound Italian at all, that last word rang a bell.

Sahur (or Suhur) is the meal eaten before dawn during Ramadan.

After some digging I discovered this whole category originated in Indonesia. The country experienced an absolute explosion in the number of internet users in recent years and is home to internet phenomena which spread globally, but few in the west seem to realise that.

[sharadov]

That's how characters are named in "Steal a Brainrot" , a Roblox game.

[revolvingthrow]

Boomers love slop. Even when they know it’s ai (and it can be increasingly difficult to tell even for people who don’t struggle to send an email) they love it almost as much as they love political ragebait, and they love political ragebait more than their own families. My ancient grandpa is on some facebook groups and they share bottom of the barrel ai videos and images all day. If it can be consumed with zero effort, it’s great. They couldn’t care less about whether any care of effort was involved in its creation, whether it has any value whatsoever, whether it’s made up bullshit. Not a whit.

They also have money and can vote, so there will be an endless avalanche of slop being generated every single day, enough to bury organic content ten times over.

[mwigdahl]

Eventually they will all die, and then the upcoming Gen-Z and -Alpha will save the world with their well-documented refined tastes for artisanal, purely human short-form video slop.

[rstuart4133]

WWE has been a successful business model for a long time now, and shows no signs of dying out.

I haven't listened to those podcasts, but from Kate's description the recipe is the same as WWE. They appeal to the senses using only bullshit. The outcome is preordained, they are selling the hype only, the reality doesn't matter.

There is clearly customer base for this sort of thing that isn't going away. Amazingly it appeals to all age groups: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jN2Jxp_o4OtLZl4HuK2jWAtmUyy...

It works so well the USA has president who sold himself to the voters using this very same model.

[surgical_fire]

Unfortunately, I think it is here to stay. But humans are very adaptable; I think things may play out fine.

See, I have some hobbies. You probably have yours too. The thing about hobbies, is that in many ways they are niche.

Of course, a lot of people enjoy running, but very few enjoy taking it seriously, delving into it beyond an occasional thing, to use it as an example. Replace running with any activity that may be approached as a hobby and that can be slopified.

And as any niche thing, there will be a separation of masses that consume it as slop, and those that engage with the real thing. They don't cancel each other out, just coexist as different things entirely.

[Lalabadie]

Yeah, people will reflexively filter out the slop, eventually, but they'll do it by leaving the places that have been rendered worthless by its persistent presence.

The particular type of innovator ghoul that's enabled by generative AI dreams of filling the entire internet with bullshit content. Aggregators (media and content) should be actively pushing them out for their own long-term survival, IMO.