Likely many other, I’ve been grossed out by some of the shit getting churned out with generative ai. But it’s also made me notice some of the existing things that give me the same feeling.
Poorly translated stuff, as often seen on cheap Chinese imports, has the same uncanny valley awkwardness. It sounds like English, but it isn’t what an actual human who spoke English would say. And if we want to talk about an algorithm that’s gone rogue and is destroying the world while trying to fulfill some arbitary metrics, there’s always late-stage capitalism…
Anyone else notice things like this?
Short form video comedy with cringy facial expressions synced to music is my most hated example
Recipe websites.
Any trump speech.
fast food…
at this point can you even call that meat?
I grew up poor where you don’t throw away food.
But yeah I’m not eating at Carl’s Jr. That shit is nasty.
Temu dollar garbage. Especially 3D printed stuff
Cars have been a prime example, IMO, for a long while.
Oh, the screen on your center console cracked or is out of date? You can’t fix it on your own and you need the dealership to do it and if they can’t, you need to upgrade your vehicle because they make the vehicle almost impossible to run without it.
Want to change your oil? A well known brandnI cannot think of the name of right now needs to approve! Heated seats? I think it was BMW that planned on charging you a subscription service for that.
I’m predicting in less than a decade, if things don’t change, you’ll not only be selling a liver for that car, but also all your healthy organs to be able to afford the subscription service to be able to start your car.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the kids pretending to be adults who own a vehicle so damn tall that they have to climb into it using a step thing in the side. I’m talking average height or taller and no visible signs that they struggle to enter ( other than being too short ). It’s like watching an entitled toddler try to walk up stairs for the first time. You can’t help but pity them, or at least I can’t.
100 years of video advertising. Here let me rub this on your eyeballs.
The “cooking blog” style where a simple answer to a simple question has to be padded with eight paragraphs of garbage. Like, I just want to know how to put a comment in a YAML file. I don’t need a table of contents for this, I don’t need to hear a brief history of how the comment was invented, just tell me the character to type.
what is the reason behind this? i never understood it. is the garbage supposed to raise the SEO score or something?
More screen length = more space for embedded video ads.
When it was recipes they claimed it was copyright related. If another site stole your whole recipe plus the story you know it’s stolen. Just saying to hard boil eggs, split em, add mayo and mustard… well that’s just any deviled eggs.
If you’re not adding Sriracha to them, it’s not deviled eggs. 😀
any maga conspiracy theories
YouTube channels that are mostly just reading Reddit comments.
Similarly, youtube channels about disaster events that are just reading the Wikipedia page with some spooky music.
Especially if it’s using that annoyingly upbeat robot voice.
That would be AI slop by most standards since the robot voice is “AI” in a way.
Or reading “am I the asshole” or “relationship advice” posts.
Fuck. I hate so much of this crap.
A lot of these are also AI slop nowadays too
Only if they dont add anything themselfs
I started adding my own reactions to certain things since I started narrating for Cocules Reddit Readings (I need to do another one soon).
Amazon. It’s a gigantic warehouse of slop
The a absolute epitome of non-AI slop has got to be these creepy videos that were on YouTube back in ~2017:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
Its exactly the kind of thing you’d expect would be the product of AI, but it actually came before AI. I think a lot of it was procedurally generated though, using scripts to control 3D software and editing software, so different character models could be used in the same scenes and different scenes could be strung together to make each video.
I think a similar thing happens with those shovelware Android games. There’s so many that are just the same game with (incredibly poorly done) asset swaps that I think they must just make a game once and then automatically generate a thousand+ variations on it.
I remember those. Awful.
NFL referees
“Silverberg’s Law”
Someone once asked science fiction writer Robert Silverberg why 90% of the SF stories they read were crap.
Silverberg replied that 90% of everything is crap.
And that’s why older media is usually better. Only the good parts have survived and the 90% has been forgotten.
The trouble is that a lot of the good stuff is forgotten as well.
Here are some movies you’ve probably never heard of.
“The Day of the Jackal” [original]
“The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” [original]
“Silent Partner” Elliot Gould
“The 3 Musketeers” Raquel Welch and Oliver Reed.
“Little Big Man”
I never hear them mentioned but people will rewatch a Hitchcock movie fifty times.
Sadly true (and yeah, I didn’t know about those movies)
Background music for all advertising during the holiday seasjinglejinglejingle jazzybellsbellsbellsbells BING BANG BONG BING DING DANG DONG although I suspect this is increasingly AI slop at this point
Those garbage/misleading mobile games in ads
Also why the hell is this a thing? Those ads are showing gameplay, it would be so much easier to make that game and then take a video of it for the advert than to just make an animation of it. So in my mind the game exists. Why is it just Mafia Wars reskinned every fucking time?
Because “mafia wars” makes consistent money, and the games people actually might want to play don’t. Slapping a new coat of paint on the same mechanics over and over again means getting the money maker out there to more people, just gotta lure em in with the promise of a game they might actually want to play, then swap in the game they don’t and hope you snag em with the psychological tricks before they leave.
It works just often enough to make it profitable and easy.
