I want to answer this for myself and hopefully do a little education at the same time. All links provided are meant to be jumping off points and also a bit of proof I am not just making things up.What makes something AI slop? Do you have an objective metric for it? Please explain.
Also, why is 'AI slop' bad, yet Agrippa worshipped? Both collated others work, yet Agrippa gets a pass? Smells funny.
I think part of the issue here is that several different criticisms are getting mixed together under the label “AI slop,” and clarity matters.I want to answer this for myself and hopefully do a little education at the same time. All links provided are meant to be jumping off points and also a bit of proof I am not just making things up.
Most people who view AI as slop do so because of the environmental and moral issues with Generative AI. I am not going to get into other types of AI because my knowledge and personal qualms are regarding Generative AI. I also will be just calling Gen AI "AI" for brevity.
AI requires large data centers to run; these in a way that not only takes water away from people in the surrounding areas at an alarming rate and and have been linked to high carbon emissions because of how heavily reliant on energy a gen ai. Anecdotally, I have seen videos and reports of people who live near these centers saying that their water bills have skyrocketed and their water pressure has decreased to a trickle. Considering the ongoing conversations about climate change being primarily carbon emission caused and that just were warned by the on our hands (according to their scientists we have approximately 14 years left of fresh water) it is easy to say that, unless AI changes it's water usage and carbon emissions, it doesn't have a place in a future where climate change improves and the human race continues living without the suffering caused by lack of resources.
AI also has moral issues wrong with it as most of the data collected for image/video/text creation was stolen from creators. There are laws in place in the USA to protect creators from theft, but because AI is new and untested (legally) they simply got away with it. And while there are currently lawsuits that artists/musicians/writers/etc are keeping an eye on (the recent win of anonymous images created with AI cannot be copyrighted comes to mind), they are neither going fast enough nor back paying creators for their stolen content. I cannot fight the exact quote but I remember one of the larger AI CEO's saying something along the lines of they couldn't make AI do what it does without theft - so even if there was a way to create AI content ethically, there wouldn't be enough opt-in to make anything good (not that I think any of it is good).
This is not to even touch on the way AI usage (usually in LLMs) and increased forgetfulness, , is often incorrect with information, are a threat to security, is a tool of fascism, and has made it so I and other AI aware people cannot see anything on the internet without having to distrust that it is real (honestly, I just want real cat videos - why do we need fake cats? The real ones are so much better.). (Some of these are without links, please just do some googling.)
I think supporting a theft-powered machine is bad enough. As an artist I find that, from my most objective standpoint I can muster, the images/writings/etc AI creates are horrible. AI doesn't have the ability and I hope it never does to understand the complexity of good art. It isn't just extra or messed up fingers, it is the lack of understanding composition, contrast, tangents, etc. AI has learned that art pieces require color and a subject but doesn't know how to put it together like an artist does. AI does know that there are beats in a story many people put into it, but it doesn't understand why an author does those things.
AI doesn't understand the less tangible and defined parts of art which is being human.
The machine can "write" and "paint" and "photograph" like a human because it is trained on human works but it doesn't understand they why of it all. The deep human urge to create and enjoy the process and to connect with the gods given gifts we can mold into something more and more powerful and connective. The 1979 IBM Training Manual says: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." Why? Because human nuance is vital to the expression of what humans think is right and wrong. That goes for the macro to the micro: managing employees to managing what line goes where.
So to more directly answer the question: AI is determined to be slop because it meets the definition: waste that often has to be removed by hand; a byproduct with little to no value.
As a human, Agrippa may have created collages of thoughts and collations of others' works but did so as a human and with his own input. Agrippa didn't use 5 million gallons worth of water a day to do so either. Agrippa created a compendium of human knowledge rather than mashing it all together in an incoherent mass of text. Even the mistakes in compiling those ideas are human in nature.
If it's text (or images, for that matter) that are generated by a clanker and not by a human. There are nuances to this: what about text that a human wrote and a clanker re-wrote to make more grammatically or orthographically correct? How about text that a clanker generated and a human reviewed? I'm not an expert on the matter, I don't know.What makes something AI slop?
We can assume Agrippa was not a generative LLM. These are two matters conflated into one:Also, why is 'AI slop' bad, yet Agrippa worshipped? Both collated others work, yet Agrippa gets a pass?
Effort. I love AI, and I use it often for research, deep searching the web when I don’t know the right search term, looking through documents to find what I need and or summarize etc.Also, why is 'AI slop' bad, yet Agrippa worshipped?
Effort. I love AI, and I use it often for research, deep searching the web when I don’t know the right search term, looking through documents to find what I need and or summarize etc.
However, think of the effort, skill and dedication it took Agrippa to write his books. Vs someone who can push out 100s of books a month using AI.
Using AI in and of itself does not make a work “AI slop” but using AI alone to generate content typically makes that content AI slop. AI is great for finding things and summarizing things. But when you ask AI to expand on something it typically does not do a great job. It might look good but it’s the equivalent of babbling.
I believe I was already clear about my opinion that using AI is not a problem, and in most cases something I would encourage, but not to generate text. So it depends. Did they use AI to, look up information, structure their writing, fact check, proof read, etc? Or did they use AI to generate text instead of writing it themselves, and if so, did they generate in small chunks with their supervision, or did they not even read what the AI generated?What if an occult author used AI to help write 3 books in 3 years? That is a more accurate comparison, does that change your opinion?
The reader determines it, along with everything else about the book. Literally everything about a book down to the number of pages it has, is subjective. Many people don't look favourably on AI generated works, because quite literally still to this day the most advanced AI LLMs tasked with generating long form informational text (especially on niche topics) inevitably ends up generating a significant percentage of garbage.Effort is subjective and might not be a solid metric. Who determines effort? Lots of books are filled with babbling. Again, subjective. This is much harder than it appears on the surface and that is kind of my point here.
That's what I'm saying.Putting an AI on auto pilot to write a book is definitely a low level thing
What makes something AI slop? Do you have an objective metric for it? Please explain.
It's a time-suckAlso, why is 'AI slop' bad, yet Agrippa worshipped? Both collated others work, yet Agrippa gets a pass? Smells funny.
In my opinion it is just rode way to say that something is made by AI, revealing disgust in the fact that people use AI.What makes something AI slop? Do you have an objective metric for it? Please explain.
Also, why is 'AI slop' bad, yet Agrippa worshipped? Both collated others work, yet Agrippa gets a pass? Smells funny.
What makes something AI slop? Do you have an objective metric for it?
Also, why is 'AI slop' bad, yet Agrippa worshipped?
Now do I find AI worthless in occult research, NO. I often use it when I know I read something a while back and can’t remember where or as a first step in my research into something newish like skull mentioned above.
But I can also see cases where someone knowledgeable uses AI as an assistant for organization, comparison, or drafting, and the final work is still solid because the human author actually knows the territory.
Yeah man, you made some greet points. I cooked a sacred cow on purpose, to make a point that some went to great length to avoid. It is what it is.No objective metric at the moment, but we should probably define one.
I agree the Agrippa worship is annoying, but Agrippa was passing along methods that were tried and true. AI just makes shit up.
See, this is making good use of AI.
AI can't validate or invalidate the methods it writes about, it's just mashing things together and extrapolating from whatever it has available in its training set. Legitimate authors of occult works, on the other hand, are writing about techniques which they have found to work.
AI SLOP I'VE RUN ACROSS:
- I've only looked at one AI grimoire, but it was terrible. At one point it even said "I cannot generate that story for you." It also conflated the Enochian word for the letter 'i' with the Enochian word for 'eye'.
- I've seen people write about another AI grimoire that tells them to use Nitika's sigil from the The Book of Abramelin, which is hilarious. It's hilarious because Nitika is associated with the Nuctemeron, a Greek mystical document that has absolutely nothing to do with Abramelin. Also, I'm not aware of a spirit list for the Nuctemeron prior to Eliphas Levi's book Transcendental Magic.
- Also, when I used AI to research an occult author, I got conflicting answers to the same question, depending on how it was phrased.
AI used can be used wisely and discerningly in magic. But, IMO, using AI to crank out 25 "grimoires' a year is just a chaep act of charlatanry to make a quick buck. Can a good mage make an AI grimoire work anyway? Well, maybe, but they would probably need to fix all the errors first.
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Agreed, but that wasn't my experience. In fact, I would argue that what you are describing would be the work of the human author rather than AI. There is a difference between using AI to assist in your area of expertise and just telling AI what amounts to "Write about this," when the person telling AI has no expertise in the field. Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the most prevalent case in occult publishing, and I say that because of the large variety of topics attributed to AI authors.
Yeah man, you made some greet points. I cooked a sacred cow on purpose, to make a point that some went to great length to avoid. It is what it is.
I think we can all agree that AI on auto pilot is ridiculous. Maybe I could clarify that that is NOT what I was referring to, but its a dead horse now lol.
At the end of the day AI is just a tool, so it isnt good or bad. Using it improperly is on the user of said tool. The original query from the other thread was my reaction to the term 'AI slop' which is just a subjective term, so I was asking for a metric or clarification.
In my opinion the use of AI just being blanket bad is as silly as thinking Agrippa was some sort of master magician, who did the exact same thing as AI authors by the way (except for the one-off outliers in the strawman arguments). Point out the historical truth, crickets hahaha. Funny.
I am willing to bet the market will sort it self out regarding low quality AI books. Like anything else its new, and people still dont really know how to navigate that market just yet. Give it time. I mean there are lots of shit occult books written by real people too.
Honestly we’re talking around each other a lot but we’re all agreeing on the basic premise but here’s a question does anyone have an example of a useful work (non AI slop if you will) that was created with the significant help of an AI tool?
- It also conflated the Enochian word for the letter 'i' with the Enochian word for 'eye'.
I'm interested myself. Despite my own moral and ecological bias I would actually like to see something high quality that would come out of it...Honestly we’re talking around each other a lot but we’re all agreeing on the basic premise but here’s a question does anyone have an example of a useful work (non AI slop if you will) that was created with the significant help of an AI tool?