Bruce Sterling @bruces*Slop weather.
*What the heck, if it's .99 cents, everybody will buy it
Brewster Kahlewhy "slop"? is this because it is using AI tools? and the AI tools are not procedural therefore not decomposable and debuggable in the familiar ways?
OCR recently went from hand coded feature extraction and rules based identification to the machine-learning system in tesseract. Is this also "slop" ?
trying to understand why "slop". Seriously, I'm curious.
Charlie Stross@brewsterkahle @bruces Let's distinguish between two contemporary uses of the word "AI". There is deep learning, analytical AI: stuff like image recognition, OCR, machine translation, etc. Almost all of this is good. And there is generative AI, LLMs, which are mostly used to spew bullshit and lies and plagiarize art and media. Almost invariably sub-par derivative slop.
Unfortunately it's the generative slop that has caught the imagination of media and investors (who throw money at it).
Clear?
mav 
@brewsterkahle
@cstross @bruces
There's also the fact that the current state of things is such that, despite this being a scientific paper published in Nature, an AI "breakthrough" is honestly hard to believe exists at this point. We have been so radically oversold on supposedly new and radical AI ideas that turn out to be significantly inferior to the systems we have now that without long-term testing and verification with somehow trusted third parties (do those even exist anymore?) that it would be hard to believe the kind of revolutionary predictive power described here is real.