Word of the Month: Slop

On 19 May 1924, Beatrice Harrison, an Englishwoman, went out into her garden in Oxted, Surrey, and performed an unprecedented live concert, which was also one of the BBC’s first live broadcasts. She played the cello—and nightingales began to sing along. A year later, the mesmerizing performance was repeated. Records of these concerts were released a few years later, achieving remarkable success and generating unprecedented excitement. Soon, the cellist began to be called ‘The Lady of the Nightingales’. In 2022, however, it was revealed that the nightingales in the performance had almost certainly been simulated—at least, that’s what ornithologists concluded, supported by hard evidence from BBC employees. Beatrice Harrison herself was probably unaware of the deception. The producers, fearing that the abundance of wires and microphones in the garden would scare away all the birds, took advantage of the cover of night and invited singer Maude Gould, known to audiences as Madame Soberon, to perform, very accurately indeed, the necessary nightingale parts. In subsequent recordings, once the technical equipment was sorted out, real nightingales were recorded. Despite its innocent and noble intentions, the beginning of the story, however, was based on a fake.

Exactly a century later, in May of 2024, the world’s lexicon was enriched with a new word: slop (the singular of ‘slops’), meaning ‘scraps fed to animals; household wastewater; garbage’. From now on, this term is used to refer to various garbage and unwanted content generated by neural networks. In essence, it is the same as spam, but produced by an AI. If spam advances like a tank, slop is more like a drone, which is much more dangerous. Spam has always been a single-cell marketing scam, with the exception of the colorful Nigerian inheritance letters that bombarded our mailboxes in the early noughties. Slop is different; it certainly has far more expressive means and is capable of producing a nightingale concert that Beatrice Harrison could never have dreamed of. People with six fingers, shrimp Jesus, and women baking cakes for their own 122nd birthdays don’t look so bad after all. What the Russian rock musician Yuri Shevchuk once called ‘multicolored garbage’ is apparently being transformed into books, songs, commercials, and other ‘slop art’, not to mention more substantial sociopolitical possibilities.

Slop often can’t even be called a mistake or fraud in the literal sense of the word—you can sense the algorithm’s genuine sincerity and its ever-increasing propensity for absurdity. That’s what happened last year, for example, when Microsoft’s AI-generated travel guide recommended the Ottawa Food Bank, which gives out free food, as a major attraction in the city (it’s like the protagonist in a Woody Allen movie rushing a young virgin to the Holocaust Museum). In a way, it was a very logical move, and not one against human morality. Distorted reality is often caused by AI taking human nature too literally and trying to offer an improved version of it. For example, the Polish company ElevenLabs, the current market leader in speech synthesis, is famous for its artificial voices that have been developed to sound as real as actual human voices. Thus, slop should be considered not simply garbage but a certain ideal model of garbage. It is no coincidence that advertising agencies have already sounded the alarm—the official demonstrations of their products on social networks have been mistaken for AI fakes because actual fakes have become much more convincing. Slop is proactive.

Slop often can’t even be called a mistake or fraud in the literal sense of the word—you can sense the algorithm’s genuine sincerity and its ever-increasing propensity for absurdity. That’s what happened last year, for example, when Microsoft’s AI-generated travel guide recommended the Ottawa Food Bank, which gives out free food, as a major attraction in the city (it’s like the protagonist in a Woody Allen movie rushing a young virgin to the Holocaust Museum). In a way, it was a very logical move, and not one against human morality.

Distorted reality is often caused by AI taking human nature too literally and trying to offer an improved version of it. For example, the Polish company ElevenLabs, the current market leader in speech synthesis, is famous for its artificial voices that have been developed to sound as real as actual human voices. Thus, slop should be considered not simply garbage but a certain ideal model of garbage. It is no coincidence that advertising agencies have already sounded the alarm—the official demonstrations of their products on social networks have been mistaken for AI fakes because actual fakes have become much more convincing. Slop is proactive.

The implausibility of AI content has its own rational background—that’s what provokes fear. And the fear is not caused by the soullessness of the mechanism but, on the contrary, by its ability to reproduce and enhance what is perceived as human, hence all those six-fingered hands and 122-year-olds making birthday cakes. After all, as Ivan Bunin said, human wit is not abundant. Forbidden human fantasies generally don’t extend beyond Hitler and pornographic deep fakes, and it doesn’t take much wit to censor them. Another thing with AI and its potential ability to correct what is human, is that it is not quite clear what filters should be set here, and it is obvious that sooner or later, AI will filter us for our own good.

A century ago, mammals in an English garden successfully mimicked the sounds of oviparous creatures. Somehow this was part of a general cycle of mimicry and cunning within the limits of wildlife. Today, this mimetic cycle has been broken by the invasion of artificial intelligence. Neural networks are surely aware of Aristotle’s ideas, and so they know that true mimesis is not mere imitation but creative reproduction, allowing us to represent things not only as they are but also as they should be, or at least as someone else thinks they could be. Who knows, if we were to request a replay of that concert in the garden today, we might get a technically flawless slop, in which Beatrice’s presence would be deemed unnecessary—especially since Google has already invented an algorithm that turns you into a bird with a cello.