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?

    • yermaw@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      10 days ago

      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?

      • Iunnrais@lemmy.world
        3·
        10 days ago

        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.

  • remon@ani.social
    371·
    10 days ago

    • Super Hero movies

    • almost anything Disney produces these days.

    • VivianRixia@piefed.socialEnglish
      23·
      10 days ago

      I’d say more specifically, Disney’s live action remakes of their old films are slop. Though I’ve not watched a Disney film since Turning Red, they’ve not seemed appealing for a while now.

      • Acamon@lemmy.worldOP
        12·
        10 days ago

        Oh God yes. The studio push for reboots, remakes and adaptations already runs the risk of by-the-numbers ‘creativity’, but those live action remakes are the natural progression. Not even a new take or reimagining, just a lazy, safe cashgrab.

  • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
    32·
    10 days ago

    “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.

    • LeapSecond@lemmy.zip
      17·
      10 days ago

      And that’s why older media is usually better. Only the good parts have survived and the 90% has been forgotten.

      • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
        10·
        10 days ago

        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.

  • emb@lemmy.world
    31·
    10 days ago

    SEO slop is the first thing that comes to mind. It’s super-charged in ubiquity with AI now, but it’s been a thing about as long as search engines.

    Sometimes you land on a page and you can tell you’re only there because they loaded it with keywords, repeating the same phrases you searched for in every variation.

    • Acamon@lemmy.worldOP
      13·
      10 days ago

      SEO is actually one of the things that started me thinking about this. Although those dumb overly long cooking blogs were (previously) written by humans, the incentives led to a style that was no longer genuine. Much worse were those shameless fake review sites that existed solely to promote some VPN or antivirus. Sure, a human might’ve put that together, but so many words with so little regard for meaning.

      • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
        6·
        10 days ago

        I never understood why we tolerate the whole recipe site bullshit. It’s been a thing my entire life and it would take no effort to make a recipe site that just gives the recipe. You could when keep doing the 8000 word essays for the search engines and just hide it in the background or something.

        • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
          6·
          10 days ago

          I believe the important part is to make people scroll, not just the number of words. For some unholy reason google considers that a better website.

          That’s also why some sites have a “go to recipe” button at the top now, which auto scrolls you to the recipe. They don’t care that you read the text, only that you scrolled a lot.

          • Acamon@lemmy.worldOP
            3·
            10 days ago

            Oh man, that’s soothing. A recipe, for a meal, and it explains what I need to do, in the order I do it, and the pictures actually show the cooking. This is some next level stuff. I hope it catches on!

      • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@slrpnk.net
        10·
        10 days ago

        He didn’t ghostwrite that, his name is on it. He also worked closely with Harriet, and had access to Robert’s notes including whole sections already written. See also Brian Henson making Muppet Christmas Carol and Treasure Island, or Christopher Tolkien publishing supplements to the Silmarillion. Care, authorship, and intimacy abound. Not slop.

        Compare with “New Hardy Boys” or the Dune prequels (which may have Brian Herbert’s name on the cover but was clearly ghostwritten in large part). Slop.

        • blackbrook@mander.xyz
          2·
          10 days ago

          Weren’t the original Hardy Boys slop from the start? It’s been a while since I read about it, but I think I remember reading that they were kind of cynically churned out by some paid hack, and occasionally revised to keep them from getting too dated. (Human slop generating practices have gotten worse over the years, tho)

  • Goldholz @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    23·
    10 days ago

    DropShipping. Basicly everything made in China

    If we want to really strech it: plastic. We should have never invented plastic. The world would be a better one

    • Triumph@fedia.io
      18·
      10 days ago

      Plastics are wonderful in certain use cases. Medical, yes please. Automotive, sure. Several layers of packaging on a plastic toy that’s also bound together with plastic wire, no thank you.

    • fonix232@fedia.io
      17·
      10 days ago

      Also included in this: the thousands upon thousands of mobile games that are literally the same exact game with minor asset switching.

      Like, 99% of those “town/castle/whatever building” games that have fixed locations for buildings etc., they’re all based on maybe 2-3 white label game “engines” that are ready to be re-labelled with new assets, new logos, new story (even though the story events driving it are the same, the “side dish” storytelling changes minimally).

      This also goes for pretty much any game format that becomes trending. You can bet your tushie that the moment a game format is even just borderline popular… there will be a dozen or so Chinese software houses copying the mechanics and looks and behaviour, and within a week you can buy a white label version of it for a few thousand dollars.

    • MyMindIsLikeAnOcean@piefed.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 days ago

      Comedic actors being desperate to take a dramatic turn often leads to this kind of slop, especially in the case of Will Farrell. There’s a whole era of films he did that’s bizarre and “cringey”, including that insane Woody Allen film. He said the lifetime movie was a satire…but there’s a certain amount of hubris involved in believing he could pull it off.

  • TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world
    22·
    10 days ago

    Most phone apps, a lot of modern software, SEO bullshit, the current web, virtually every show, the vast majority of Hollywood films, a lot of the music that makes it to the charts, influencers’ “content”, adverts, the overwhelming pile of crap that no one buys on Steam, lots of AAA games that too many people buy on steam, the poorly-written bottom of the barrel fanfiction that passes as books, and a depressing amount of stuff posted on social media, including this comment.

    Yes, I am grumpy today, why do you ask?

  • DickFiasco@sh.itjust.works
    21·
    10 days ago

    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.

      • Bongles@lemmy.zip
        4·
        10 days ago

        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.

  • FridaySteve@lemmy.world
    20·
    10 days ago

    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

  • Fargeol@lemmy.world
    211·
    10 days ago
    • Funko pops
    • those Hong Kong ninja movies from the 80s that mixed chinese movies and ninja scenes
    • food that lost all taste and is basically salt, sugar, water and/or fat
    • any movie franchise or TV show that has a 37th sequel or season
    • The Loudness War in music
    • Fast Fashion
    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      10 days ago

      those Hong Kong ninja movies from the 80s that mixed chinese movies and ninja scenes

      You shut your whore mouth, those chopsocky films are a treasure! The difference in quality and how the stories barely go together are some of the appeal of those movies. It’s really cool how far some creators go to make their movie and have everything sorta be a somewhat cohesive narrative.

      Shit like Kung Pow are great examples of the genre being done very well (even as a parody).

      • Fargeol@lemmy.world
        4·
        10 days ago

        I know what you mean, but I still can’t tell the difference between The Ninja Force, Ninja The Protector, Full Metal Ninja, and Ninja Terminator.

        Those movies were produced en masse with little to no regard to copyright, contracts with actors or global quality and that pretty much fits the definition of slop.

        Aside from the so-bad-they’re-good ninja scenes (always a pleasure to see a ninja turning into a wooden stick in a park), I just find those movies boring.

        • Krudler@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 days ago

          I think you’re talking about those like bootleg ones that were hastily assembled pieces of shit from stolen Run Run Shaw films, etc

          Right?

            • Krudler@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              10 days ago

              Looks like we might be discussing the same movies. I checked out the link you included, and he did work at Shaw Studios and was apparently known to splice in footage not filmed by his crew. Nice

  • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    201·
    9 days ago

    The 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.