August 29, 2025

"You hear the term 'slop' a lot now. There’s a good reason for that: A lot of janky internet content is being churned out with A.I., and slop..."

"... is a handy name for this. But there’s another phenomenon—not unconnected, but a little different—that I also think it’s worth getting a handle on. I’ve been thinking about it as 'slurry.' In the non-metaphorical world, slurry means an unresolved mix of liquid and solid; in agriculture, a thin mixture of manure and water. The word comes to mind with this very pervasive kind of content that’s gunking up my feed, where different content types are running together into one, half-resolved substance. Where everything assumes the qualities of everything else. It’s painters having to perform incongruously as influencers to get some attention for their work. It’s audio interviews, auto-transcribed and posted without any editing so that you get not only weird errors but also all the 'you knows' and 'uhms.' It’s long video essays chopped up into little incoherent bits and posted with gibbering subtitles. What these have in common is a feeling of clunkiness that comes when something originated in one medium and hasn’t quite been thought through for another...."

Writes Ben Davis, in "The Great Enslurrification of Culture/Rosalind Krauss's 'post-medium condition' comes for writing, and everything" (ArtNet).

17 comments:

Enigma said...

The lesson of the last 20 years: "Truthy" Wikipedia was first, and it cannot be beaten by AI.

Achilles said...

The people who can proofread the slop will be fine.

I am teaching my kids how to use these tools. “Edit for clarity and grammar” is a great prompt.

It is the ability to compose you need to build. If you have an understanding of how to compose and organize your thoughts into words you can use LLMs to massively speed up the writing process.

It will generate material and you will need to edit it to keep it on track.

Editing the generated material is mostly deleting extra words I find. The LLMs like to add too much explanation and filler.

Wince said...

"Loves it. Eats it up. Eats the slop. Born to slop."

Iman said...

‘She said, "Sloppy"
She said, "Sloppy"
She said, "Sloppy, I think I missed the hole, hole, hole" ‘

Lazarus said...

He's not wrong, but he takes a while to get to the point, and seems like someone one would avoid talking to at parties. Outside of the art world, more people are probably familiar with what a "slurry" is before reading the article than have a firm grasp on what he means after reading it.

When everything comes to you in bits and bytes maybe the concept of "medium" itself has been superseded or sublated (a word I am using to appear more intelligent than I am).

Mr. D said...

Can you slurry, can you picnic, whoa?
Can you slurry, can you picnic?
Come on, come on and slurry down to a stoned soul picnic

rhhardin said...

It's not mixes but ai scripting and voicing. amusing though.

Tattycoram said...

I'm finding this unnerving--I just used the word "slurry" to describe the writing in a lousy new book filled with undigested factoids, thinking I was original.

Jaq said...

"Enshitification" was a fine word, no need to tweak it.

Achilles said...

Really all the LLMs are doing right now is allowing people who were plagiarizing before to have a new way to not do work.

The fundamentals of writing won’t change. It will just make increase the volume that both writers and plagarizers can produce material.

Jaq said...

Slop, slurry, mush, whatever. What is missing is the crystalizing power of human intelligence.

Jupiter said...

"gunking up my feed".
He has a feed?

Jaq said...

On the other hand, AI just read the manual for my car, and scanned the forums, and told me how to stop an annoying behavior by holding the off button down for three full seconds, instead of just pressing it, which only temporarily muted the radio, lying in wait, ready to spring at you at full volume, like Cato.

Aggie said...

Nothing's worse than slurrifying your words, especially during field sobriety tests.

Aggie said...

Who was it that made a career out of that kind of thing, was it Norm Crosby? He used to brag about his prodigious vocabulary and grasp of 'eight-cylinder words'.

rehajm said...

That’s not a slurry tanker that’s a honey wagon…

n.n said...

Generated, recycled slop or spam?

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