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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20345 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Pre-AI slop was actually good - and AI ruined it

I've seen many claims that "Slop existed before AI" and that means AI isn't destroying the internet. I believe that is absolutely false. The OG slop was actually good, and now it's gone.

Let's define exactly what we're talking about. The slop is web content created by marketing teams, at the absolute lowest cost possible, in order to improve search engine ranking. Let's look at a specific example: when looking up a term mentioned in another post I came across slop created by the same company and same marketing team, but years apart. Let's see if you can tell which slop is worthless garbage ruined by AI, and which is slop that despite being slop may actually be slightly useful.

Critical Insights into Hostile Witness Designation: What It Means When a Lawyer Asks for Permission to Treat the Witness as Hostile

In today's hypercompetitive legal landscape, every advantage matters—especially when it comes to managing witness testimony. A seemingly simple request by a lawyer to treat a witness as hostile can fundamentally change the dynamics of a trial and even determine its outcome. Research indicates that strategic use of this tactic can help uncover inconsistencies, expose bias, and ultimately strengthen a case. This comprehensive guide is designed for legal professionals, law students, and litigators who want to delve into the complexities of hostile witness designations and understand the full strategic, procedural, and ethical dimensions of this courtroom tool. We have optimized this article using high-ranking keywords such as “hostile witness designation,” “treat witness as hostile,” and “litigation strategies” to ensure it not only provides unmatched value but also performs strongly in search engine rankings.

...

link

What Does It Mean When A Lawyer Says “Permission To Treat The Witness As Hostile?”

We asked attorneys throughout the United States what it means when a lawyer says “Permission to treat the witness as hostile?” Several attorneys responded and our readers might find what they said interesting. We hope you enjoy their answers.

It means that the witness you call to testify is not on your side, i.e., is ‘hostile’ to your client’s position. Nevertheless, you want to call that witness to testify in your case (in which you’re trying to prove your case, not disprove the other side’s) for other reasons, i.e., to fill in some facts that need to be stated for you to satisfy your burden of putting into evidence all of the facts necessary to demonstrate your entitlement to bring the claims your client has asserted. If the Judge accepts your assertion that the witness is hostile to your case, you are permitted to ‘lead’ the witness with questions like, ‘isn’t it true that the light was red when you first observed the blue car?’ If the witness is not ‘hostile’ the lawyer is not permitted to ‘lead’ the witness, i.e., to suggest the answer to the question. All you’re allowed to do is to ask open-ended questions like ‘where were you on the 20th of March? Who, if anyone else, was also there?’

...

link

Both of these articles were created with the exact same intention: to enhance search engine ranking at the lowest cost possible. Yet one of them makes the internet a better place, and the other one ruins it. I might even contend that when a human is tasked with writing worthless fluff, that human can't help but to try to insert some nuggets of truth into that fluff. It's simply human nature. AI has no such compulsion.

Both of these articles were created with the exact same intention: to enhance search engine ranking at the lowest cost possible

This is obviously not true though. Yes it's interesting that these are same company, same topic, but the early example is very clearly not some low effort, low cost article. It quotes actual people ffs!

I have worked in marketing for a number of years, and produced a good deal of SEO slop. I'm sure I'm not the only person here with the same experience either. I daresay that every single person in such a position will say the same thing: gathering quotes, even internal quotes, is a ballache, and immediately adds a bunch of extra time needed to any given project. The Medium article has multiple dozen quotes. It is like the highest effort piece of SEO work you will ever see.

edit: I figure I should provide an actual example of SEO slop. Here's a topic I actually remember publishing on once (not this specific article, just the search term)

https://www.integrate.io/blog/7-key-differences-between-data-lakes-vs-data-warehouses/

Data lakes vs data warehouses. A simple enough technical question that a lot of B2B data companies would compete for. This is a very standard SEO article: it's got a nice list hook in the title; Good number of links, both internal and external; Couple of CTAs; etc. etc.. And it's all pretty low effort: no custom design work, no diagrams, just the 1 stock cover image; no quotes, no insight; it's just a very standard presentation of the basics on this topic.

This is a very standard SEO article: it's got a nice list hook in the title; Good number of links, both internal and external; Couple of CTAs; etc. etc.. And it's all pretty low effort: no custom design work, no diagrams, just the 1 stock cover image; no quotes, no insight; it's just a very standard presentation of the basics on this topic.

Yeah it's pretty standard. Now let's look at AI slop. Which one is better?

The human slop is a very mid fluff piece that has some useful information. The AI slop one is disgusting and its very existence is an insult to humanity.

I'm sure they put together a scalable and low cost way of doing this. For example, they mention a newsletter, it may send out requests for opinion regularly, and subscribers can send in their hot takes via a form. Then they can simply cherry pick a bunch of halfway decent responses, write 1 paragraph of exposition, and have an article in less effort than it takes to manually write one.

If you look at the other articles on that page, it's clear they're not in the business of putting a lot of effort into each article.

Low cost in the sense that they aren't literally paying the participants for their quotes, sure. But low cost in the sense that the marketer does not need to expend a lot of salaried time? No way. Just the lead time for gathering everything would add months to the timeline, whereas a typical SEO blog is going from brief to publish in under a week.

Like the other articles on the page you mention, these are so much more typical of what SEO blogging actually was:

3 Reasons Why Going To Law School Has Become Popular Again

10 Ways To Make A Case For Yourself As A Lawyer

4 Tips To A Successful Maternity Leave While Having A Solo Practice

The latter 2 actually go the extra step of having some custom work with infographics, so slightly higher effort, but these are clearly written as very standard SEO articles. There is nothing remotely interesting in them in terms of content or style, and nothing to distinguish them from a typical AI written blog

nothing to distinguish them from a typical AI written blog

I would have to disagree with you there. They lack the "We have optimized this article using high-ranking keywords ... to ensure it not only provides unmatched value but also performs strongly in search engine rankings." part

In 2010 I had a job writing brief scene descriptions for a porn company. Three sentences maximum. I was a political science major so couldn't help but slip in totally irrelevant references to Sandinistas or whatever after getting the basics - blonde, threesome, etc. - out of the way. My boss didn't seem to care. I guess it made no difference to the, er, bottom line.

Now AI can do that and it will surely be without my idiosyncratic approach.

Why Sandinistas though?

Oh I have no idea how I worked that in this far out, but I did

I see. So - I'm guessing you had to watch the movies before writing the scene descriptions?

Curious. How do you actually get AIs that will process porn? It seems like you need to grab open weight models and fine tune them? And the fine tunings themselves are valuable enough that you don't just post them? Definitely doesn't seem as easy as grabbing a Claude API key and writing a Python script.

I'm sure ai's own idiosyncratic apprach can figure out how to slip in a few emdashes, and some not x, but y into each output

The guy that hired me would not just get AI to do it, and he wouldn't include these tangential irrelevances. Point is my human randomness was able to get in. But no longer.

Some human scuff can be a good thing. Not sure if I have enough information to make the call in this case.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

This guy is full of crap

CD distortion

Red book cd is the closest we're ever going to get to perfect undistorted audio in the mainstream. Streaming is a slight step down unless you use a meme audiophile service like tidal. 99% of listeners can't tell the difference in a blind test.

jitteriness of digital video

What?

the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control,

8bit is perfectly in control. 8bit synth is basically an instument and artists make the music on it that they can.

The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it.

True, though generally made as an artistic choice rather than unavoidable.

The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it.

Singers have to practice and learn techniques to make these sounds

You're just proving his point. All of these used to be, at some point in time, seen as technical limitations worthy of contempt. Now they're deliberate artistic choices.

Early CD compression has a unique sound, which is what many a 2000s nostalgia pieces are now trying to recreate, go play Night-Runners: Prologue for a good example.

The jitteriness of digital video is so common an aesthetic you may not even notice it anymore, mainly because we don't associate video with digital video tape which is what created all those artifacts and motivated the continued existence of film for some, but half of modern horror relies on it. And even purely digital artifacts have had this phenomenon. You can look at this year's Ghost in the Shell for lots of proeminent examples. It pays big homage to pixel sorting and other databending techniques which only exist to recreate and magnify the quirks of digital media.

8bit music used to be seen as ridiculous and antiquated when we finally managed to have decent sounding music on the SNES. And now you don't even consider it as "wrong" or "poor", it's just another genre of music, with its own nobility. QED.

No. There is no such thing as cd compression. Cds do not have distortion period. He is full of shit.

Brian Eno is full of shit about music production. Well, golly gosh.

Other revelations:

Escoffier was full of shit about cookery, he couldn't boil an egg.

Newton was full of shit about physics, he had no idea what planet he was living on.

Pasteur was full of shit about microbiology, dude didn't even wipe the cow dung off his milk bottles.

Be pendantic about bitrate if you want, dynamic range compression is a thing, the loudness wars did happen and Californication sounded like shit on CD at the time, and so did much of the output from 1995 to 2002 in a way that was noticeable enough to create a style.

We can argue about the technicalities of how that happened, audiophile forums probably have terabytes of flamewars about the specifics at this point. But that's all besides the general point about how people perceive media over time.

I think Eno was talking about reader distortions anyways. Which are also a staple of eerie sound design now.

In other words, Audio CDs did not use audio data compression (the techniques used to make things like MP3 files smaller, at the expense of making the audio sound slightly distorted), but did often use dynamic range compression (an audio editing technique used to make the volume of a song more consistent, by making quiet sounds louder and/or making loud sounds quieter).

You can ask a good LLM the same question and get a superior answer to both, because it's not optimized for SEO. I agree with your premise that human SEO slop is better than AI SEO slop, but not that it matters.

A good LLM may give an answer that's more technically accurate and thorough, but I'd have to read all the glazing and em-dashes. The human slop is more entertaining and pleasurable to read.

You can make an LLM avoid glazing and figurative language. It will still sound like an LLM and maybe a domain expert would give a better, more concise answer. But I think LLMs are more than adequate for answering questions with facts, where the primary goal is understanding the answer, especially niche ones which you’ll have trouble finding an human expert.

Sure, I agree that llms are adequate if that's the bar, but this is quite a low bar.

If only there was a worldwide network where domain experts could share concise answers to a variety of questions. And if only there was some sort of engine that let people search this network to find the answers they are looking for. I would argue such a system could serve many queries better than an LLM can.

But alas there's no way soemthing like that could exist.

You can make an LLM avoid ... figurative language.

Literally impossible. Never seen a prompt that succeeds at this and would love to see one if you have one.

If only there was a worldwide network where domain experts could share concise answers to a variety of questions. And if only there was some sort of engine that let people search this network to find the answers they are looking for.

We had that, Stack Overflow. We still do but it all but died. Notice that it started declining before AI.

There are multiple theories, but mine is simply that there are lots of beginners who tire out the domain experts, and the (novelty) incentive to answer decreases while old answers constantly become outdated, lowering median answer quality, further decreasing incentive. LLMs solve the beginner problem, and we can maybe address the motivation problem by e.g. paying experts and training LLMs to cite them (I suspect this is possible and would improve training).

Moreover, LLMs are the ultimate search engine, better than Stack Overflow and Google could’ve been, because if the question is exact, the LLM may regurgitate the expert’s exact answer, but it can also handle (near-arbitrary) peculiarities and combine domains, which there aren’t enough experts for.

You can make an LLM avoid ... figurative language.

Literally impossible. Never seen a prompt that succeeds at this and would love to see one if you have one.

I have ChatGPT set to “efficient” with a custom prompt to cite sources. I’ve never seen it glaze or use figurative language yet. It still has LLMisms and occasional (filler) casual exclamations, but it has been concise enough, and answered specific questions I couldn’t get from manually searching online.

Why do these things seem so rigid on their style?

Many years ago I had a job doing SEO filler content for Commercial Ice makers. AI is welcome to take that job

Are you saying you didn't like doing the job, or was the content actually bad?

It was fine as something that paid but trying to write articles differentiating a 9kg per hour ice maker and a 11kg per hour ice maker is difficult

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