Comment on Science Is Drowning in AI Slop

• Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Making physical things by hand isn’t just a price issue. It’s also a quality issue. Just look at a hand made beanie and tell me where the seams are. Oh, there aren’t any, because the production method is radically different from machine made beanies.

  With machine made beanies, they tend to have multiple seams. If the fabric comes in square format, you’ll end up with a seam in the back. If it comes in pipe format, you don’t need a back seam, but you still end up with several seams at the top of the beanie. We’ve been using inferior clothes for so many generations that most people don’t even know how good hand made clothes are. That’s also why people refuse to pay for quality like that.

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  • Sas@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    But we already have a sufficient amount of media production and low prices without slop and also media is recreational while clothes are a necessity

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    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah, there’s plenty of low-effort trash floating around the web these days. Then again, the industrial revolution has resulted lots of physical low-effort trash too. Some of that is somewhat useful, like cheap t-shirts, electronics and power tools, but none of that is actually good. It’s not good for the environment or the people using those things.

      They all serve some strange purpose I guess. At least people with very low standards still buy those. I certainly don’t need a cheap bluetooth speaker that breaks after a month. Many companies still produce e-wasete like that, because people keep buying it.

      I can see a similar pattern happening with AI-slop. People click those videos, read those articles, and that produces ad revenue. It’s basically the same incentive, and that results in everyone racing towards the bottom. The basic mechanics of the situation haven’t changed, even though the technology has. What I see here, is just history repeating itself in the digital realm.

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  • Tinidril@midwest.social ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I really can’t imagine a world where I would care how many seams my beanie has. If anything, seams make them easier to fold. Also, modern 3D knitting machines can make beanies without seams, as well as more complicated seamless garments that a human would really struggle to make.

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    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Seams a marker for quality and tells you a lot about the way the item of clothing was made. They can be uncomfortable, and that’s why well made clothes reduce the number of seams needed and hides the ones that are unavoidable.

      This also applies to shoes. Well made leather shoes have only very few seams and they are definitely not located in annoying places. However cheap shoe manufacturers cut corners here. They use whatever scraps they could find in the trash, and sew them together into an abomination roughly the shape of a shoe.

      That’s how modern industrial markets work, and we get what we pay for. We’ve been doing this for such a long time that we don’t even know what good clothes and shoes look like. Hobbyists do, but the mass market just ignores quality and gravitates towards any piece of trash that barely gets the job done.

      I would argue that generative AI models are going to do the same thing with text, audio and video. Currently, the quality is just atrocious, but it’s getting better all the time. Maybe one day, people don’t really mind the minor glitches and artefacts in video, because they’ve been looking at that slop for so many years. Just like the awkward and numerous seams in industrially manufactures clothes, but in digital form.

      BTW 3D knitting definitely solves the problem. Too bad, not that many companies are doing it. On the other hand, it doesn’t scale as well as the older methods. Economies of scale result in low prices, which result in greater quarterly revenue.

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