Slop is content without grounding

“Slop” is often used to refer generically to any AI-generated content. I don’t think this quite captures the deeper meaning of the term. Slop is content without grounding. It’s content that doesn’t bear information about anything we care about. “Ground” suggests something firm, something you can stand on, something that can only be changed through costly effort. Non-slop could be grounded in an author’s genuine, heartfelt perspective. This is a form of grounding because we presume the author formed this perspective through costly acquisition of experience or knowledge, and the author’s view can’t easily be changed. In the past, all content was costly to create, and thus its existence was a proof of work of the author’s investment in the content, a hint that it is grounded in something meaningful to the author, and so perhaps also to us. Non-slop could also be grounded in correspondence to objective reality. Software that correctly and parsimoniously models something isn’t slop, even…