sudo make ./

The following are a selection of thoughts collected over time about, but not limited to, the state of AI, the internet, and humanity. (A bit of pathos is a must; sorry...)

I have a few topics to get through, so let's get going:

The Origin: Viewer statistics From time to time, I look at the statistics on my blog. And every single time I look, the numbers go up. Though not very big in absolute numbers, when considering the scale of this blog combined with the non-existent marketing and visibility, ~100 views on average per post seems a bit too much... Well, I'm sure you're already able to tell what is most likely going on here: bots, AIs, and scrapers...

Sometimes I really am wondering if even a single actual human (I have not told to do so) found and read a single word from this blog. Most probably not. Except, of course, if you consider it reading the same words if I have indirectly contribute to the word selection of the newest GPTx. I'm sure most people wouldn't. The problem is that one cannot really differentiate between bots and real human traffic. Of course some bots will tell you through their user agent or in another way, but if they really want to visit you website, there is nothing really able to stop them. Except maybe the CAPTCHAs (= Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which at this point are either solvable by computers or in such a way complex that even humans cannot manage anymore. Wow. What a beautiful world we live in... The only reason I originally thought the traffic might not be human generated was the weird hyper fixation on my post containing code. Well, of course the code is more valuable, since everyone needs more (stolen...) code to train all the coding AIs... Because the post itself was not special in any other way that would explain roughly double the amount views than normal.

If I'm wrong and there really is a real human reading this, please contact me! Just send me a mail to blog@benoto.net... It would make my day!

Is the Internet dead? This naturally leads right into the next thought in the line: are there humans left? Well, of course there have to be some humans still in the internet, at least two, me and you (under the assumption that you're not also an AI). But are there more bots than humans? YES, and there have been for a long time already. It simply takes way less resources to make another bot compared to make another human. But what has changed in the last couple of years then? I might only speculate, but I believe the introduction of mainstream slop. Slop in this case is ambiguous as it is currently used for anything and everything, but I will define it in a second. First, however, my thesis why the internet is now more dead than it ever was before: Up until a few years ago, viewed content was still made by humans. Of course, algorithms were able to produce content too, but it was obvious when they did and the average content creator did not use the same methods these bot-content-farms did. This changed with the recent development of AIs and general neural networks. Not only is it a viable and actually used strategy to just generate content, many content creators now also use the same tools used for automation for the creation of their own content (e.g. ChatGPT making thumbnails or helping to brainstorm for a new post) as the fully automated workflows. Everything contributes to the final reality in which effort is not visible for the unknowing viewer.

The Buzzword “Slop” Now, to round this chain of thought off, I still need to deliver what I promised before: the definition of slop. Though, I might need to apologize, there is not a single one, since the term is used in such an inflationary manner, it does not really mean much anymore. But recently, I heard a quite fitting one with the personal definition I thought of:

Slop is content taking more effort to consume than it took to produce in the first place.

Of course, in most modern cases, the word is used in the context of AI making worthless content, but that is not the only way the word slop can be used. Humans, just like AIs are able to produce slop. The difference between the two is simply the fact that in most cases human slop is harder to find than AIs slop. That's because for humans to create something, they still have to put in some amount of energy and time. It's impossible for humans to create without using any amount of time and resources. The difficult part with the aforementioned definition is the fact that AIs do also consume lots of resources and therefore there seemingly was a lot of effort that went into a given piece of content. But that is a misconception. Here, I would like to give the analogy of the physical difference between work and energy. Both of these are measured in joule; the difference being however that if you expend a lot of energy to push against a door which does not budge, you have not produced any work. Same as in the analogy, AIs can use up a lot of energy, resources, and “effort”, but these facts are not sufficient for arguing that the AI did any work.

Giving credit where credit's due, the previous definition originally came from an unknown LinkedIn post; however, I found it on the blog post: The Effort Economy of Slop by Dr. Leon Furze

Potentially, the only other human ever reading these very words will be a potential employer who clicked the link in my application to view the applicants blog. Well, hello there. I really hope my “blogging skill” will increase in the future; this still feels like writing a nonsensical diary.

Anyway, CUL8R!