The words "AI slop" were coined to describe an instinctive revulsion.
But the people using don't know exactly what it is that's bothering them.
It's not the quality of the visuals. It's not the ease of creation. And it's not any sort of style cue.
It's the lack of artistic vision.
What's artistic vision? It's the combination of two things:
- An idea in my mind that I want you to see in the way that I see it.
- A plan for how I'm going to get it across to you.
Right now, an AI can't have artistic vision, because it has no object model, so it can't have an idea, and it has no theory of mind for you or anyone else, so it can't make a plan for how it's going to show you the idea that it doesn't have.
So when you tell an AI "make me a short film about a cat playing basketball" you get slop. Lots of pictures and sound, no artistic vision.
But when spend thirty-seven hours alternately banging your head against the desk in frustration, and wrangling the AI until it executes your exact idea and your exact plan, then what comes out will have artistic vision, because you supplied it.
Someday, AI will be able to have a true artistic vision of its own. On that day, it will be a person.
Until that day, AI is a terrible artist, but a wonderful brush.
The creator of the C++ programming language, Bjarne Stroustrup, says AI-generated code is not successful and calls the idea of using natural language as a programming language idiotic.
He says humans will still write code and use abstraction.
According to him, AI generates bloated code with more bugs and security holes, making it hard to validate.
He also says the senior developers needed to validate it are starting to retire because they don’t want to deal with validating something that changes every time you change your prompt.
He goes on to say that AI is not good at writing safety-critical or performance-critical code: “Now, let’s say that 70 or 80% of the world’s code doesn’t fit that pattern, but it’s that 10, 20% of the code that I’m interested in.”