I wonder if they went straight to "AI" as an insult independently from the older generations, or if they were using "slop" like the rest of us but had to adopt a new insult because "slop" has been co-opted to refer to things that are terrible whether AI or not.
While slop seems to be the popular term online, I never hear it spoken aloud. With Gen Alpha’s exposure to AI mostly through school, spoken media (youtube, tv), and their parents, “AI” probably cropped up independently as an insult
I feel "slop" is more specifically about quality of some output rather than a synonym for "bullshit" like "AI" appears to be. And like "bullshit", "AI" can mean either "not true", "poor quality", or "this/that sucks".
And "That’s so slop" sounds awkward. But mostly I think the kids haven’t even heard of "AI slop" which isn’t really in the general lexicon, at least yet. That is, the prevalence of its use in these circles is a bubble effect. I doubt anybody ever uses it in kids' Tiktoks or Youtubes or whatever.
Slop meant cheap garbage meant for mass consumption before it was used for AI. The roots are actually antisemitic. 4chan's cooking board used "goyslop" to mean fast food and other cheap consumerist foods that they claimed the illuminati or jewish conspiracy or whateve fed to non jews to keep them unhealthy. Its crazy how often 4chan's neonazi rambling are the start of so many cultural phenomena. They supported trump way before he became a serious candidate in 2016
That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.
I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.
People give 4chan far too much credit. Slop was a term that was used, maybe not widely, well before it was picked up by internet racists. Slop was used to refer to the stuff you'd feed to pigs, and if you were American, school children.
I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.
They are not dumb. Just not initiated in the direction required to understand this. And the purpose of incessant marketing is to prevent them from doing so..
Well, dumb-ness is subjective. On one hand, it's hard to call someone like Richard Dawkins "dumb" in a broad sense, but as a man of science he knows what it means to study and research something before drawing conclusions... And you do not need to be a computer scientist to understand the basic principles of an LLM. In that sense, Richard Dawkins is displaying a side of him that is almost willfully dumb when he's waxing poetic about how "Claudia" is sentient.
Morality aside, living as an intolerant is such a bad value prop. You're really just signing up to be mad your whole life, because the toothpaste does not go back in the tube. Gays are not going back in the closet. Just like interracial marriage is not going away, and women's suffrage is not going away. If you're mad about these things you're like a social footnote that people fifty years from now won't really understand because the things you're mad about will have inevitably become so normalized.
I mean, will it be normalized? By the way rates are going it seems quite the opposite.
And your other examples don't quite work. Interracial marriage has been allowed in many places (if not most places) throughout history, and even female suffrage was a thing in some polities. Homosexual marriage is not a something that's ever really been practiced in its current form until basically the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage
> Interracial marriage has been allowed in many places (if not most places) throughout history, and even female suffrage was a thing in some polities.
You do understand that they were referring to the places it was disallowed? LGTBQ people and same sex marriage have also been tolerated in some times and places (even before the 70s).
While homosexuality has been accepted in many nations and cultures before the modern day, gay marriage including custodianship over children is basically a 21st century invention.
It's not a "21st century invention," not even because it has a longer history than that, but because it's just marriage. It isn't an innovation. Any more than women's suffrage was an innovation. In both cases it's extending enfranchisement to more people.
Your article is literally saying what I'm saying. I agree with you... homosexual partnerships are common, but claiming that they were the equivalent of marriage is ahistoric:
> At the same time, many of these relationships might be more clearly understood as mentoring relationships between adult men and young boys rather than an analog of marriage.
Of the western world it says:
> Conubium existed only between a civis Romanus and a civis Romana (that is, between a male Roman citizen and a female Roman citizen), so that a marriage between two Roman males (or with a slave, amasius) would have no legal standing in Roman law (apart, presumably, from the arbitrary will of the emperor in the two aforementioned cases)
Of China:
> While the relationship was clearly approved by the wider community, and was compared to heterosexual marriage, it did not involve a religious ceremony binding the couple.
Of early modern times:
> Michel de Montaigne, a 16th-century French philosopher and prominent essayist, reports having heard a third-party description of a same-sex wedding occurring some years earlier using the usual Tridentine marriage ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. The ceremony was said to have occurred a few years before 1581, at the San Giovanni a Porta Latina basilica in Rome and the participants were burned at the stake by the Vatican
It then claims Anne Lister married Ann Walker, but if you read the article detailing this marriage, there wasn't any sanctioned ceremony. Rather the two women took communion together and thereafter they considered themselves married. There was no socially sanctioned recognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Lister#Relationship_with_...
> Eventually the women took communion together on Easter Sunday (30 March) 1834 in Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, York, and thereafter considered themselves married, but without legal recognition.
It literally says all this in your article. Did you read it?
The only references to pre-modern homosexual marriage are hearsay reports of Siwa oasis and the Phillipines. Neither of these cite written records or any sort of proof, and both of these would have been in somewhat literate societies.
And the church and its conservative patriarchal misogynist homophobic dogma ruled all our lives for centuries. But it turns out you can beat the church, if you prove to people that there's no invisible man in the sky watching everything you do, dinosaur bones weren't planted here 6,000 years ago, and gay people are actually normal people that are just slightly different. Conservatives may be depending on hate to keep their numbers up, but that's all they have now.
Once again, I'm not sure this is true. Perhaps the Catholic Church is beaten and relegated to the dustbin of history. The article fails to mention the real reason behind a lot of the LGBT acceptance rates going lower, which is that Muslim migrants have more kids and Islam is a very socially conservative religion.
So maybe you beat the Catholics but is there enough willpower to defeat the Muslims?
Again, you're assuming I'm sort of social conservative pariah. I'm not.
> and gay people are actually normal people that are just slightly different
Once again you're trying to convince me instead of the children of the Netherlands. Good luck.
Your analysis is correct. Personally, I think that Islam getting the western left to embrace it as part of "the oppressed" has been the most successful social social movement of the last 20 years.
I don't need to convince anyone. That's my point. The trend is toward liberalism in general, across the globe, despite outliers. Plenty of academic study backs this up, if you care to research it.
There is no trend towards liberalism except in western nations, and even that is debatable. People operate under this assumption that everything magically becomes more liberal. It doesn't. There have been regressions and progressions. Progress is not guaranteed.
> Plenty of academic study backs this up, if you care to research it.
With all due respect to the academics, there is more to the world than the Western world and most academics in the West have no ability to comprehend the East. I say this as someone whose family is from 'the East' and so I think I have some more insight into it than many people do. The simple truth is that about 3.1 billion people alone live in India and China and the majority of people in the world live outside the West and these areas are not seeing any sort of great social progress. Sure, there's a lot of economic progress, but social progress in the Western sense is absent (progress in the non-western sense is continuing). There is no evidence that any of these countries are any more closer to embracing gay marriage than they were before. On the periphery of the west, such as the island of Bermuda, they actually repealed gay marriage. Even California, if they were to ask the voters, would repeal gay marriage due to the presence of Asians, Hispanics and blacks, who voted against it the last time they were asked.
Something for you to consider: if you genuinely believe you have more expert & accurate knowledge than dozens of people who have each spent their entire career studying a subject including doing years-long scientific studies on it, then either you're a genius or you severely overestimate yourself.
how do you do a 'scientific' study on a historical question? Did they simulate multiple worlds and do statistical analyses to see how societies develop? Of course not... this is an archaeological/historical question not a scientific one.
> accurate knowledge than dozens of people
Yes, if you look at experts outside the main Western academic circles, they're pretty much in agreement about it.
> either you're a genius or you severely overestimate yourself.
I'm talking about approval for gay marriage not homosexuality. Obviously homosexuality is ancient. Homosexual marriage in the modern sense is absent from the historical record until 1971. Where it was portrayed it was typically as a joke .
I'm being down voted but I have no real stance on this. If anything I'm in favor of civil rights for all, but I don't see how that changes the historical record. Gay marriage is a novelty compared to female suffrage and interracial marriage.
Interracial marriage was federally protected in 2022, and only permitted by court opinion in 1967 in the US. You better believe it was not socially acceptable in much of the South just because the court said it was legal.
Heck, I bet there are communities today where you cannot safely live if you have an interracial marriage. I don't think it's as solved as you suggest.
I lived in a lefty urban environment in the 90s and recall many people telling me I wasn't allowed to date noon write women.
There is more to 'the world' than America. America was an aberration for legislating marriage so closely. Consider that someone in India in the 1800s would have thought that caste simply 'was', whereas the rest of the world would have been shocked by it. Similarly, anti-miscegenation laws, while common in America, and easy to think of as 'normal' from an American perspective, were not that common. Almost every culture normally socially approved of a man taking on a foreign wife, and most cultures welcomed foreign men who adapted into it marrying a local woman. There are countless examples from almost every part of the globe. It wasn't exactly uncommon. For the last two thousand years, the largest religions on the planet, would have supported a man and woman of different races to be married. Neither Catholicism nor Orthodoxy nor Islam nor Hinduism nor Buddhism (which together constitute the vast majority of the world) would have ever had any issues with interracial marriage. In fact, they would have encouraged it against a non-believer of the respective traditions. Not a single one would have supported gay marriage.
We have historical proof of homosexual marriage dating back to imperial Rome. IIRC the latest acknowledged homosexual union before modern times goes back to early 1500, before it started being prosecuted more aggressively by the catholic church.
There is no proof of homosexual marriage in imperial Rome. 'Marriage' as we practice it today does not have a direct analogue in Rome, but all the institutions one could point to that could be likened to it explicitly stated it was between a male and female. Can you please provide written proof? If it is common, it should not be hard to find in the extremely prolific writings of the Romans.
If you can understand italian I can suggest you Alessandro Barbero's Podcast, it's a pretty famous historian, there are several episodes about the topic.
I know where you're getting at - Not really the modern equivalent, only for the rich part of the population, contrasting opinions from historian at the time, etc.
But frankly the same objections could be raised even about the equally famous "did Ancient romans have running water in their homes?" question, and yet for some weird reason it's a far less controversial topic.
You're taking a fairly strong stance, though it may not seem that way to you. "Same sex marriage was legalized in 1971" is a factual statement not in dispute. "Same sex marriage is a 21st century invention" may seem to you to be the same statement but it carries significant ideological baggage and is a way stronger statement way more in dispute. You go on to say things like "the real reason behind a lot of the LGBT acceptance rates going lower ... is that Muslim migrants have more kids and Islam is a very socially conservative religion." I hardly feel I need to explain why that is not a simple factual statement but really a statement of an ideological and political position.
So while I totally believe you may feel that way, you aren't simply being downvoted for indisputable facts, you've taken a position in a contentious ideological and political debate.
There is no debate. If someone were to point out a written record of an actual marriage that is using equivalent rites to a heterosexual marriage with exact legal recognition of that contract plus additionally rights over children, I will relent. This is not some ideological position. It's simply an absence of any such thing. For example, it should not be controversial to say that surrogacy is a modern day thing and that there is no historic record prior to it of a woman being considered the biological mother of a child she didn't bear. People are having their feelings about gay marriage override simple historical fact.
The Wikipedia page on the history of gay marriage makes the exact same point I've made. My statement is not controversial and is the accepted view. There are countless examples of gay people considering themselves married, but without societal recognition equivalent to heterosexual marriage. You cannot consider this the same as gay marriage because gay rights activists said that similar arrangements in the modern day were not enough and they needed to be married in an equivalent fashion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions
Intolerance, of any kind, does not care about praticality. It's the infinite scream of a child, saying "but I don't like it!".
I have no proof, but I really wonder how much of the current resurgence of regressive ideologies (the correct word would be "conservative", but truth is this is a phenomena we can observe across all of the political spectrum) is the byproduct of the glorification of infantilization and nostalgia in our society.
"I want my old movies, I want my old games, I want my old white neighbourhood, I want my parents, I want my old society, I want my youth back".
On the other hand, the proliferation of shovelware Show HNs is a problem. Now that anyone can "create" a project and that project is so much less likely to have any quality or still be active and maintained in 3 months, they're not worth the same level of attention. And they're usually from spammers with little to no activity here other than self promotion.
Why even be concerned with the prompt, it's an undeveloped thought from someone who doesn't care enough to develop it themself. It's essentially a tweet.
It won't get the same level of attention, but the question prior to the lapse into Chinese was pretty damning as well. It wasn't a difficult question at all but she didn't understand or answer it correctly until it was asked a second time.
Because (1) you'd be rewarding the entity that originated and normalized the loss of freedom that Google much later adopted, and (2) as Apple restricts more freedoms you'll still be able to enjoy them on Android for a few more years as Google remains (comparatively) more user friendly.
I've never felt a need to completely withdraw from the phone or the internet. If you just get off the 6 biggest sites/networks it goes a long way. The worst stuff/people have been captured by network effects and are quarantined in place on Twitter etc.
reply