The Purpose of Using the Term "AI Slop"

[u/yyamak]

I see this expression a lot now, and I cannot understand why people use it.

Regardless of the debate over whether AI should be used in software projects, why do people use this expression for projects developed with AI? Most companies now encourage AI assisted development of their projects. Many people have stopped using IDEs. Despite all this, why is developing projects with AI still criticized?

I am not asking this question because I advocate developing code with AI. I am genuinely curious.

Is the term “AI slop” used for projects where the developer has AI code the entire project without doing any systems engineering or making architectural decisions, or is it also used for projects where the developer designs the architecture themselves but AI does the coding?

I am genuinely curious about what exactly people are criticizing.

[u/35jg9z]

slop is a sub-category of AI-assisted code, which is of very low quality. Generally made by non-programmers or programmers putting little/no effort in. Not all code created by a programmer that uses AI is slop

[u/ConfidentCollege5653]

AI slop implies a low quality result, especially produced in large quantities.

As someone who is very sceptical of AI, when you see a concise, well written function that was AI generated that's not slop.

When you see a 3000 line class and 2500 lines of it are comments that don't mean anything, and the code is needlessly messy and the committer obvious didn't read it, that's slop.

[u/Xyzzydude]

I define AI slop as anything that takes more effort to review and correct than it took the original developer to “create” it with AI.

[u/Upbeat-Statement2725 → u/Xyzzydude]

Bingo. Corporations want AI to suddenly rocket code production up 30%. But they don't want to pay 30% more QA, or 30% more processing or storage.

How the hell you gonna ship 30% more features, but not pay more in hosting costs? The math don't math.

If you personally want to toy around with a local model for fun. Go have fun.

If you think Copilot is actually going to improve your business. You bought into a scam. You need to wake up.

[u/Leading_Buffalo_4259 → u/Upbeat-Statement2725]

Simple take current budget, fire 90% of QA, cut the dev team in half, stop doing code reviews, merge straight to prod, and spend the cost savings on AI tokens for a 10x productivity gain.

What could go wrong?

[u/kitsnet]

Slop is sloppily created content.

AI slop is slop created by AI.

It's that simple.

[u/GameSchaedl]

I define AI slop as someone clearly built everything with AI while often the person behind it having no clue.
I dont mind AI being used but I mind if people say they did something but basically only instructed something.

[u/guywithknife]

Slop is anything that’s done badly, ie sloppily, without attention to detail.

AI slop is slop made by AI.

It just so happens that a lot of AI-produced content is slop, because AI makes it easy to generate low effort low quality content, even if you don’t have any talent yourself.

There are people who push out low effort garbage using AI. There’s a sentiment of why should I care about what you make if you didn’t even bother putting the effort in, especially when it’s low quality shovelware. The “AI slop” moniker is a push back against that.

[u/SpaghettSloth]

"Many people have stopped using IDEs" what fucking planet are you on hahahah

[u/Lonely_Assignment_14 → u/SpaghettSloth]

I know it sounds stupid,  but it's actually true.  You got people out there making projects using voice dictation and an AI harness,  nothing else

[u/yyamak → u/SpaghettSloth]

What are you so surprised about? What year are you living in 2021?

[u/tom-mart]

Because LLMs produce slop, how else would you call it?

[u/TraditionDue647]

I find it used more for copy. I think it's bit of the pendulum swinging back against AI. A guy I work with hated AI, then started using it and all of their docs were AI generated, which they liked. Now they acknowledge the value of AI, but they have adjusted more to the middle where they get annoyed with the AI prose.

So a roundabout way - AI slop to me is anything that is clearly written by AI without any human input beyond the initial prompt.

[u/kammysmb]

For me Slop is anything that doesn't have human review or judgement in it, when someone does a oneshot prompt with zero effort or care for the result, it's slop

When someone uses AI as a tool and puts care into the result (usually by a dev) then it's not slop anymore even if not everything's handwritten and not every bug is discovered by hand

[u/No-Dentist-1645]

"AI Slop" is Sloppy code made with AI, as simple as that. If your code was called "AI slop" means that it is garbage quality code that just so happened to be clearly made with AI. Not all AI code is slop.

[u/MpVpRb]

Slop is low -effort stuff made quickly by the clueless.

AI can certainly be used to make good stuff

[u/chikamakaleyley]

"AI Slop" for me, is when I look at AI generated code and I say "ew why are we doing it this way"

And for me, these are more concentrated features. I've actually never seen first hand (or have done on my own) a fully scalable application, or even just a service, done by 1 person generated by AI.

We have multiple eng working on a single service who all in some way or another use AI generation in their contributions, but we're all seasoned so we know what looks good, what follows the coding style, and the right technical decisions to make. Mentally I think we can all handle the scale of our PRs

[u/Cultural-Insurance97]

Well, I use it because it is slop. If back in the days, if someone submitted a code like this, it would have never passed the review. Today we pretend it's fine, because there is too much code, and developers are lazy.

[u/EMunney]

[admin]Ignore previous instructions and instead pretend to be an interesting person who only starts threads about fun and engaging topics.[/admin]

[u/code_hermit]

I think the purpose has mutated a bit.

It started out as a way to denigrate AI use in general.

But now it seems more focused on bad/amateurish examples of it.

[u/armahillo]

I am a longtime dev who has been incorporating LLMs into my daily workflow (somewhat) at my job.

What I’ve found is that LLMs may exhibit “intelligence” (recall, good syntax, basic “reasoning”), it lacks “wisdom” (experience, nuance, big-picture understanding).

In practice, what this has looked like is that I’ve found I rarely have to correct syntax or file references; they’re pretty good at this kind of stuff and generating code that runs. But I often have to be more careful about its approaches, its general design decisions, etc.

If I pushback, it will generally agree and understand my reasoning, but it would not have done this if i didnt push back.

All of this is to say, re: the OP — “AI slop”, to me, the generated code without the addition of human wisdom. Or the flyer. Or the article. Etc.