Not All Bad Content is Slop
Awhile ago, I heard someone describe a bad Newgrounds animation as slop. This seemed wrong to me at the time, but I had trouble articulating why.
I think I can now. Slop is not merely bad content, nor is it merely low-effort content. Non-professional singing is often bad, and it is typically quite low-effort, but it is certainly not slop. Neither is a child's drawing. A let's play can be quite low-effort, and it can be low-quality, but that would not make it slop. Specifically, slop is low-quality content which only exists only to profit off of the attention economy. You can easily make a terrible creative work -- most creative people have at least one in their closet.1 But, if you were intrinsically motivated to do so, you are not a slop-artist.
Notice that slop preexists generative AI. In the late 2010s, many YouTube videos were obviously slop. Many popular books are slop. Instagram reels have always been slop. Cable news was slop, 90% of political commentary is slop. But, slop-creation used to require at least some skill, and now the barrier to entry is nonexistent.
Every day, I thank God that nothing I made in middle school ever wandered onto the internet.↩