These are muddled times - with more information available than ever before, recent advancements in information processing have created something new - artificial information. Artificial information including falsehoods is available in larger quantities than ever before.
From a simple web-search for the Baby Calculator, one page really stood out in the search-engine results with its well-phrased explanation of the little gadget. A Symbol Of Social Progress - am intrigued; tell me more!:
Right away in the first paragraph it gets weird: "...one can identify a small thing called a “baby calculator,” which is a piece of equipment left from the period of the approach to reproductive health in modern society. This device, a rather humble tool by today’s measure, allows for a glimpse into the family planning strategies of the previous generations, ...".
One clear signal -apart from it being utter nonsense- is that the grammar sounds right at first reading, but the second half of the first sentence does not close. It seems something a statistical word-generation program would generate. I.e. this looks like artificial information from Artificial Intelligence (AI).
It gets better (or worse).
And it doubles down on this storyline.
The article ends with verbose platitudes that manage to still be surreal: "... the baby calculator of the 1920s is not just a forgotten relic, but rather a symbol of the humanity’s ongoing process of discovery and control over life. "
Normally I would not copy and show an article like this, but in this case did so to show/preserve it. It's an outstanding example of a moment in the development and application of AI. Pages like this are liable to vanish as quickly as they emerge. (But they do enter search engines' indices to muddle the waters, do poison the corpus of information.)
If wanting to have a look at the article, this is the link. The site by the way contains several other finely illustrated and phrased pages of articificial information. They're not all as hilariously wrong as the Baby Calculator page, but definitely all slop. And worryingly, slop with decent SEO.
This page and the whole site is created by a company Egeekowl that is based in Telavi, Georgia (თელავი, საქართველო), doing digital content creating for social media. The channel that this Baby Calculator pages is on/in is centred around a nostalgia theme. Likely with some form of advertising in or around it, this channel's content is claimed to reach an audience (~1M !), mainly in the US.
One of my kids reading the article reacted with derision and disbelief. Another, without paying attention to content, only noted the pretentious language as a red flag to then wonder "hm, is this AI?".
As signalled by Mr Polt's proposing of the term slopbait for a particular species of artificial information, we may need to develop a new vocabulary to describe the various types of AI slop that increasingly invades the human information-sphere. Would this be 'slopfeed'? Or 'feedslop'? Or slopbait! :)
Whilst this artificial information is silly and likely relatively harmless, it still is falsehoods being presented as bona-fide information. Does that make it not just silly, but also morally bad? And then considering the resources being spent (and burnt) for this, would that make it an evil? It is in any case not a positive or good thing, I'd argue. This is bad.
Coming back to the article; this is of course slop.
It's effective slop. Not great slop, only reasonably polished slop - perhaps a turd?
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