Fair criticism overall, and to be clear I don't personally have a problem with calling it slop. I agree that its a good rallying term. I also don't think anyone here needed this article, since we already use clear language when it matters (ex. Writing community rules), and slop/other shorthand when it doesn't.

My earlier comment was mostly because I've seen how these discussions quickly spiral, and I try to add context for people who haven't gone off site to read the content being discussed.

So they're coopting, appropriating, and diluting.

I didn't consider this, and yea I agree. The article does end up helping the AI companies more than it hurts. I still think that this was unintentional on the author's part, since I feel that the intended audience was other academics and clarity does matter in those settings.

None of these are debates. [...] "Don't do activism. Just 'debate'."

Again, I don't think that's what that paragraph is going for 😄 The way each 'debate' is framed, each one has a more and more obvious answer. I think the author wants to focus attention and activism on those issues. Like these last two are worded in a way that makes it clear what the author thinks is right:

Do we want the systems that increasingly run our lives steered by a few private companies, or held more widely accountable? And do we want a shared world we can make sense of together, or one so flooded with synthetic stuff that no one can tell what is real?

I don't really get his point since the supposed debate on "whether AI produces slop or not" is directly tied to the other issues, and we can dislike generative AI for multiple reasons + advocate for multiple things.

However it's true that some of those issues are more dangerous than others. We needed laws a long time ago to prevent generative AI from getting into each of those other areas.