Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast under whose John Harris. Today we are going to talk about slot. It is a word that has an old origin, but a new meaning in the online world. And it

refers to information that is just puzzled together and haphazardly thrown out there in the most

uncareful kind of way. It is oftentimes used of AI derived images and information that doesn't actually make sense.

You've all seen the images of people with six fingers or two sets of arms and that kind of thing. And it's just referred to as slop.

There's this is careless. And I've seen the rise of this kind of thing with AI, but even preceding

AI. I've just seen some of the bigger, more influential, supposedly accounts on social

media tend to be traffickers of slop and they don't care. And this is a big problem, actually.

And so I wanted to talk to someone that I thought would have a deeper insight on this based on a

post I read. And that is the man behind the Abrahamic meta critique on Substack.

If you go to critique and digest.substack.com or the Abrahamic Metacritique, if you Google that,

you will find Hussein Abu Bakar Mansour, who has been on the podcast before and is going

to give us his perspective on Slop and how it is affecting serious institutions today. Thank you,

Hussein, for coming on again. I appreciate you being on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

So I saw a post you made. And you mentioned working for at least one think tank.

I think you had some other experiences as well, where you could tell they were marketing their output,

their information, their product to the online world.

And doing so in a way in which they were attempting to gain

a lot of internet traffic to go viral, to do so in provocative ways, perhaps, but really just

sloppy ways to put out bad information specifically to gain a hearing.

And I can't tell you how much that concerns me if that kind of thing is trusted on the think tank level.

So I just want to open it up to you, maybe share some of your experiences here with the downgrade of institutions and why even institutions we maybe used to trust.

We can't trust as much anymore because they are listening to a different call and marketing

...