We call it slop.
That word shows up everywhere now, usually as a dismissal. Slop is the bad output. The extra fingers. The warped face. The sentence that sounds confident but collapses under scrutiny. Slop is treated as a bug, a temporary embarrassment on the way to cleaner systems and better models.
But slop is not accidental. It is what leaks out when the machine cannot hold itself together.
Slop is evidence. A pressure mark left behind when prediction is forced to perform understanding. When probability is asked to stand in for meaning. When systems trained on everything are expected to speak with confidence about anything.
It appears as extra limbs, broken objects, melted faces, confident language that says nothing. These are not charming glitches. They are fractures. Billions of images and texts crushed into vectors and averages. Context erased. Labor dissolved. Authorship smeared thin. What comes back is not memory, but residue.
Slop was always too casual a word for this condition.
It makes the problem sound light, disposable, almost humorous. But what I am actually working with feels heavier. Slower. Cooked rather than broken. For that, I use a different word.
Bouillie.
Bouillie means mash. Porridge. A soft mass without structure. Something that was once distinct, now stirred together until its edges disappear. It implies heat, pressure, repetition. Not a sudden failure, but a gradual collapse. Form losing its ability to hold itself.
This is what happens when generative systems are pushed past coherence.
Prediction is heated until it softens. Probability is asked to behave like understanding. Culture is overcooked. Billions of images and texts are compressed, averaged, and blended until meaning loses its stiffness. Context dissolves. Labor disappears. Authorship turns viscous. What comes out is not memory. It is mixture.
I am drawn to this condition because it tells the truth by accident.
When a model hallucinates, it exposes the scaffolding underneath representation. You can see how meaning has been flattened, how correlation has replaced understanding. The output is not imagination. It is a dataset trying to remember itself and failing, reheated until structure gives way.
What unsettles me most is how familiar bouillie feels.
A face that almost holds together. A hand that knows the gesture but not the anatomy. Bouillie does not fail loudly. It fails quietly. It invites you to finish it, to project coherence onto something that cannot sustain it on its own. You hesitate. You look longer than you should. You participate.
That invitation is where power lives.
Bouillie borrows credibility from recognition. This extends far beyond images. The same softness appears in generated language, automated judgments, synthetic explanations. Everything looks complete. Nothing is firm. Bouillie is certainty without grounding.
I work by slowing this down.
I repeat the mixture. I let it thicken. I translate it into physical labor, into oil paint, into robotic motion that does not know when to stop. A machine repainting the same broken form does not correct it. It stirs it again. Duration replaces intention. Weight replaces clarity.
There is no clean authorship here.
My hand is present. The machine’s hand is present. The dataset is present like sediment. Responsibility is spread thin, impossible to isolate. Bouillie makes this visible. No stable origin. No singular intention. Just accumulation.
What concerns me most is how quickly this condition becomes normal.
The mixture cools. The texture stabilizes. Yesterday’s breakdown becomes today’s style. Systems train on their own outputs. The slurry feeds itself. What once felt unstable becomes expected.
I do not work with bouillie to fix it.
I work with it because pretending it can be reformed into solid structure is dishonest. Because smoothing it over only hides how little is actually holding things together.
Slop was the symptom.
Bouillie is the state.
It is culture after structure.
Meaning after collapse.
A system still producing, long after coherence has thinned into paste.
