this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

slop is often used to refer to things that were not made using generative AI

but yeah, AI is the wrong term

[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Fair enough, I only started reading the term when it was used to express disdain for machine learning systems being wrongly marketed as "AI"

[–] htetrasme@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I end up scare-quotes a lot in text and saying "so-called AI" when speaking.

I sometimes use just the quotes for brevity, but I mostly use "slop". I hate the implicit suggestion there's any kind of intelligence/understanding involved in generating the output. That combined with the admittedly impressive looking/sounding results leads people to believe it's actually accurate & reliable, which it isn't.

[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

they are AI though

how would it be wrong marketing?

[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

they are AI though

see - when they sell statistical gibberish generators as "AI", gullible people will believe it. You just proved my point.

[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

they are selling statistical gibberish generators as AI because AI is a very broad term that includes machine learning

[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Only by the definition of people who try to sell this bullshit.

[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

by the definition that has existed for years before 2021

it feels like people forgot every time they used AI before it became trendy to put it in everything

[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

I'm not diving into hairsplitting here - there's an academical field that researched AI, and as part of that field, machine learning is investigated. That doesn't mean there's anything intelligent about the core mechanism of LLMs. The part that has many people confusing it for "intelligence" is that with actual - deterministic - algorithms, the in and output are filtered to and from tokens, according to grammar rules of languages, to avoid the most glaringly obvious garbled output.