AI Slop Is Destroying the Internet. These Are the People Fighting to Save It

[highplainsdem]

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/features/ai-slop-is-destroying-the-internet-these-are-the-people-fighting-to-save-it/

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"AI slop" is a shabby imitation of content, often a pointless, careless regurgitation of existing information. It's error-prone, with summaries proudly proclaiming made-up facts and papers citing fake credentials. Images tend to have a slick, plastic veneer, while brainrot videos struggle to obey basic laws of physics. Think fake bunnies on trampolines and AI Overviews advising you to put glue on pizza.

The vast majority of US adults who use social media (94%) believe they see AI-generated content when scrolling, a new CNET study found. Only 11% found it entertaining, useful or informative.

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AI slop is an oil spill in our digital oceans, but there are a lot of people working to clean it up. Many are fighting for better ways to identify and label AI content, from memes to deepfakes. Creators are pushing for better media literacy and changing how we consume media. Publishers, scientists and researchers are testing new strategies to keep bad information from gaining traction and credibility. Developers are building havens from slop with AI-free online spaces. Legislation and regulation, or the lack of it, play a role in each potential solution.

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You see slop because it's being forced upon you — not because you've indicated to the algorithms that you love it. If you were to sign up for a new YouTube account today, a third of the first 500 YouTube Shorts shown to you would be some form of AI slop content, according to a report from Kapwing, a maker of online video tools. There are over 1.3 billion videos labeled as AI-generated on TikTok as of February. Slop is baked into our scrolling the same way microplastics are a default ingredient in our food.

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Much more at the link.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. K&R

[highplainsdem]

5. Thanks!

[sop]

2. It's not just AI slop, it's all the disinformation that's become commonplace on the internet.

[highplainsdem]

4. Some of that - misinformation anyway - is slop because it isn't intentional. Much of the misinformation

online results from AI errors that people are too ignorant or lazy to correct.

The disinformation online, otoh, is deliberate. And AI has made it so damn much easier to spread disinformation.

[Historic NY]

3. I trust nothing...

some time searching for local history or other it repeats stuff from my own websites. It often attributes it to other places. Right now its useless.

[highplainsdem]

6. I suspected a few years ago that genAI's effects would be bad, but I had no real idea then just how fast

it would do this much damage to the internet.

[Initech]

7. What's scary is the #1 song right now on iTunes is 100% verified AI slop.

And the people who are buying this garbage don't really seem to care. This is how art dies.

[highplainsdem]

8. You have to really lower your standards to think AI slop is okay. You also have to not give a damn about artists

to think it's okay, if you have any understanding at all of the worldwide theft of intellectual property to train generative AI. And you have to not give a damn about the future of art and music and film and writing, because that tsunami of slop will discourage kids from developing their own creativity and their own skills, while people without skills and creativity churn out slop in seconds.

[Initech]

9. Yeah I 100% agree with everything that you said.

It's not just art, but existing intellectual property is also at stake. It's music today, but tomorrow it will be movies, TV, art galleries, you name it. I got shit a couple of years ago for saying that the same people who sold the crypto boom also sold us the AI boom, but more and more I feel like I was right. Jensen Huang (NVIDIA CEO) is an absolute mad man. Eventually the AI bubble is going to get too much and will eventually burst. And just like when crypto went bust, it won't be pretty when that happens.

[Prairie_Seagull]

10. Of course there is no off button for AI slop.

Becoming nearly all pervasive. What is going to happen to our discourse when we can't tell what is or is not AI.

[highplainsdem]

12. We'll have a situation that authoritarians will love. Confused, lost people will often turn to authoritarian

leaders.

And rightwingers seem to love AI slop.

AI critic Brian Merchant, whom I've sometimes quoted here, recently linked to this essay, written last year:

https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism
February 9, 2025
Gareth Watkins
It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.


Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on D-Day. Britain First’s co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify’s global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party posts, then is forced to take down, a video of its policies as embodied by anthropomorphic animals. A few days later, they promised to “mainline AI into the veins” of Britain.

The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression, right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year posters to ‘terrorwave’. Today it is slop, almost totally. Why? To understand it, we must consider the right’s hatred of working people, its (more than) mutual embrace of the tech industry and, primarily, its profound rejection of Enlightenment humanism. The last might seem like a stretch, but bear with me.

The first point is the most obvious. ‘AI’ – as embodied by large language models like ChatGPT, and largely diffusion-based image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney – promises to make anyone who can write a single-paragraph prompt into a copywriter or graphic designer; jobs generally associated with young, educated, urban, and often left-leaning workers. That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The selling point is that their users don’t have to pay (and, more importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they’d be forced to depend. For relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that, when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their utter contempt for labour?

For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality – think the mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned), or the music of Kraftwerk – AI art pretends to realism. It can produce art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without the need for artists.

-snip-

I saw so many RW AI users, starting a few years ago, gleefully predicting AI destroying the careers of artists, writers, actors, musicians and filmmakers - the creatives they hated so much. The creatives who are almost all liberals. Bluesky is as liberal as it is to a large extent because so many liberal creatives went there to get away from X and the artist-hating AI users there.

Link to the Brian Merchant piece that linked to the essay quoted above, and a couple of paragraphs of what Brian wrote:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ais-aesthetics-of-failure

Now, it’s often argued that AI cannot create anything truly new, that even the most sophisticated LLMs are fundamentally token-prediction systems, and thus the pixels its image-generators rearrange are necessarily an amalgam of shapes and styles all seen before. That AI image generators are intensively derivative, and that Sora was all but exclusively so, is undeniably true. And that I think is the root of its failure. LLMs strive to reproduce reality, or beloved aesthetics of the past, or even generally pleasing imagery, and they almost always fail. This failure is immediately apparent to us, for the same reasons that animate our discomfort with imagery in the uncanny valley in general, as well as some reasons beyond that.

This failure is not limited to or even primarily concerning image quality. As the generators have improved in ironing out past telltales like the extra fingers and such (in prepping for this post I looked back at the original Sora videos and it was shocking to me how bad they were), our queasiness hasn’t subsided. AI image and video slop is not just homogenous, and it’s not just derivative. Slop is a visual embodiment of the modern AI project itself; an in-progress effort to replicate, undermine, and replace human works. It’s fundamentally unsettling. (This one reason that, as Gareth Watkins argued, AI is ideal for creating a new aesthetics of fascism.)

Emphasis added.

[Johnny2X2X]

11. Facebook is too much AI slop now

I think this could be good in the long run. The sites who weed out the slop and become trusted sources will do the best. I think the news sources who have the best track records for identifying AI nonsense will become the big winners.