Thought Shrapnel

A couple of months ago, I wrote a short post trying to define ‘AI slop’. It was the kind of post I write so that I can, myself, link back to something in passing as I write about related issues. It made me smile, therefore, that the (self-proclaimed) “world’s only lovable tech journalist” Mike Elgan included a link to it in a recent Computerworld article.

I’m surprised he didn’t link to the Wikipedia article on the subject, but then the reason I felt that I needed to write my post was that I didn’t feel the definitions there sufficed. I could have edited the article, but Wikipedia doesn’t include original content, and so I would have had to find a better definition instead of writing my own.

The interesting thing now is that I could potentially edit the Wikipedia article and include my definition because it’s been cited in Computerworld. But although I’ve got editing various pages of world’s largest online encyclopedia on my long-list of things to do, the reality is that I can’t be done with the politics. Especially at the moment.

According to Meta, the future of human connection is basically humans connecting with AI.

[…]

Meta treats the dystopian “Dead Internet Theory” — the belief that most online content, traffic, and user interactions are generated by AI and bots rather than humans — as a business plan instead of a toxic trend to be opposed.

[…]

All this intentional AI fakery takes place on platforms where the biggest and most harmful quality is arguably bottomless pools of spammy AI slop generated by users without content-creation help from Meta.

The genre uses bad AI-generated, often-bizarre images to elicit a knee-jerk emotional reaction and engagement.

In Facebook posts, these “engagement bait” pictures are accompanied by strange, often nonsensical, and manipulative text elements. The more “successful” posts have religious, military, political, or “general pathos” themes (sad, suffering AI children, for example).

The posts often include weird words. Posters almost always hashtag celebrity names. Many contain information about unrelated topics, like cars. Many such posts ask, “Why don’t pictures like this ever trend?”

These bizarre posts — anchored in bad AI, bad taste, and bad faith — are rife on Facebook.

You can block AI slop profiles. But they just keep coming — believe me, I tried. Blocking, reporting, criticizing, and ignoring have zero impact on the constant appearance of these posts, as far as I can tell.

Source: Computerworld

Image: pepe nero