The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.
What this means, and what I have already seen on my own timelines, is that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by AI-generated content because of the sheer amount of it. On top of the quantity of AI slop, because AI-generated content can be easily tailored to whatever is performing on a platform at any given moment, there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of “reality” online. I no longer see almost anything real on my Instagram Reels anymore, and, as I have often reported, many users seem to have completely lost the ability to tell what is real and what is fake, or simply do not care anymore.
It’s not as if humans slavishly obeying the algorithms was a much better situation than robots doing it. They’ve just sped up the process and it can only hasten the demise of the new technofeudalist content mills.
Yeah, just based on the summery here, I’m not really upset about this. An engagement-maximising brainrot feed was never a great way to understand important issues in the real world.
If you just want to slip into TikTok for a couple hours I see little problem with all-AI content, if you want news go here or directly to a reputable news agency, and if you want to learn something new start with Wikipedia and then branch out once you know what you’re looking for.
You are describing how non-brainwashed educated and intelligent people behave. Unfortunately, here in the USA, there are a very large percentage of brainwashed people (that may or may not be educated and intelligent).
Sure. But if there’s not even the illusion the brainrot is real life, maybe they’ll give it a try.
(And it’s not just America. You don’t have to be that hard on yourselves, dumb people are everywhere)