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.
I think it’s interesting how “maximizing for engagement” inevitably leads to slop taking over everything. I wonder if real people (with real money) will continue to engage with the slop? Some people surely, but enough to sustain these mega-corps?
I have wondered this too. Will it just all become bots talking to bots.
Yeah I have to imagine much of it is bots/artificial views already, this line from the article stood out:
It doesn’t shock me a single reel has significantly more views than all of 404 media, but “multiplied tens of times”? A recent comment me chuckle:
(implying the ad views are faked to increase the stock price).
Being relatively a relatively unknown outlet that forces extra steps on anyone who wants to read their articles probably sets the bar pretty low. Especially when a lot of people will just share archive links.