AI-generated ‘slop’ is slowly killing the internet, so why is nobody trying to stop it? | Arwa Mahdawi

January 9

How do you do, fellow humans? My name is Arwa and I am a genuine member of the species homo sapiens. We’re talking a 100% flesh-and-blood person operating in meatspace over here; I am absolutely not an AI-powered bot. I know, I know. That’s exactly what a bot would say, isn’t it? I guess you’re just going to have to trust me on this.

I’m taking great pains to point this out, by the way, because content created by real life human beings is becoming something of a novelty these days. The internet is rapidly being overtaken by AI slop. (It’s not clear who coined the phrase but “slop” is the advanced iteration of internet spam: low-quality text, videos and images generated by AI.) A recent analysis estimated that more than half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated. Meanwhile, many news sites have covertly been experimenting with AI-generated content – bylined, in some cases, by AI-generated authors.

Slop is everywhere but Facebook is positively sloshing with weird AI-generated images, including strange depictions of Jesus made out of shrimps. Rather than trying to rid its platform of AI-generated content – much of which has been created by scammers trying to drive engagement for nefarious purposes – Facebook has embraced it. A study conducted last year by researchers out of Stanford and Georgetown found Facebook’s recommendation algorithms are boosting these AI-generated posts.

Meta has also been creating its own slop. In 2023, the company started introducing AI-powered profiles such as Liv: a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller”. These didn’t get a lot of attention until Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times in December that the company had plans to fill its platform with AI characters. I’m not sure why he thought that boasting the platform would soon be full of AI characters talking to each other would go down well, but, it didn’t: Meta swiftly killed off the AI-profiles after they went viral.

The likes of Liv may be gone from Meta for now, but our online future seems to be getting sloppier and sloppier. What Cory Doctorow memorably termed the gradual “enshittification” of the internet (the degradation of services in pursuit of relentless profit-seeking) is accelerating. Let’s hope Shrimp Jesus performs a miracle soon; we need it.

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