AI Slop Has Turned Social Media Into an Antisocial Wasteland | Platforms that once helped us stay in touch have become fractured and impersonal — and AI slop and deepfakes are making it so much worse.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ai-slop-has-turned-social-media-into-an-antisocial-wasteland/
17 Comments
Just when you thought social media couldn’t get any worse – you can automate the social dysfunction!
Just think about how bad the algorithm already is. Optimized for your attention, not your well-being, and no real way to turn it off.
Imagine how much worse modern day LLMs will make it.
Just because we *can* build something, doesn’t mean we *should.*
Social media is speedrunning its own collapse.
Bruteforcing all this AI slop to prop up companies that have long abandoned any innovation and have let their platforms become incrementally worse with each version update.
Truth is social media have been terrible LONG before AI appeared. Now AI is the comfortable scapegoat to blame it all, instead of blaming shitty people who behave in shitty ways.
Amazing that AI now gets the blame, when it was already destroyed by ‘the algorythm’ and companies trying to steer engagement.
I think ai slop is amping up cognitive dissonance in people’s perception of the “social” aspect of social media. People engage in fake parasocial interactions all day, bc it produces dopamine, but for the system to work they must place value on the “relationships”.
Now the flimsy framework that made them feel this way is removing the human at the other end, and they must supply more of their own delusional effort to maintain their perceived relationships. Like as if Mr beast is technically a human on the phone with them, and now they’re just on the phone with his automated answering service.
Both are false, but it’s not about truth, it’s about justifying the value of the emotional component that allows them to consume this stuff without questioning the actual nature of a commodity based market relationship.
It’s also a major problem with modern media. Because we’ve stopped paying for things like newspapers, nobody watches the physical news on TV, everybody wants free internet news, they have to drive profit through clicks.
Nothing drives clicks quite like ragebait. So great deal of modern news media is stories and headlines intended to evoke rage..
This is not a healthy place for a society to be. Clicking on stories that make us angry, divisive politics, pointless arguments on the internet on Reddit and other places, toxic Twitter, all of these things.
Social media and smartphones are one of the worst things that are happening to society.
Ai might be hastening or at least continuing, but social media has been a toxic wasteland since before Ai slop became a thing.
Ridiculous. Social media was a shithole way before ai came around. An ai video of a dog tossing another dog into a pool doesn’t make people call each other slurs.
“ChatGPT, write me an article about how AI has turned social media into an antisocial wasteland, but make sure to replace all em dashes with a double dash so people won’t think it was written by AI.”
Every social media has been awful for a long while, progressively more. Over the last 2 years, worse than ever.
And it affects every sort of platform
I am so glad that something like AI is finally going to kill the menace of the social media.
But maybe it will create something more dangerous?
This has been a problem for a long time, way before AI.
Bots and spam are a huge problem for many years.
Social media has not connected us for at least the last decade. People are more distant, and watching some influencer sell you stuff is not connecting with the person. So turning to AI slop is exactly what it was made for
Social media isn’t, and hasn’t been for a long time. These are not places where the free exchange of ideas can happen, where people can meet and connect. These are highly monitored and curated playpens, where we may talk about anything that doesn’t get us banned. We are discouraged to establish trust with people; we have seen what that can lead to.
Without trust, there can be no intimacy. And without intimacy, there is no true human connection, just an endless dinner party where we all agree or disagree generally, but no meaningful conclusion is ever reached. We’re on an intellectual hamsters wheel in here.
Demise of social media would be a very good news for society.
AI Slop did that? Then why did it feel like that 10 years ago?
I’d have left Fakebook long ago if it wasn’t for a dozen people who don’t check email and don’t use discord or whatsapp.