AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality
https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a-brute-force-attack-on-the-algorithms-that-control-reality/
AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality
https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a-brute-force-attack-on-the-algorithms-that-control-reality/
8 Comments
>Algorithms That Control Reality
Reality is objective and absolute. Algorithms don’t and can’t “control reality”.
“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.
There is a dual problem with this: It not only floods the internet with shit, crowding out human-created content that real people spend time making, but the very nature of AI slop means it evolves faster than human-created content can, so any time an algorithm is tweaked, the AI spammers can find the weakness in that algorithm and exploit it.
A brute force attack is a type of hack that relies on rapid trial-and-error to guess a password. If a hacker is trying to guess a four-number PIN, they (or more likely an automated hacking tool) will guess 0000, then 0001, then 0002, and so on until the combination is guessed correctly.
People running AI-generated accounts can have hundreds or thousands of entries into the algorithmic lottery every day, and can hammer the algorithm once they find something that works. Brute force.”
Agreed. There needs to be legislation to force AI content to be tagged, the same way websites have to have cookie notices otherwise it will wipe out what’s left of the real online content.
This is a continuation of the Dark Forest theory of social media. People are moving to private communities where humans and AIs are more obviously recognizable for what they are. Perhaps we’ll figure out a way to use this network of private communities and reconnect a new global Internet from it.
https://maggieappleton.com/forest-talk
The silver lining is that maybe this is finally what convinces people that algorithmic feeds are bad for mind, body, and society as a whole and we go back to something less captivating and more organic. I see this as a good thing.
AIs mostly don’t have agency themselves. The issue isn’t AI itself but rather people with poor objectives. We should collaborate with AI to counter those who intend to misuse it. I believe the technology is being villainized for a reason, but in my opinion, that discussion isn’t productive.
EDIT: That being said, AI and other technologies should help us identify those who abuse them.
The fact that the phrase “algorithms that control reality” made it past the editor is reason enough for me to never take this site seriously
What’s bad about these pictures? They are obviously fake and nobody believes they are real.