With ‘AI slop’ distorting our reality, the world is sleepwalking into disaster | A perverse information ecosystem is being mined by big tech for profit, fooling the unwary and sending algorithms crazy
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/21/ai-slop-artificial-intelligence-social-media
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“Journalist Max Read [found that Facebook AI slop](https://maxread.substack.com/p/were-in-our-slop-era) – the sloppiest of them all – is, “as far as Facebook is concerned”, not “junk”, but “precisely what the company wants: highly engaging content”. To social media giants, content is content; the cheaper it is, the less human labour it involves, the better. The outcome is an internet of robots, tickling human users into whatever feelings and passions keep them engaged.
These pictures and videos join an infinite stream of others that violate physical and moral laws. The result is profound disorientation. You can’t believe your eyes, but also what can you believe if not your eyes? Everything starts to feel both too real and entirely unreal.
You are immersed deeper and deeper into subjective worlds rather than objective reality.”
Everyone just needs to include with their ad blockers “AI blockers” to detect and filter out degenerate brain rot content and generated slop. It seems like that’s about 90% of the internet now but what can you do
Every time I try to bring up arguments against the use of generative AI, the users of said tech downvote me to oblivion. Even if I just state the fact that I will personally never use it, they respond me in anger. 🙂
Imagine thinking this is worse than newspaper owners straight up lying to our faces for centuries.
What we are dealing with here is the old older seeing that their monopoly on bullshit, their captive audience, is finished. Does this mean that people are suddenly going to get more informed? Of course not. But it is much less easy to control the message.
If anybody was interested in having the general public able to differentiate between facts and bullshit they would invest in education, but would you look at that, nobody in the anglosphere is about to try that.
Short-sighted idiots running the show, being replaced by a different batch of the same.
Everybody was so eager to make the general population more ignorant, malleable and easy to push around, and look what it has got us.
Odd no one cares or calls the same photoshopped memes recycled countless millions of times for YEARS “slop”.. Nor do they give a shit if the templates are copyrighted.. But the minute Ai becomes repetitive, people want to have a shitfit meltdown over it. Just another outrage trend people get to virtue signal over “on behalf of” And in this case it’s traditional artists. None of the people complaining do a single substantive thing for artists. Disingenuous whining on social media is the extent of their “support”.
Here’s the thing, AI is not inherently anything. Neither good nor bad. However, the ones controlling and programming it right now, are.
They determine how it will function. And since money is involved, we all know how and what they will lead it into.
That is what makes AI a terrifying thing if you’re paying attention.
Maybe if more people were to regulate THE PEOPLE WHO OWN/RUN/PROGRAM THE AI, instead of regulating the AI itself, things might not look so…dystopia-like, yes?
The end result of gen AI is no one will ever be able to trust anything they see on the Internet again.