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The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platfo

The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance

orev 2y ago
Unlikely. What’s more likely to happen is that the AI posts that don’t get good engagement provides a feedback loop into the AI, training it to what works and what doesn’t. I believe we’re already seeing this on Reddit where upon the initial OpenAI deal, there was an influx of obviously poorly generated AI posts, people flagged them, and they fell off pretty quickly. The posts that make it through now are the ones people can’t tell are AI, based on that feedback. We’re training it in real time how to fool us.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Mission Fucking Accomplished https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
shombaboor 2y ago
Discord and heavily moderated forums are the future.
- altruios 2y ago
  IRC still is around. Pretty sure most of the user base is human still.
  - rogerthis 2y ago
    Lots of bots. Also body-only-soul-less users (as I call those that never look at messages).
- doesnt_know 2y ago
  Yeah, small, invite-only "walled garden" style communities are definitely the future of the web. There has always been those of course, but I think they will just end up becoming the default, rather then the fringes. And the thing with these smaller communities is that they are far less tolerant to their hosting platforms pulling dumb shit (like stating they will train AI's on the comunities content).
dartos 2y ago
We can only hope
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
If that was true Twitter would be collapsing. The vast majority have been too passive to leave. I no longer think there's a threshold of worsening that will disrupt Twitter, Reddit, etc.
jsheard 2y ago
What I'd give to see the user retention stats at DeviantArt ever since they allowed it to be filled absolutely wall-to-wall with the most boring AI art you've ever seen. Not just allowed but encouraged by jumping on the bandwagon and integrating their own generator. Anecdotally it feels like there's not just an insane glut of AI slop drowning out everything else, but also less "everything else" over time due to user attrition. It really can't be overstated just how much it's come to dominate the entire site, skimming the frontpage now I immediately spotted a generic Midjourney-core image and the creator has posted 4100 pieces to date after joining... two months ago. 68 uploads every day on average.
- vunderba 2y ago
  100%. It's intensely frustrating that they didn't at least firewall that vast amount of AI noise using a subdomain or something (e.g. ai.deviantart.com).
  - jsheard 2y ago
    They do have an AI tag that creators are supposed to set where applicable, and there's an option to hide everything with that tag, but the enforcement is weak so there's a lot of obvious AI spam which isn't tagged. Many of the AI spammers are using DAs monetization features or promoting a Patreon so they're incentivized to not set the AI tag to maximise their reach.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    Deviantart was already noise of unappreciated forms of expressions People just use it as a hosting platform Sounds more like a UX issue that you can see galleries
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo This made real.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
Hard to make any forecast about "spaces" "prone to AI slop," whatever that means, besides social networks that you personally do not like, in aggregate or individually. TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking, if you exclude their presence on social media itself. If anything we already live in a post-scarcity world with regards to engaging content, starting a few years before the advent of generative AI. Why would AI generated content reverse that trend? Isn't TikTok's feed algorithm agnostic to whether a video is AI slop or user created? Isn't Instagram's? Are you really going to play No True Scotsman with "spaces" "prone to AI slop?" Shouldn't Kyle Chayka, who supposedly wrote a book on this, know that? Aren't there already too many good books, movies, TV shows, video games, operas, plays, etc. to consume? The toughest thing about this article is it is longing for a world that hasn't existed for a long time. If anything, the New Yorker and the New York Times, by doing a bad job at being media companies, have reduced the amount of new narrative creative projects that can thrive, not increased it. They never look in the mirror. The fickle and sometimes vindictive personalities that work there are not allied with narrative creators. The idea that discovering one or two diamonds in the rough offsets the incumbent cultural trends the New Yorker reinforces has long been dead - there is just way too much new stuff for any traditional media company to accurately review, report on and amplify. Everyone thriving on YouTube, Instagram, Steam, TikTok, hawking their shit, figured that out. It's even crazier to me that Kyle Chayka, who wrote a book on this, misses the mark here - I mean he should know about non-negative matrix factorization, which basically was the beginning of the end of traditional media, he should be able to make the leap that invention that enabled accurate collaborative filtering at scale killed The New Yorker, not AI, or anything in between 2000 and now. He should know there's absolutely no reason that AI generated content would be treated any differently than any other bad content, by NNMF or whatever feed algorithm. There's a possibility that the reason the NYTimes and Conde Nast have to reinvent themselves is because they do a bad job. To them, "A.I." is just another effigy, when the reality is that fewer and fewer people care what important New Yorkers think. Listen guys, it's not looking good for the writers, better to get your head out of the sand.
- kibwen 2y ago
jabroni_salad 2y ago
When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed with an AI generated children's science fair project I always notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for enough people that discerning users are just helplessly along for the ride on every platform. The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is because people like it. The next iteration, IMO, will be AI generated children's science fair projects that also have a pepsi logo in them, still with 60k likes.
- kibwen 2y ago
  And how many of those likes are AI-generated?
- munk-a 2y ago
  We need to move above that before it kills the web though - if the end state is that you want to look at any old random adorable puppy pictures so you just ask your machine to generate them for you then we might have a way out of this internet death cycle. I'd hope that if you can trivially produce your own better tailored slop on your local machine then the AI slop online will lose any value - I'm concerned that we're going to lose a lot of good content created by artists before we reach that level though. I suspect the actual outcome will be a rise of manual curation and providence where a feed of adorable puppies or discussions on technology will rise or fall by how diligent the moderator is at keeping slop out of the feed.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 2y ago
  > When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed... There are still people watching Facebook with unfiltered feeds? There are filters for that. From the article: "The main people benefitting from the launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users trying to communicate with one another but those who are producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated content that is monetizable on social platforms." Yes. The main use case for LLMs remains blithering.
bakugo 2y ago
I wish this was actually true. The unfortunate reality is that the average internet user can't tell that they're looking at AI generated content with an AI generated caption and AI generated people posting AI generated comments, as we've already seen on Facebook.
r0m4n0 2y ago
Or humanity will devolve into confusion over what is real or AI generated for the next decade until we learn to live alongside the monster we have created.

The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance

orev 2y ago

Unlikely. What’s more likely to happen is that the AI posts that don’t get good engagement provides a feedback loop into the AI, training it to what works and what doesn’t. I believe we’re already seeing this on Reddit where upon the initial OpenAI deal, there was an influx of obviously poorly generated AI posts, people flagged them, and they fell off pretty quickly. The posts that make it through now are the ones people can’t tell are AI, based on that feedback. We’re training it in real time how to fool us.

fragmede 2y ago
Mission Fucking Accomplished https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

shombaboor 2y ago

Discord and heavily moderated forums are the future.

altruios 2y ago
IRC still is around. Pretty sure most of the user base is human still.
- rogerthis 2y ago
  Lots of bots. Also body-only-soul-less users (as I call those that never look at messages).
doesnt_know 2y ago
Yeah, small, invite-only "walled garden" style communities are definitely the future of the web. There has always been those of course, but I think they will just end up becoming the default, rather then the fringes. And the thing with these smaller communities is that they are far less tolerant to their hosting platforms pulling dumb shit (like stating they will train AI's on the comunities content).

dartos 2y ago

We can only hope

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

If that was true Twitter would be collapsing. The vast majority have been too passive to leave. I no longer think there's a threshold of worsening that will disrupt Twitter, Reddit, etc.

jsheard 2y ago

What I'd give to see the user retention stats at DeviantArt ever since they allowed it to be filled absolutely wall-to-wall with the most boring AI art you've ever seen. Not just allowed but encouraged by jumping on the bandwagon and integrating their own generator. Anecdotally it feels like there's not just an insane glut of AI slop drowning out everything else, but also less "everything else" over time due to user attrition. It really can't be overstated just how much it's come to dominate the entire site, skimming the frontpage now I immediately spotted a generic Midjourney-core image and the creator has posted 4100 pieces to date after joining... two months ago. 68 uploads every day on average.

vunderba 2y ago
100%. It's intensely frustrating that they didn't at least firewall that vast amount of AI noise using a subdomain or something (e.g. ai.deviantart.com).
- jsheard 2y ago
  They do have an AI tag that creators are supposed to set where applicable, and there's an option to hide everything with that tag, but the enforcement is weak so there's a lot of obvious AI spam which isn't tagged. Many of the AI spammers are using DAs monetization features or promoting a Patreon so they're incentivized to not set the AI tag to maximise their reach.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  Deviantart was already noise of unappreciated forms of expressions People just use it as a hosting platform Sounds more like a UX issue that you can see galleries
Mistletoe 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo This made real.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

Hard to make any forecast about "spaces" "prone to AI slop," whatever that means, besides social networks that you personally do not like, in aggregate or individually. TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking, if you exclude their presence on social media itself. If anything we already live in a post-scarcity world with regards to engaging content, starting a few years before the advent of generative AI. Why would AI generated content reverse that trend? Isn't TikTok's feed algorithm agnostic to whether a video is AI slop or user created? Isn't Instagram's? Are you really going to play No True Scotsman with "spaces" "prone to AI slop?" Shouldn't Kyle Chayka, who supposedly wrote a book on this, know that? Aren't there already too many good books, movies, TV shows, video games, operas, plays, etc. to consume? The toughest thing about this article is it is longing for a world that hasn't existed for a long time. If anything, the New Yorker and the New York Times, by doing a bad job at being media companies, have reduced the amount of new narrative creative projects that can thrive, not increased it. They never look in the mirror. The fickle and sometimes vindictive personalities that work there are not allied with narrative creators. The idea that discovering one or two diamonds in the rough offsets the incumbent cultural trends the New Yorker reinforces has long been dead - there is just way too much new stuff for any traditional media company to accurately review, report on and amplify. Everyone thriving on YouTube, Instagram, Steam, TikTok, hawking their shit, figured that out. It's even crazier to me that Kyle Chayka, who wrote a book on this, misses the mark here - I mean he should know about non-negative matrix factorization, which basically was the beginning of the end of traditional media, he should be able to make the leap that invention that enabled accurate collaborative filtering at scale killed The New Yorker, not AI, or anything in between 2000 and now. He should know there's absolutely no reason that AI generated content would be treated any differently than any other bad content, by NNMF or whatever feed algorithm. There's a possibility that the reason the NYTimes and Conde Nast have to reinvent themselves is because they do a bad job. To them, "A.I." is just another effigy, when the reality is that fewer and fewer people care what important New Yorkers think. Listen guys, it's not looking good for the writers, better to get your head out of the sand.

kibwen 2y ago

jabroni_salad 2y ago

When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed with an AI generated children's science fair project I always notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for enough people that discerning users are just helplessly along for the ride on every platform. The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is because people like it. The next iteration, IMO, will be AI generated children's science fair projects that also have a pepsi logo in them, still with 60k likes.

kibwen 2y ago
And how many of those likes are AI-generated?
munk-a 2y ago
We need to move above that before it kills the web though - if the end state is that you want to look at any old random adorable puppy pictures so you just ask your machine to generate them for you then we might have a way out of this internet death cycle. I'd hope that if you can trivially produce your own better tailored slop on your local machine then the AI slop online will lose any value - I'm concerned that we're going to lose a lot of good content created by artists before we reach that level though. I suspect the actual outcome will be a rise of manual curation and providence where a feed of adorable puppies or discussions on technology will rise or fall by how diligent the moderator is at keeping slop out of the feed.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Animats 2y ago
> When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed... There are still people watching Facebook with unfiltered feeds? There are filters for that. From the article: "The main people benefitting from the launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users trying to communicate with one another but those who are producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated content that is monetizable on social platforms." Yes. The main use case for LLMs remains blithering.

bakugo 2y ago

I wish this was actually true. The unfortunate reality is that the average internet user can't tell that they're looking at AI generated content with an AI generated caption and AI generated people posting AI generated comments, as we've already seen on Facebook.

r0m4n0 2y ago

Or humanity will devolve into confusion over what is real or AI generated for the next decade until we learn to live alongside the monster we have created.