35 ms·

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+

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.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > The main use case for LLMs remains blithering. And in a close second-place, to cheaply/easily counterfeit signals that we are/were treating as indicators of human things like "intelligence", "time-investment", "emotional involvement", "distinct identity", etc. I wonder how many traditional cover-letters / essays will vanish because the format has been so debased it doesn't mean anything, and people will say: "Just give me the core bullet-points."
dspillett 2y ago
> notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for enough people Or that buying likes from bot farms is incredibly cheap.

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.

Terr_ 2y ago
> The main use case for LLMs remains blithering. And in a close second-place, to cheaply/easily counterfeit signals that we are/were treating as indicators of human things like "intelligence", "time-investment", "emotional involvement", "distinct identity", etc. I wonder how many traditional cover-letters / essays will vanish because the format has been so debased it doesn't mean anything, and people will say: "Just give me the core bullet-points."

dspillett 2y ago

> notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for enough people Or that buying likes from bot farms is incredibly cheap.