From unstoppable slop, to #enshittification the #FT on the internet mess

https://hamishcampbell.com/from-unstoppable-slop-to-enshittification-the-ft-on-the-internet-mess/

"We're excited to share audio and video of our panel at SXSW, where Jason, Sam, and our friend Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine discuss how AI slop has taken over the internet, how it is a brute-force attack against the algorithms that control what we see on social media, and what we can do to fight back against it.

Here's the panel:"

https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-breaking-the-internet-as-we-know-it-404-media-live-at-sxsw/

"From unstoppable slop, to “enshittification”, to a digital world peopled by automatons, all of these ideas have a useful explanatory power. None, on its own, sufficiently captures the problem. The internet suffers from a cluster of disorders, some with overlapping symptoms and causes. I’m interested in uniting them all under a bigger tent, one that accounts for their similarities and for the role of human decision-making in bringing us to our current predicament.

Borrowing from the world of public architecture, I think of it as the “hostile internet”. Through deliberate choices, and some unintended consequences, the architects of the current consumer internet have created a thoroughly commercialised, surveilled and authoritarian space where basic functions are seconded to the extractive appetites of the monopolies overseeing the system. And it’s making us miserable.
(...)
Like the Moynihan Train Hall, today’s internet isn’t really designed for us, but rather to elicit certain responses from us, responses which, to put it loftily, are hostile to human flourishing. The tech companies’ growth-at-all-costs mentality has scaled their products’ flaws and vulnerabilities — and their second-order social effects — in proportion with their billion-person user bases. The hostile internet is a witch’s brew of explanations for how one of humanity’s most important inventions has produced so much simultaneous prosperity, inequality, disruption and social upheaval.

The result is that today’s internet seems to, if not make us actually crazy, make many of us seem crazy. Always connected, always posting and consuming, we resemble madmen now, giving voice to thoughts that are normally the province of the eccentric ranting on a street corner."

https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef

"To be clear, I am not really interested in criticizing any one individual here. In the absence of stronger rules on Instagram, this just comes down to a question of ethics. I am free to believe that what FutureRiderUS is doing is not ethical; they are free to disagree, or at least pretend to.

But neither of our opinions matter, because of two facts: fake AI slop is profitable, and there are countless users doing the same thing. There’s absolutely nothing to stop them.

That is: the Instagram platform doesn’t just enable this behavior, it rewards it. So do other platforms. On Instagram and TikTok, FutureRiderUS’s top hits are from fake LA fires; on YouTube, it’s three-hour long Christmas music compilations with slop visuals of families shopping. None are clearly labeled. Disaster porn is just another kind of #content.

It doesn’t really matter what that content is: as long as it is ‘content that grabs attention,’ both sides can make money.

For the slop creator and the platform, this is a clear win-win, at least in the short term. The only loser here is the audience, who is unable to recognize slop when they see it.

There’s this thing that AI proponents like to say every time something new comes out: this is the worst it'll ever be. So far, they've been right, and they may well continue to be right. It’s hard to predict what happens next with AI, but I have one prediction I feel fairly comfortable making: unaided, most of us will always struggle to reliably recognize AI when we see it.

But it’s hard to blame us when two sides are conspiring against us: Instagram’s interface makes it almost impossible to tell, and creators are incentivized to lie by omission."

https://www.404media.co/inside-the-economy-of-ai-spammers-getting-rich-by-exploiting-disasters-and-misery/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

"One hint that we might just be stuck in a hype cycle is the proliferation of what you might call “second-order slop” or “slopaganda”: a tidal wave of newsletters and X threads expressing awe at every press release and product announcement to hoover up some of that sweet, sweet advertising cash.

That AI companies are actively patronising and fanning a cottage economy of self-described educators and influencers to bring in new customers suggests the emperor has no clothes (and six fingers).

There are an awful lot of AI newsletters out there, but the two which kept appearing in my X ads were Superhuman AI run by Zain Kahn, and Rowan Cheung’s The Rundown. Both claim to have more than a million subscribers — an impressive figure, given the FT as of February had 1.6mn subscribers across its newsletters.

If you actually read the AI newsletters, it becomes harder to see why anyone’s staying signed up. They offer a simulacrum of tech reporting, with deeper insights or scepticism stripped out and replaced with techno-euphoria. Often they resemble the kind of press release summaries ChatGPT could have written."

https://www.ft.com/content/24218775-57b1-4e9f-ba64-266a3239cf27?accessToken=zwAGMvPAVVcgkc8kIYd1V7FOn9O6ZCZqMjnPJw.MEUCIQDMtSVpX0B3iseXKaqvL8IjUVyohoowQhXAXzk4y5cqTQIgHcaK7yxG6mobaEqrLGe2GcJwB2T2gWNJyuaCBeaJsCU&sharetype=gift&token=9ee5e78e-8e38-4ce4-9f53-05b7dc4fd2ea&__readwiseLocation=

The now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them.

Current status. Dont date robots!!!

#Futurama #aislop
https://youtu.be/Of504LSTQqY

The Ghibli AI DISASTER
—Stevem

https://youtube.com/watch?v=xm_DE-pgung

Not content with losing billions of dollars annually on it's AI slop with little to no chance of ever turning a profit, OpenAI is branching out.

They're planning to launch their own social media platform, because every self-respecting American broligarch needs his own Twitter clone.

https://gizmodo.com/openai-is-reportedly-building-its-own-social-media-platform-2000589662

Cognitive psychologist Arryn Robbins looks into the surge of AI-generated images online or "AI slop," how they can exploit us and what we can do to spot them in the wilds of social media.

@TheConversationUS https://flip.it/3A_9aT

Kids, learn to code In the next few years you'll have a chance earning insane hourly rate for rewriting programs that are now produced by LLM slop factories

A brilliant piece by Séamas O'Reilly on being stolen from by Big AI.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-41606539.html

Excerpt:

"I hate all of this in almost every way a thing can be hated. I hate the factless waffle that surrounds Big AI’s every improbable goal. I hate how insipidly stupid, or just plain evil, those goals so often are, and the yawning chasm between them and any form of achievable reality. I hate that Big AI’s successes are inflated and its failures ignored — or are even categorised as hilarious mis-steps, like when AI chatbots tell people to eat poisonous mushrooms, put glue on pizza, or make air diffusers from chlorine gas.

"I hate that Big AI consumes so much energy that every time you generate a six-fingered portrait of Anne Frank or a scene from the Vietnam war in the style of Studio Ghibli, you might as well just kill a polar bear with a crossbow. I hate that it can run roughshod over every copyright law and environmental protection on the planet in pursuit of the data it needs to continue failing, with no consequences save for the enrichment of the worst people on Earth, who have managed to make all of this magical bullshit seem sensible to an intellectual class comprised of people I wouldn’t trust to print an email.

"And, yes, I hate what Big AI means for culture. I hate that writers and artists must suffer the indignity of being pickpocketed by the richest men who’ve ever lived. I hate the constant, deadening marketing of machine-generated slop as a replacement for human thought and creativity. I hate every shiny, godawful image from an 'AI artist', and each lifeless line of pilfered prose, Frankensteined into existence by an 'AI author', posited as a substitute for illustrators and writers facing pay and working conditions already decimated by assaults on their professions from those self-same Silicon Valley hordes."

A heartwarming reaction to a blatantly AI-slop ad for shoes in my local subway station.

"AI firms are interested in developing tools and marketing strategies that revolve around the allure of AGI—around a stillborn god that will transform large swaths of society into excessively profitable enterprises and incredibly efficient operations. Think of it as a desperate attempt to defend capitalism, to preserve the status quo (capitalism) while purging recent reforms that purportedly undermine it (democracy, liberalism, feminism, environmentalism, etc.). Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder, has repeatedly called for “a new social contract,” though most recently has insisted the “AI revolution” will force the issue on account of “how powerful we expect [AGI] to be.” It doesn’t take much to imagine that the new social contract will be a nightmarish exterminist future where AI powers surveillance, discipline, control, and extraction, instead of “value creation” for the whole of humanity.

The subsuming of art springs out of the defense of capitalism—more and more will have to be scavenged and cannibalized to sustain the status quo and somehow, someday, realize this supposedly much more profitable horizon. The ascendance of fascism comes with the purge—the attempt to rollback institutions and victories seen as shackles on the ability of capitalism to deliver prosperity (and limiters on the inordinate power and privilege for an unimaginably pampered and cloistered elite).

Both are part and parcel to what’s going on, but one project is objectively more dangerous (and ambitious) than the other. In that way, then, all of this is a distraction."

https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/does-openais-latest-marketing-stunt

Meinasin oksentaa tänään kun työpaikan puhelimella instaa päivittäessä ruudulle pölöhti selkeästi tekoälyllä generoitu video rantataloista joiden taustalla kerrostalon korkuinen aalto pyyhkäisi rantaan. Etualalla kasa nykiviä ihmishahmoja juoksi rantaa pitkin paniikissa.

Alla hashtageja mm. NaturePhotography, NatureLove yms. mutta ei mitään mainintaa AI:sta.

Hyi saakeli mitä touhua. On todellakin mennyt ripuliksi sekin palvelu.

'YouTube has stopped two major fake movie trailer channels from being able to monetize their videos. The video-hosting giant has turned off ad revenue on Screen Culture and KH Studio trailers after a Deadline investigation chronicled the scale and sophistication of their output.'

Thank GOD!! These two are definitely the worst offenders, but there are more that need to get attention asap. We need to just put a nationwide ban on this slop once and for all.