Something exceptionally grim is happening on the Internet.
In the last few months, the constant flood of algorithmically generated junk content has kicked into an AI-powered overdrive, and it is cutting a swath of destruction as it overwhelms search engines, filters, and moderation systems
Call it Gresham's Law 2.0: bad content drives out good.
I'm starting this thread to document it, because there is a lot happening all at once.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bunch of people all accusing each other ad infinitum of being AIs (“haven’t you heard of Dead Internet Theory?!”), while the actual AIs serve ads to them in the background.”
"We suspect that AI-generated images appear on users’ Feeds because the Facebook Feed ranking algorithm promotes content that is likely to generate engagement.”
“Coull couldn’t even be bothered to pen his own author bio, which declares him a “rising star in the literary world” who “weaves spellbinding tales that delve into the mysterious realms of fictional thrillers and gripping conspiracies.”
"In a resignation letter seen by Aftermath, Glennon says that she made this choice due to the management team’s recent decision to deprioritize news in favor of guides. … According to a source close to the situation, Kotaku's staff will be expected to create 50 guides a week at the site.”
"The insights tool essentially lays out ideas for videos a creator could make, based on both personalized and general data. On my account, for example, TikTok flagged “Succession outfits” as a recommended topic for me to make content about. Also listed: “Herman Miller Chair,” “Fairy Grunge Room Ideas,” and “strawberry muffins.””
“The bigger issue is that there's just the peer review crisis you're talking about where there's just so many papers being sent to these conferences,” he said. “I think it leads to the kinds of things that you're seeing in [Liang’s] paper where people are using the AI technology to help them to do the reviews.”
"For example, the 2024 book Bears, Bulls, and Wolves: Stock Trading for the Twenty-Year-Old by Tristin McIver, bills itself as “a transformative journey into the world of stock trading” and “a comprehensive guide designed for beginners eager to unlock the mysteries of financial markets.” In reality, it reads like ChatGPT-generated text with surface, Wikipedia-level analysis"
"Stealing video footage from real women to make an AI influencer more “believable,” because the underlying video footage actually is real, is a strategy that I repeatedly saw being espoused by guides to making these AI influencers."
"“Because we could say things like, ‘Well, it’s automatically generated content.’ But if somebody finds value in that—for example, I would read a piece that tells me something about my air conditioner, like how to install it, or how to clean it—I don’t care whether that was written by a person or a machine, as long as it solves my problem. So does that constitute MFA?”
"It took me two days, $105 and no expertise whatsoever to launch a fully automated, AI-generated local news site capable of publishing thousands of articles a day—with the partisan news coverage framing of my choice, nearly all rewritten without credit from legitimate news sources.”
"Who cares if users are praying to and/or asking to marry AI images of flight attendants? All that matters is that they’re on the app and you can stick ads in front of them.”
"The saddest part about it, though, is that the garbage books don’t actually make that much money either. …The way people make money these days is by teaching students the process of making a garbage ebook. It’s grift and garbage all the way down — and the people who ultimately lose out are the readers and writers who love books.”
"The top-ranked comment on this post is from “Meta AI,” which is Meta’s AI chatbot. “I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T program,” the nonsentient chatbot wrote to a group of human parents. “We’ve had a positive experience with the citywide program, specifically with the program at The Anderson School.”
"A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as “the AI that plugs your product on Reddit” and which automatically “mentions your product in conversations naturally.”"
"The post has 2,192 reactions, 173 comments, and 84 reposts. About half of the comments note that the image is AI-generated, while about half of them say things like “I just saw his wood curving of Messi, He is talented. Just amazing.”
"One of the images shows a child whose leg is amputated below the knee and holds a sign reading “Today is my birthlday pleaase like.” That image has 70,000 likes and 3,000 comments. Another image is of a girl face-down in the ocean wearing an oxygen mask that is connected to a floating birthday cake.”
"“The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” Dawson told me. “These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story.”
"When exploring their comment sections, one will often see hundreds of bot-like comments interspersed with a few ‘real’ people sounding the alarm to no avail,” Khan Schoolcraft, a moderator of the group, told me. “It’s like yelling into an empty room full of a thousand identical brick walls.”
"Some leading opponents have built online tools that tap the power of artificial intelligence to allow anyone to quickly generate custom letters to the IRS in opposition to the proposal — a big step beyond the form letters often central to other lobbying campaigns.”
"Basically, AdVon engages in what Google calls "site reputation abuse": it strikes deals with publishers in which it provides huge numbers of extremely low-quality product reviews — often for surprisingly prominent publications — intended to pull in traffic from people Googling things like "best ab roller." "
"Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it."
"Across the social web, older forms of low-effort engagement bait are getting a brand new coat of AI paint. Every time I poke around a random TikTok that ends up on my For You Page, I, without fail, find out it’s connected to some weird content farm pumping out AI images on Facebook."
"Over the last few months, I have realized that I do not have to rush to archive content that blatantly violates Facebook’s rules, because Facebook has not deleted any posts that I have wanted to reference in an article this year without me directly sending them a link to the content.”
“Generate a bunch of free images and accounts, have them buy and boost one another in perpetuity, inflate metrics so that the “art” gets boosted by DeviantArt and reaches real humans, then watch the money pile up from DeviantArt revenue-sharing programs. Rinse, repeat."
"This new Instagram header also features a side-scrolling list of prompts for interacting with the AI: “Imagine rooftop gardens,” “advice for the modern stoic,” “anime reels.” … I have no rooftop, and if they think I’m interested in stoicism or anime, they’re beyond help.