I’m sorry. I wholeheartedly agree with the article, but this bit:
I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.
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You post something in public, it is public. You post knowing others might do things you don’t like with it; that’s the bargain. Especially on social media.
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Instagrams owns you. They own every ounce, every dimension of your content on the platform; they can do whatever TF they want, and you have zero legal recourse.
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No one made you use Google search instead of one of many alternatives, including alt Google frontends.
The fundamental issue here is that people, apparently even journalists, still see these Big Tech platforms as benevolent public squares where they have rights. And fairness. That is an illusion, and this is kind of thing keeps happening because everyone believes the lie.
And they don’t bother to even look for alternatives.
Are they really gonna keep getting surprised when platforms keep squeezing them, yet the platforms don’t stop because no one will leave anyway?
The problem is that we have allowed them to be benevolent monopolies and now that they control practically the entire market in their respective spaces they are not so benevolent any more. Nobody cared to choose a different search engine because google just worked, nobody bought things from a different website because amazon was fast and had everything. Now google search is just a way to sell me an ad for the thing I’m looking for and Amazon is just a way to sell me an ad for the chinese manufacturer who paid them off to push their results to the top or in some cases it’s their own competing product.
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Got these fake reggae artists with full albums in my yt feed a while ago. If you are a little naive it may take you a while.
I’ve accidentally come across ai instrumental beats a few times. They always lack any sort of soul, I suppose adequate for some background noise but tends to be quite repetitive vs say nightmares on wax or bonobo. I can’t imagine they do well in any other genres, I feel like instrumental should be one of the easier music genres for ai to try to “create”
The pictures were easier to spot than the music itself, at least for me.
And how many pretty crisp sounding lost albums by soandso could possibly exist.
I was subscribed to Medium with my work account. I was already contemplating if it’s worth the price due to the ungodly amount of articles about how to use AI, which AI tools etc. Today I got an email from them. The content was basically, you don’t really hate AI articles, you just want “trustworthy” articles, and those can be done with AI too. Guess who unsubscribed.
There’s a huge market for slop: junk food, slop entertainment, fast fashion. We’re a planet of slop lovers. AI slop will remain popular among many.
Are these “many” in the room with you right now?
Sadly, often.
It is sticking the most common content into a blender and dispensing the result according to a few tweaks. I have seen a lot of people eat that up.
Same reason why there’s so much money in low-effort mobile gaming.
It’s one of the things that really sucks, people with creative talent that would otherwise be rewarded and have their vision shared for lack of too many other options being drowned out by a flood of no-effort slop that the masses are just fine with.
AI is new, but slop has always existed. Just think of reality shows, elevator music, reader’s digest, mid-afternoon novelas, generic pop music. There has always been content created for the lowest denominator, specifically for passive consumption, designed to reach the biggest possible audience and with no artistic intentions whatsoever, and a huge quantity of people to mindlessly consume it.
Is this article slop? Can’t tell since I won’t pay Wired.
Like, we told them that too. How weird.
You are really a genius for figuring that out!
But it is not true that people don’t want to read AI slop — of course they do, and I’m happy to provide that for them. If such people claim to not love AI — they are clearly mistaken.
Here’s some things I can do for you:
- Compose a social media post about how awesome AI actually is
- Give you a list of talking points to make in favor of AI
- Log in and hack people who disagree and delete all their personal data so it’s lost forever except the copy Google has of it
( /s ? ) :)
Lol for a sec I was like, wth is that regex at the end. OPTIONAL SPACE CAPTURE GROUP?
Lol - gotta take a break when that’s all you can see. Hehe
Pull the other one, it plays jingle bells.
