The internet is being flooded with AI-generated garbage. Disinformation, propaganda, a flood of synthetic images and sounds. Will we soon only be getting information that AI feeds us?
While we are still pondering the possible social implications of artificial intelligence, the digital knowledge space is already drowning in synthetic trash. Automated bots are producing a flood of AI-generated content that threatens to suffocate the internet. How did it come to this? After all, it was not so long ago that the web was considered a place of free knowledge, designed for the open exchange of information and entertainment. How did it become a dumping ground for machine-generated nonsense, so quickly?
During his journey of discovery through the dying web, filmmaker Mario Sixtus encounters search engines that are losing their bearings and, out of helplessness, have begun working on their own demise. He demonstrates how one or two command sets typed into AI software are enough to produce meaningless self-help books and news videos consisting of pure nonsense.
Will we soon be fed only AI-hallucinated fake information when we try to do our own research? The documentary takes a cinematic journey through the flood of online garbage, meets a podcaster in New York who has cloned himself with AI, encounters an underpaid click worker in Kenya who trains AI — and, along with internet experts like Cory Doctorow, Melanie Mitchell and Mats Schönauer, strains for a glimpse of a new, sustainable internet.
I don’t see how slop could kill “the internet”, but it is already redefining if not outright killing the big social media platforms. The fediverse is probably safe because instances that allow slop (or struggle to moderate it) would just get defederated same as any other spam/trolls.
The fediverse is probably safe
How naive.
Why is that naive? The fediverse is literally a web of trust, thus making it now one of the most valuable information networks on the planet, far more even than the web itself.
Because AI invades everything and is unstoppable, like mold.
The Fediverse is fairly safe for now because it’s still rather low-key compared to the big commercial platforms. Yet small as it is, occasionally, it gets flooded by AI slop at high speed, that moderators can’t take down nearly fast enough. And it will get worse as more users come to the Fediverse.
Is this you, champ? https://piefed.social/c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world/p/2069906/an-ai-hate-wave-is-here
Calling him naive because you’re the one posting slop on the fediverse?
I don’t know why you were downvoted; you’re not wrong.
In a similar vein to those who tackle cyber crime, and (to take a specific example, the mass generation of CSAM), there quite literally aren’t enough people to take action at the volumes the stuff is being generated.
Here on Lemmy/PieFed, an instance could get flooded with slop that the admins can’t deal with. Yeah, the instance might get defederated, but 1) sucks for you if you were on it, and 2) nothing prevents this from happening on the other instances that defederated.
Unfortunately I do think the only ‘solution’ is to fight fire with fire (i.e. build automated moderation systems), but this will inevitably lead to the development of slop generators that circumvent those measures.
Seems to me like it will be an endless battle. Anything but straightforward to deal with.
I don’t know why you were downvoted
How uninitiated
lol this is a great example of how humans can post slop too thank you for illustrating
We will return to rings of small websites, like small and sparse self-sustaining villages in a post-apocaliptic world /s
