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.
How naive.
lol this is a great example of how humans can post slop too thank you for illustrating