AI-Generated 'Slop' Threatens Internet Ecosystem, Researchers Warn (bloomberg.com) 31
Researchers are sounding alarms about the proliferation of AI-generated content -- dubbed "slop" -- that may be overwhelming the internet's human-created material. Fil Menczer, distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University, who has studied social bots since the early 2010s, is now expressing serious concern about generative AI's impact. "Am I worried? Yes, I'm very worried," he told Bloomberg.
Another research from Georgetown University found over 100 Facebook pages with millions of followers using AI-generated images for scams. According to Tollbit, a company that helps publishers get compensated when their sites are scraped, web scraping volume doubled from Q3 to Q4 2024, causing significant strain on sites like Wikipedia during high-traffic events.
The situation creates a dangerous feedback loop where AI content is generated to please AI recommendation systems, potentially marginalizing human creators. Jeff Allen of the Integrity Institute told Bloomberg this resembles "the algae bloom that can blow up and suffocate the life you would want to have in a healthy ecosystem."
Another research from Georgetown University found over 100 Facebook pages with millions of followers using AI-generated images for scams. According to Tollbit, a company that helps publishers get compensated when their sites are scraped, web scraping volume doubled from Q3 to Q4 2024, causing significant strain on sites like Wikipedia during high-traffic events.
The situation creates a dangerous feedback loop where AI content is generated to please AI recommendation systems, potentially marginalizing human creators. Jeff Allen of the Integrity Institute told Bloomberg this resembles "the algae bloom that can blow up and suffocate the life you would want to have in a healthy ecosystem."
tech dark ages (Score:3)
You are now entering the tech dark ages.
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More like the general crappification that is ongoing with all IT now that things have slowed down severely, but some cannot deal with the former astronomical profits slowly going away. I expect that in the next 10 years or so we will get software liability (as any decent engineering product has liability) because the damage is getting far too high. The EU already has things in the work with consumer protection and KRITIS. Except more.
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That's the Dark Age of Technology [lexicanum.com]
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I genuinely think the only way out of this is some kind of reset, some massive opt-out of the corporatization of the Internet otherwise we're going to lose it all. It probably means building a new Internet that sits on top of the old one the same way the old one was built on the telephone network.
And initially, such a network would be unpopular and people would ask the point and claim it's not user friendly, the same way the Internet was in the mid-1990s.
We need to democratize content publication, we need t
if you build it... (Score:4, Interesting)
They will leave.
We're approaching a period where people disengage from an Internet full of AI slop. People are going to stop going to major sites as often, they'll stop browsing through store listings, and ultimately marketing, the major source of profit for internet companies, will retract.
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I look forward to so seeing a faster version of the 1990s internet again.
Excluding the commercial aspect... (Score:2)
There are tens of thousands (millions worldwide?) of people whose job depends on researching the internet, online language use, sentiment analysis, image analysis, ... who will have less credible in terms of original human generated content to process.
Speculation:
- Entire emerging fields of research will become career limiting for academics / think tanks backwaters due to a lack of authentic human generated content when compared to the Ai slop.
- Agenda based "news" and clickbait outrage "news" will become t
The Tragedy of the Commons (Score:3)
Only in Internet Time. The greatest resource and invention of humanity will be reduced to ruins by billionaires trying to shake out the last penny for themselves. It will take much less time to do this than it took to create it.
Needs an "AI Generated" indicator/badge (Score:4, Interesting)
I want to know which content is AI generated and have a way to block it completely. Youtube is now flooded with so much AI garbage content. I want a way to say 'hide AI crap from my feeds'. I pay for Youtube (to remove Ads) but I consider stopping this because the content is AI garbage more than ever.
I'm talking about Youtube but it must be the same for any Web sites, music, ... I want a 'Hide all AI created crap' button/settings.
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Just use the evil bit [wikipedia.org].
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Love it. They need to pass a law that ALL AI-generated crap *must* set the evil bit.
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Just overfit the model on packets with the Evil-Bit set.
Internet Archive / Google Cache (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's cached webpages are no longer available for individual consumption, and it's dawning on me it may be for this very reason. By keeping their cache private they are keeping the value of it (IE pre-AI era) for themselves. Perhaps for use in training since it hasn't been corrupted with AI generated content.
The Internet Archive is a great thing, but it's by no means browsable in any useful way. It's mainly for viewing a specific page's archive, with gaps and disassociations between the specific times things were crawled.
I'm wondering what it would take to identify and label "pure" internet content that at the very least already existed prior to AI and is unchanged. You know how a browser tells you a website is "secure" and certified, etc? How about one that indicates that the page's content pre-existed AI. It could grab the page from the Internet Archive, generate a checksum, and compare it to the live version. Lots of caveats of course, like filtering dynamic content (ads and the like) that do change.
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They turned it off to protect paywalls. Sites present Google their content without paywall and Google of course wants it that way. This means they cannot share their cache, because users would circumvent paywalls that way and publishers would stopping showing Google paywalled content.
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The ecosystem is already poisoned (Score:3)
I've seen websites full of copied and made-up redundant content for years, the only thing different is that it can be created in the blink of an eye now.
Whenever I go through the results of a search (DDG), I skip those with suspicious domain names that reek of bait. I've been skipping a lot more in the last half year and the worst thing is there's too much Reddit results left over, often useless.
LOL Too Late (Score:5, Insightful)
"Am I worried? Yes, I'm very worried," he told Bloomberg.
You're way too late, pal, you should have started worrying about 20 years ago.
Seriously, it's all over. The proliferation of AI slop is here to stay and it's only going to get worse. Much, much worse.
As I've said before, it won't be long before you won't be able to trust anything you see on a screen no matter what it is, from chemical formulas to muffin recipes. Statistics and "facts" will ALL be suspect.
The real "source of truth" in this world will soon be whatever was printed on paper before 2020.
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The problem is, in a few years, humanoid robots will come to the park, with human skin and blood, terminators. What will we do then?
Probably go extinct.
Facebook is becoming... (Score:2)
...increasingly useless as they push ads and suggested content
It's hard to imagine that AI slop will make it worse
Congrats to Mike Pondsmith (Score:2)
Likely it's weird clones of existing data (Score:2)
On stack exchange (Score:2)
Some sites reject AI answers, those sites will remain 'pure' to some extent
Enough with Bloomberg already? (Score:1)
Businesses just don't care (Score:2)
As long as they have 'engagement' they don't give a shit what slop they're feeding you. I still use Facebook periodically (don't judge me! older family members still use it to keep in touch), and I've noticed the amount of shitty AI content on the feeds, suggestions, etc., has exploded in the last couple of months -- fake animals, fake people, fake incidents, etc. I use some extensions/add-ons to mitigate/block the worst of it, but it's still so much shit. Dead Internet indeed.
FB/Meta could undoubtedly do
Scams is now the No.1 business model ... (Score:2)
... for social media and crypto.
Looking back at the optimism of the early days of the web this is a profoundly saddening outcome.
If an AI bot scams another AI bot online (Score:1)
does anyone actually give a fuck?
Human-generated content is still out there. (Score:1)
Lots of humans are still creating content.
You just can't *find* most of it, because Google has de-indexed it to focus on "established brands" (i.e., on paying advertisers). And none of the other search engines that I'm aware of, were ever really worth using in the first place.