#AI slop

[magiccharmss]

“oh but i can’t draw! how will i know what my ocs look like?” “its so difficult to find a specific reference so i still use it!” “i just use character ai dw” use gacha club. cut images up. read an x reader fanfic. LITERALLY do ANYTHING else you dumb fuck.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

Heeeeeeey students, it's scholarship application time again, and boy howdy am I seeing a lot of fucking AI-written scholarships. Let me tell you right now, you're not likely to get far using AI in your scholarship apps, especially the more reviewers see it pop up.

Every process is different, but these are my three tips for a scholarship essay:

Be Genuine. Yes, I know this sounds stupid, but hear me out. If you're asked to describe a hardship or challenge you've faced, you need to be able to talk about how you relate to it personally. Throwing in those SEO words like "implementing goals" and "the value of perseverance" sounds like a computer wrote it for you. Not sure about it? Read your essay out loud. Does it sound like you? Is there a word or phrase you think would suit you better? Use it! This isn't an academic paper, it's an appeal you're making as a relatable person. You gotta make it sound like it was written by you.

Have clear and specific goals. What are you planning on doing after you graduate? How do you picture your future? Even if you're not quite sure, having stated future goals for what you want out of education is frequently what applicant screeners want to see. Make sure you tie it in with the "be genuine" part (if you are studying medicine, what field interests you, etc). If you are still unsure, look at the careers of people who inspire you. I went to grad school wanting to teach overseas because I had a fantastic teacher in high school who did the same thing. Citing an inspiration is always a good way to lay out your potential goals, even if they're not set in stone.

Be open on why you need the money. Listen, it's not cringe, and few scholarship essay prompts will outright ask for it, but this is the number one thing we are looking for above all else. Are you juggling work and school? Does your family need your support? Are you working from limited resources? Please put that in your essay. You can make it part of your personal section or why you have the goals that you have, but scholarships are granted on need, not on good writing. This is one thing left out of the AI-generated essays I've seen.

Can you plug these factors into ChatGPT and have it spit out something that works? Sure, anyone can. But the big telling factor of AI-written essays is sameness, which quickly becomes bland. If you are going to use AI at all (which I will refrain from rolling my eyes at within this post) I highly recommend using it to generate some ideas to work from only. The more the essay is in your own words, the more it will stand out.

The final piece of advice is for the love of Prime take advantage of the resources your school has. Don't struggle there on your own. Seek out a tutor, ask at the library, look out for sessions on how to better your scholarship essays. Your school or community most likely provide them and they are so worth going to, if only to be more present and engaged in your education. I can't tell you how many resources we offer for students that they don't use simply because they don't know they exist. We can plaster flyers and shout about it from the rooftops as much as we like, but the burden of finding out about these resources is on the student. Please pop into your school library and ask if you're struggling, they love to help you in any way possible.

[theabigailthorn]

oh god it finally happened, a friend of my parents' sent them a "Lovely Christmas video of a stream train!" and it's completely AI, they had no idea it was fake. It's the most obviously fake slop and they were fooled

"Look at this beautiful train!" "That's AI." "It's beautiful! Where is this?" "It's fake: the train does not exist. Thousands of gallons of water were boiled to create this and it's all done with plagiarised work." "What a beautiful train! How did they make that train?"

[zed-sabre]

i have some doubts about the kanji as well, but i don't know enough to say for sure

[artistncs]

not gonna sugar coat it

[figmentjedi]

From the AI generated Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow, this is the Unknown, an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls, a byproduct of the scripts these poor actors had to read also being randomly generated.

[yuzul0vesyuri]

ai… columbine???

[delta-m]

AI Slop. It’s fine if you glance, but if you pay any attention.

The weird cup smoke and the ghost rocking in the hammock.

The uncanny valley of things that are just not quite right making them haunted af. Like this trope already existed in horror something someone familiar but they’re just off and they’re actually some horror beyond imagination.

[madagasc-art]

Anti-AI Zine

So generative AI is fucking bullshit, and I initially thought it was just going to fade away like its NFT brethren but clearly not, SO I've been busy

I spent about a year working on this zine about all the ways that current AI tech is undermining the arts, contributing to climate collapse, stealing our data, and just being all around shit.

I wrote a lot about my personal opinions on the subject and included quotes from writers, academic studies, and other creatives, as well as artworks from artists I admire, who I contacted for their permission beforehand. Because it TURNS OUT asking people for PERMISSION is the respectful thing to do????????? Who'd have known... 💀

The rest of the images were either made by me or were from the public domain (not fucken "publicly available" like OpenAI like to say 🤪).

If you'd like to read it I have the full PDF available for free on my website here and physical copies are on my etsy here. 💙

It's been really fun connecting with people about this subject and seeing people speak out more and more about how fucked AI is. Because as much as tech bros like to say that AI is an "inevitable" tech advancement that we can't take back, that doesn't change the fact that we still can and should be regulating the HELL out of it.

Stay safe out there folks, especially Sam Altman cause otherwise he's gonna catch these hands 👊👊

[ddarianne]

I was just going to ignore this post but the idea of this being tf2 spy all along was too good to pass up :'D HE'S GOING AFTER THE GOONERS! Like come on I'm not really after ai users, i think there are better ways, but dude's so lazy, forgot to check the tags :'D Do tell me if ya'll want spy on it's own, but rn have a laugh :D

[scragon]

How it feels to spot AI a mile away when the rest of the replies cannot

[zuza-finally]

WHY DO PEOPLE ON THIS SITE KEEP LIKING AI CONTENT. I CAN'T STAND IT. OPEN YOUR EYES!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nycs-subway-weapons-detector-pilot-program-ends/

Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.

All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.

AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:

https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/

For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:

https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-being-overrun-with-stolen-ai-generated-images-that-people-think-are-real/

In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).

So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.

(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":

https://www.usermag.co/p/my-neighbors-ridiculous-reason-for

The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.

According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.

The funnel goes:

i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;

ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;

iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;

iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.

The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.

These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.

Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.

Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."

The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.

The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?

Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”

This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.

This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.

When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."

Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.

The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."

The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[gaykarstaagforever]

I was going to do a whole journalistic deep-dive of this, but upon further reflection, 1) that would require labor I don't want to do, and 2) everyone but me is probably aware of this kind of shit and over it by now.

But I want to talk for a moment about a new "Country Gospel Christian" artist that is "blowing up" on YouTube and Spotify right now (I'm being sarcastic) named Aisha Sparkle.

YouTube Music, forever may it functionally persist, decided to drop one of her songs into my stream. Curious, I DuckDuckGo'd her.

Oddly enough, no image results matched the picture of the lady tied to the track.

Okay, fine. DuckDuckGo isn't perfect. There's still Google. Let's see.

Okay. She's pretty!

...Is that...the same lady?

Wait. Who the hell is that?

And none of these look like the track art, which looks like this:

Who is THIS, then? There is no way two country gospel singers have that same weird name --

......Wait a minute.

......OH YOU BASTARDS.

Yeah so this is AI generated, at least partially. All these tracks and entire albums have been dumped online, everywhere, in the last couple days, all with different lazy AI art.

The songs themselves are at least some kind of guided AI, because they're lyrically a little awkward at times, but sound like actual songs, with structure. Or it's just a really good AI, trained on this kind of music.

Honestly, the bar for white people "praise and worship" music is so low, it's hard to tell. Just endlessly mash up a handful of vaguely-positive Christian-esque platitudes, maybe start with a hooky chorus, and literally anyone or anything can generate one of these, and it sounds...good enough.

Then synth the music and get an AI voice of a white lady, and bam. Time to generate some money!

I just did one on ChatGPT, with the chorus "We Rise in Glory":

"We Rise in Glory" Verse 1: We lift our hearts, we lift our hands, To honor You, our Maker, Lord, With every breath, we praise Your name, Forever we will worship You, forever we will stand. Pre-Chorus: Through every trial, through every storm, You hold us close, You keep us warm. Our hope is sure, our faith is strong, We’ll rise with You, our souls belong. Chorus: We rise in glory, we rise in grace, Lifted by Your love, we seek Your face. With hearts united, we stand as one, In Your glory, our victory's won. We rise in glory, we rise in You, Our hearts surrender, our spirits renewed. Verse 2: The chains are broken, the dark is gone, Your light has come to lead us on. We run the race, we press ahead, In the power of the cross, we are led. Pre-Chorus: Through every trial, through every storm, You hold us close, You keep us warm. Our hope is sure, our faith is strong, We’ll rise with You, our souls belong. Chorus: We rise in glory, we rise in grace, Lifted by Your love, we seek Your face. With hearts united, we stand as one, In Your glory, our victory's won. We rise in glory, we rise in You, Our hearts surrender, our spirits renewed. Bridge: Let the heavens declare, let the earth sing loud, We are rising, we are shining, we wear the victor’s crown. By Your power, by Your might, we stand, In Your glory, we find our land. Chorus (Reprise): We rise in glory, we rise in grace, Lifted by Your love, we seek Your face. With hearts united, we stand as one, In Your glory, our victory's won. We rise in glory, we rise in You, Our hearts surrender, our spirits renewed. Outro: We rise in glory, we rise in You, Forever faithful, forever true.

Tell me that's in any way substantially different than this:

We all know this is doable and relatively easy now. But it's still amazing to run into it in the wild.

Whoever did this isn't even hiding it, obviously. The AI photos are lazy, and they're flooding the platforms with it. Which is the point. People who stream this kind of music probably won't notice that it's AI slop, because it is just good enough to pass as the mid thing they like.

And they don't seem to notice or care, judging from the YouTube comments.

...Assuming any of those are even real. That's probably part of the algorithm pumping, fake engagement.

Again, we all know this is what can be done now. But to stumble into it is still jarring. Especially when YouTube Music just drops it into an auto playlist.

Interesting note: why didn't DuckDuckGo show me any of these pictures? And why, then, did Google?

My guess is, while both are now using AI in search results, DuckDuckGo might still be sensible enough to weed out AI slop from search results. Because no one is looking for AI slop. And of course Google absolutely does not care, because they want to be the world's foremost AI slop company.

I went hard for awhile with AI art, to understand how it's made and all its quirks. And maybe that taught me something. I don't know. I assume everyone can become canny enough to sniff this crap out.

And clearly we have to, because this kind of thing is only going to get worse.

...Also AI-generated fiddles don't sound quite right. And the lyrics are always off in subtle little ways. And all the songs are around 3 minutes and don't have instrumental breaks.

...Also, Aisha Sparkle? That was the first red flag. It's probably some esoteric SEO thing, but it's so transparent. Issa Sparks would be better. Traylor Switch. Take it seriously, you bums.

All of this still requires a careful human hand to pull off atm, and shockingly, people scamming Christians for money are only willing to work so hard at it. Usually because they don't have to.

And that's certainly not something you need AI for. But damn if it doesn't make it faster!

Also NO, I'm not the one doing this. I like making fun of terrible people, not being one. Plus, why put all of this work in to make garbage for maybe a little bit of money, temporarily? Just make a good thing, if you can, and that could maybe generate a little money forever. You have to really just care about money NOW NOW NOW and nothing else to commit yourself to shit like this.

And if I cared about money, I wouldn't pay to use Tumblr. Like, come on.

[sighinastorm]

"Boiiu Chocken" means "how do they open the refrigerator?"

Cozy kitchen

[elf-trash]

reposting this bc the OP blocked me (and is blocking anyone else who disagrees which means blocked people can't reblog) and i want to say this loud and with my whole chest!!!!!

another Dragon Age fic was recently outed as being AI, and this is what the writer had to say for themselves about it:

so actually, Grammarly uses generative AI and is just as bad as ChatGPT. it also objectively makes your writing worse, it sucks the voice out of your prose and turns it into corporate sounding homogenized paste. it's also unethical for all the same reasons any generative AI is unethical. get a writing group and have a real human beta read for you if you don't trust yourself to check your own grammar etc. but honestly something unpolished and written entirely by your human brain and human imagination will ALWAYS be better than AI slop.

also, the part about published authors doing this is patently untrue. i know this is a huge problem in the self-publishing space, but most publishers now are including clauses in their contracts that expressly forbid the use of AI in ANY part of the creative process. this includes using ChatGPT to generate or clean up outlines or Grammarly to spellcheck and revise. so if you're trying to publish, don't fucking do this or you could literally be asked to return an advance if you get caught.

i've posted about this in the past, but AI detectors are actually shocking accurate these days. i've tested them extensively recently and they can consistently and correctly flag individual sentences written by ChatGPT in an otherwise original passage. and they almost never flag false positives. so the argument that AI detectors can't be trusted is just flat out wrong. are they correct 100% of the time? no. but can they indicate with a high degree of accuracy if AI was used in some capacity? absolutely, especially if there is additional evidence.

and for all the people hand wringing about AI detectors flagging false positives, let me just say this: if something is not AI written it is very easy to prove. you can't write anything of any considerable length without leaving a massive paper trail of notes and drafts. almost all writing software tracks changes and makes it very easy to prove you wrote something yourself. being falsely being accused of AI isn't actually a real problem and is only being made to seem as such by people who are trying to get away with and justify using AI or who are worried about getting caught.

i think a lot of people are just lured by a seemingly easy shortcut, and to their untrained eye, what the AI is spitting out feels "better" to them than their own writing. but i promise you it's not. trust your own brain and put in the work to improve at your craft rather than outsourcing the gift of your imagination to a robot that steals from other people's work.

i will continue to die on this hill!!!!!