Maybe AI Slop Is Killing the Internet, After All

Maybe AI Slop Is Killing the Internet, After All

The assertion that bots are choking off human life online has never seemed more true.

AI-Generated 'Slop' Threatens Internet Ecosystem, Researchers Warn

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 Uni…

Maybe AI Slop Is Killing the Internet, After All - 3 Quarks Daily

Issie Lapowsky at Bloomberg: Fil Menczer caught his first whiff of what he calls “social bots” in the early 2010s. He was mapping how information travels on Twitter when he stumbled onto a few clusters of accounts that looked a little suspicious. Some of them shared the same post thousands of times. Others reshared thousands of posts from each account. “These are not human,” he remembers thinking. So began an extensive career in bot watching. As…

X/Twitter is implementing new changes to show "less slop"

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and rebranded as his own platform X, a constant criticism thrown at the social media is that the content people see is far worse than what used to be available. Racism, homophobia, and more runs rife, with AI-generated slop as a constant on people's feeds. But, that might soon be about to change. Greg Yang, mathematician at xAI, recently posted that due to some updates to the platform, people are expected to se…