this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
105 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

38307 readers
669 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
gyrfalcon@beehaw.org
rs5th@beehaw.org
coldredlight@beehaw.org
SemioticStandard@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social
remington@beehaw.org
105
AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 day ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to c/technology@beehaw.org
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.17-153712/https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a-brute-force-attack-on-the-algorithms-that-control-reality/

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings. 

What this means, and what I have already seen on my own timelines, is that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by AI-generated content because of the sheer amount of it. On top of the quantity of AI slop, because AI-generated content can be easily tailored to whatever is performing on a platform at any given moment, there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of "reality" online. I no longer see almost anything real on my Instagram Reels anymore, and, as I have often reported, many users seem to have completely lost the ability to tell what is real and what is fake, or simply do not care anymore.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

SEO (search engine optimization) has dominated search results for almost as long as search engines have existed. The entire field of SEO is about gaming the system at the expense of users, and often also at the expense of search platforms.

The audience for an author's gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google's algorithm.

Slop is not new. It's just more automated now. There are two new problems for users, though:

  1. Google no longer gives a shit. They used to play the cat-and-mouse game, and while their victories were never long-lasting, at least their defeats were not permanent. (Remember ExpertsExchange? It took years before Google brought down the hammer on that. More recently, think of how many results you've seen from Pinterest, Forbes, or Medium, and think of how few of those deserved even a second of your time.)
  2. Companies that still do give a shit face a much more rapid exploitation cycle. The cats are still plain ol' cats, but the mice are now Borg.
[–] TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org 1 points 4 hours ago

The audience for an author’s gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google’s algorithm. I know this sentiment gets repeated a lot, but I'm not sure it's universally true. I know back in 2012/2012 my wife was very invested in a bunch of bloggers along the lines of Pioneer Woman. A lot of the posts on those blogs were a mixture of personal anecdotes and recipes and I know my wife was there for both. It's frustrating when you're ready to cook and just want the recipe, but that's not the only (or maybe even the primary) way that a lot of these cooking/homemaking blogs were made to be consumed, I don't think.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 7 points 20 hours ago

For a while Google let you blacklist domains from search results, fantastic feature so of course they killed it off.