{"id":59466,"date":"2025-10-07T17:42:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T17:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/59466\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T17:42:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T17:42:15","slug":"ai-generated-slop-is-slowly-killing-the-internet-so-why-is-nobody-trying-to-stop-it-arwa-mahdawi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/59466\/","title":{"rendered":"AI-generated \u2018slop\u2019 is slowly killing the internet, so why is nobody trying to stop it? | Arwa Mahdawi"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do you do, fellow humans? My name is Arwa and I am a genuine member of the species homo sapiens. We\u2019re talking a 100% flesh-and-blood person operating in meatspace<\/a> over here; I am absolutely not an AI-powered bot. I know, I know. That\u2019s exactly what a bot would say, isn\u2019t it? I guess you\u2019re just going to have to trust me on this.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m taking great pains to point this out, by the way, because content created by real life human beings is becoming something of a novelty these days. The internet is rapidly being overtaken by AI slop. (It\u2019s not clear who coined the phrase but \u201cslop\u201d is the advanced iteration of internet spam: low-quality text, videos and images generated by AI.) A recent analysis<\/a> estimated that more than half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated. Meanwhile, many news sites have covertly been experimenting with AI-generated content \u2013 bylined, in some cases, by AI-generated authors<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Slop is everywhere but Facebook is positively sloshing with weird AI-generated images, including strange depictions of Jesus made out of shrimps<\/a>. Rather than trying to rid its platform of AI-generated content \u2013 much of which has been created by scammers trying to drive engagement for nefarious purposes<\/a> \u2013 Facebook has embraced it. A study conducted last year by researchers out of Stanford and Georgetown found Facebook\u2019s recommendation algorithms are boosting these AI-generated posts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meta has also been creating its own slop. In 2023, the company started introducing AI-powered profiles such as Liv: a \u201cproud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller\u201d. These didn\u2019t get a lot of attention until Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times<\/a> in December that the company had plans to fill its platform with AI characters. I\u2019m not sure why he thought that boasting the platform would soon be full of AI characters talking to each other would go down well, but, it didn\u2019t: Meta swiftly killed off the AI-profiles after they went viral<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The likes of Liv may be gone from Meta for now, but our online future seems to be getting sloppier and sloppier. What Cory Doctorow memorably termed the gradual \u201censhittification<\/a>\u201d of the internet (the degradation of services in pursuit of relentless profit-seeking) is accelerating. Let\u2019s hope Shrimp Jesus performs a miracle soon; we need it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How do you do, fellow humans? My name is Arwa and I am a genuine member of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[85,123,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-59466","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-internet","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}