AI ‘slop’ and the end of the internet

Opinion

The pace of generative AI development has been swift and astonishing. Just recently, Google un-veiled a new AI tool called Veo 3 which can create ultra-realistic videos. In a demo in a news report, it was able to make a news story complete with video, audio, backgrounds, and a news anchor reading copy, virtually indistinguishable from anything created in a human-based, real news-room. The completed AI-generated video was ready within five minutes.

Although amazing and somewhat alarming, AI has been making media for a while, and it is increasingly difficult for humans to tell the difference between AI and human-generated content. An AI band and its music had been featured on Spotify with a million monthly followers before anyone noticed. A Canadian journalist has finally come clean and admitted that he created the AI band The Velvet Sundown as an experiment. But not before real human followers had gotten sucked into the hoax.

Besides many other issues with generative AI, these two examples bring up serious implications for the future of the internet. First, AI can generate content much faster than humans can. Second, the content that they generate is often indistinguishable from human-made content.

AI “slop” describes mass-produced, quickly made AI generated content that lack oversight or fact checking that is often generic. AI can also put together all kinds of slop by reusing human-generated content that exists on the internet and re-purposing it to create endless regenerated content. YouTube is especially prone to this, with numerous channels dedicated to self-help, philosophy, best-of lists, biographies, advice, yada yada yada, all made to be attractive and clickable to get the views that the YouTube economy is based on. You can recognize a YouTube AI slop channel by looking at its description page; they have usually joined YouTube within a year or so and are able to publish several videos or more a week, sometimes more than one a day, that have a similar style with minimal differentiation.

What could AI slop mean for the internet? Up until recently, information on the internet has been put there by humans. AI slop can be generated much faster than human content, and so far there are no meaningful limitations on AI to consume (steal) any content on the internet to create in slop form.

Unlimited amounts of AI slop could then be produced. As AI creation outpaces human content creation, it is reasonable to extrapolate that AI will be the dominant source of content on the internet, human created content eventually in the minority.

Beyond the vast volume of AI content that will be created, AI tools are so incredibly good at “learning” from human creators that it will be very difficult to discern reality on the internet. At the very least, this would lead to human confusion and, at the very worst, it could mean someone’s death if they follow the wrong advice from some AI slop.

AI has no ethics or morals or any consequences or liability with regards to human harm from its negligence. For those who have any experience, we can use some critical thinking to suss out crazy content that should be ignored, but for those who don’t know, it can be very dangerous.

So a few years go by and AI content overtakes the internet.

What does that mean? It means that any content that is consumed is likely AI-generated and it is so good at imitating what used to be human content that we cannot tell whether what we are consuming is real.

The internet that once held great promise to bring humans universal knowledge, connectivity, freedom and education will have been turned into a wasteland of unreal, unbelievable, and untrustworthy slop. In other words, the end of the internet will be brought about because it will no longer have any value to humans.

What can be done? The AI train has left the station and there’s no getting it back.

We’ve already conceded (by lack of action) that our AI overlords are able use any human created content to train AI to serve content back to us. Human news media have taken it on themselves to label AI content and that should be a first step. The implications for many of the downsides to AI need serious discussion and AI slop is just one such issue among many for this incredibly transformative technology.

On the plus side, when the internet does get shut down, we can finally put away our phones, rub our eyes, open our front doors and walk outside and say “Hi” to our neighbours in the real world. Because at least we know everything in real life is real. For now.

(This article was completely written by a human).

» David Nutbean was a technology instructor at RRC Polytech, a Digital Literacy Administrator for a school division, and a computer science teacher. He writes from his home in Oakville, Man.