It’s interesting to watch people sus this out in real time. Society as a whole will land on some sort of “solution”, and I expect it’s one most of you won’t like.
What are your thoughts? I’m starting to lean toward avoiding any fakeable content (even though I’m contradicting myself by even posting here). That can’t be worse than pre internet times right?
It’s shopped you can tell by some of the pixels also stopped being true after a few years and people just stopped caring.
We are just going though the same thing. People will just stop caring in a few years.
How to avoid AI Slop:
Step 1: Adopt a cat (aka: be adopted by a feline overlord)
Step 2: Observe the cat (but make sure to occasionally wink-blink at them)I have a business idea:
Vintage social media.
Only media that verifiably exists on the internet before 2021 is allowed. That’s still billions of cute animal photos and videos.
EDIT:
And a sister project: RAW-only social media. Only photo/video uploaded as raw sensor data (which even phones can take now) is allowed. Metadata is stripped, and they’re post-processed by the site.
Why? RAWs are technically possible to fake, but difficult enough to deter lazy slop spam. As a bonus, they can’t be heavily edited either; they’re unprocessed, unglamourous slices of reality. And they can be served in HDR with modern compression, as a cherry on top.
…Now I just need a few billion dollars to host it, and about a trillion to survive anticompetive attacks.
Fr your second idea is actually quite good.
When I do search for something that is not a current event I will filter for at older results to avoid any inaccurate AI answers
I was thinking about digitally signing content and you can go check the author’s public key against it or something.
Honestly, I don’t think your edit is crazy at all. I have a hunch that all the fake, filtered, AI-processed, vtuber’d social media is going to result in a sharp backlash soon. Kind of like how over-the-top, image-focused glam and heavy metal of the 80s spawned a backlash in the rawer, more “real” feel of grunge and stripped down alt-rock in the 90s.
Maybe that desire for reality will be one of the triggers for the AI bubble bursting.
It’s still a fantasy though. People aren’t in control of their phones/feeds.
Heck, we can’t even get the world to support JPEG-XL or HEIF or anything, much less take RAW pictures.
And Twitter has convinced me there is absolutely no line these services can cross to get people to quit.
Well, I had a brief moment of hopefulness at least 😐
i usually assume something is not AI unless its obvious or someone in the comments says its AI
I do hate being a cynical bastard but the slopification of the internet has made me this way.
;–;
Assume it’s all AI and don’t engage. Go learn to play guitar.
This might need to be the way forward.
Internet was fun, that was a really sick 30 years, but GG.
But then you are just training and generating music with AI… (Acoustic Instruments)
Get an electric guitar then.
Just another flavor of cynicism for me. Before AI, I would look at most “cute” animal videos and just see an animal performing a trained trick under the guise of “Omg, LOOK my dogs love spontaneously hugging each other, isn’t that cute??!!”
People have ALWAYS lied on the internet.
There was a wave of “sleepy baby animals collapsing in sleep together” on Spez’s site until someone figured out most of them were “sleepy” because they were drugged.
Just like a lot of animal rescue videos. Horrible, heartbreaking animal abuse, staged to look like an act of heroism.
I used to watch those videos on YT a lot, until I suddenly pieced it together, that two cats had the very same markings, and figured out what their scam was, I felt so disgusted I ended up making a massive rant and telling every person I knew for months.
next you’ll tell me people don’t always tell the truth on the internet or to not always believe what you read in the newspaper
Yeah this was my reaction, before AI cynicism there was “this is obviously scripted” cynicism and then even tropes that built on it like nothing ever happens
People lied way before the internet; Look at the octopus jump to escape the holding tank (crew poured bleach). Staged stuff like that has been going since recording was possible … they even staged pictures.
Or the contrived stories. “He does this every day until we feed him <3”
“This [specie of animal] hid in the corner every day for [X] [months/years] until one day THIS happened! (wait for it)”
My spouse yelled at me after she showed me too many AI videos, and I would watch it and 1) if it’s under 15 seconds, 2) too good to be true, 3) has unrealistic physics, and/or 4) has AI artifacts, I wouldn’t enjoy the video, and just say “yeah, that’s AI.”
She just wants to enjoy the videos, and didn’t care if staged or AI or what. She likes the concept of what’s on the video. AI takes that away from me, and not her, apparently.
If the video is obvious a fake and overexaggerated, I dont mind AI videos. Its no different than the shitposts people made before. But its the click farming shit that really irks me.
thats actually pretty interesting.
I’d be firmly on your side of that fence, the idea being its cute or cool cause it happened in real life. this is a recording of real life. if its a computer drawing using the severed and reconstituted husks of other things and did not happen, its just something completely different- would she watch a hand drawn cartoon of the same thing? Would she really?
Another possibly interesting way to tease it out, is say it’s a video of her close friend being given an award from a prestigious institution and she feels a sense of pride. Or, its a video from the same friend where her partner does something very sweet and poignant. In both cases, she then finds out that this never happened, its just a computer drawing her friend made of these non-events. Too different to draw out the reason while real vs fake matters? Possibly.
Say the video of a cat that can accurately work and excel spreadsheet. Does that one matter (spoiler, its REAL)
Usually when people share a post, it’s because the post evoked a reaction, and they want to share that with someone. Making the conversation about the provenance of the post truncates the exchange in an unsatisfying way. For a news story, propaganda, or the like, the source is important. For funny dog videos? Maybe the quality of the exchange is more important. A nice middle ground would be to react as if it were true, and then point out it’s probably AI. Videos are easier to spot, but the difference between an image that’s obviously AI and one that looks real is like 10 min of work in Photoshop. So we’re often better off saving our faculties of discernment for the stuff that matters.
I disagree completely, but I mean your position makes sense.
Nah, screw that. I am disgusted by the way AI looks. I’d rather people not send me anything than to send me slop.
The monkey paw curls you only get photoshopped dick picks from now on.
I predict you’ll get your wish.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as well, with the comparison to hand drawn animation. Honestly, I’m not sure, but I expect that would not hit quite the same way. Claymation…maybe the same, actually. It might also be just no glasses scrolling and quick reactions without discernment.
I’ve explained how to recognize AI videos, and she knows how to ID most (I hope), and I have noticed that she shows me fewer AI clips now. Not none, but fewer. I think she knows I don’t like them, and doesn’t want me too be the killjoy.
I even made a clip in Sora of our cat doing stuff, as an olive branch. I think that sort of made the point you were making about the friend getting an award.
this is all very thoughtful, and it seems like your thinking on it is aligned quite closely to my own.
just to say, I think its understanding and kind of you to be hands off and respectful of what she enjoys. I find all gen AI slop disquieting, but if someone else really enjoys it with their eyes wide open, really who gives a shit, there are very real and serious things to worry about and someone liking an AI cat video or not prolly isnt one of them
I’ve found, as I’ve gotten older, that my desire to believe things that are true is far from universal. It’s mind boggling to me that people willingly delude themselves for a hit of dopamine or whatever, while they slowly lose the ability to tell the difference between reality and fiction
Oh man I’ve noticed zero difference. Religion, a thousand times religion.
But that’s the point for the AI owners. To get people to not care about the destruction of your brain, the world, our income, our art, etc.
At that point, when we stop pushing back, AI slop peddlers have won.
Honestly I’ll take staged videos. At least it’s real humans doing it.
One of the things that makes a staged video less troubling is that the staging itself always comes with tells. Camera angles, cuts, framing, and of course actual staging.
AI videos can have that too, but they aren’t the inherent tells. AI tells are unnatural: bodies that shift in subtle ways, objects warped or searching outside the center of frame. It’s not stuff that you look for because it’s not stuff that actually happens in nature, or even in human constructed CGI all that often. But it does add up to a sense of uncanny valley.
“I’ll take people shitting into my mouth over dogs. At least it’s real humans doing it.”
If someone were to say to you “why did the chicken cross the road?” You wouldn’t demand that there is actually a chicken. You would accept it as a framework for a joke.
The same holds true for staged videos or AI or anything. Is the framework important to the point? A video claiming people can fly and using AI as proof… That’s problematic. A staged bit where it would still be funny if it was just told verbally by a standup comedian? Who cares how real it is, the realness was never the point, the concept of the situation was.
Almost all comedy movies are just long staged bits.
And “how funny would this be if a standup comedian told this as a joke” vs “the context of this potentially actually happening is very important to the underlying humor of it” is a variable line for people. And that’s ok. Unless someone is in danger (don’t let someone jump off a cliff because ai said they can fly), other people’s lines don’t really affect you
It’s kind of a shame you’re getting down voted for this. It’s a perfectly reasonable perspective, and makes sense.
When you sit down to watch a movie, you know it isn’t real. When you watch media coverage of current events, you should not have to guess if it is or isn’t.
news has been lying to people long before AI
So add fuel to the fire right?
honestly…seems like AI-slop is making things so bad that it’s pushing people away back into real life, so…kinda
I agree. But that’s wrong because lying about current events is wrong. This is what I meant about framework. AI is a tool in that regard and not the problem. There is plenty of “real” journalism out there spreading lies too that I have problems with.
I’m fortunate I guess that most of the AI slop I dismiss is things more akin to baby panda sneezing scares mom panda. Where it doesn’t REALLY matter if it’s real because there are no consequences. It’s either funny or it’s not.
If all we were seeing is the prompt used to generate the video, then there wouldn’t be a problem. Human-written fiction is generally valuable.
Instead we’re getting single sentences masquerading as “a picture worth a 1000 words”, or worse with video. Only 1% of that is actually the valuable part (the prompt), the rest is filler words and hallucinated slop.
A video or picture of reality is inherently more informative than any AI generation.I have the exact same problem with AI-generated articles. They’re nearly empty of any actual information, and it completely wastes your time to filter through it and find the actual point. Just like the backstory that gets put before every online food recipe; it’s useless fluff.
I feel like the photorealism is what makes it bad. When you notice it’s fake you feel lied to. If it’s a cartoon, or blatantly cartoonish, it doesn’t.
I just adjusted my way of thinking. Before it was “this video is staged, until proven otherwise”, now it’s “this video is AI, until proven otherwise”.
Also dont forget about the bots!
At least the ones where the cat or dog start Fortnite emoting at the end are obvious.
It’s not that hard to spot; my mother will watch them sometimes. A parrot using complete sentences and witty turns of phrase about a cat trying to attack them? Yeah no. But how do you get a “I just want to sit under my blanket, eat soup and watch cute animal videos” boomer retiree to understand she’s destroying the world by paying attention to this?
she’s destroying the world by paying attention to this
Okay, I’ll bite. How exactly is your mom “destroying the world” by paying attention to it?
By actively selecting these videos, watching them, sometimes multiple times through, going back to them to show them to me “You’ve got to see this video I saw” god hate fucking dammit, she’s driving revenue toward their uploaders, which is causing them to pave over the entire continent of North America with data centers that are destroying the concept of truth itself and murdering the environment.
I figure it’s not going to be long before you are unable to tell the difference. Consider the rate at which you’ve had to go from “zero effort at all” to “it’s not hard to spot”.
Which is why it’s important to starve them for attention, and thus ad revenue, now.
We past that point a year ago if not longer. The only point that would have worked came went and is long gone.
Better quit browsing shorts and get a real dog instead
It is a great exercise to test your media literacy. That you can’t even trust cute cat videos and art really does suck though.
I don’t find AI cat videos half as offensive as the “I found this kitty shivering in the rain and rescued it on my hike” videos with a 3000 buck show quality Bengal.
Upside is that I now look a lot closer at the pictures in my feed.
As much as I vehemently despise AI, these days, I’ll take positivity where I can get it.
Solution is to either enjoy for what it is or stop consuming it.
