The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance
It really can't be overstated just how much it's come to dominate the entire site, skimming the frontpage now I immediately spotted a generic Midjourney-core image and the creator has posted 4100 pieces to date after joining... two months ago. 68 uploads every day on average.
People just use it as a hosting platform
Sounds more like a UX issue that you can see galleries
This made real.
The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is because people like it. The next iteration, IMO, will be AI generated children's science fair projects that also have a pepsi logo in them, still with 60k likes.
I suspect the actual outcome will be a rise of manual curation and providence where a feed of adorable puppies or discussions on technology will rise or fall by how diligent the moderator is at keeping slop out of the feed.
There are still people watching Facebook with unfiltered feeds? There are filters for that.
From the article: "The main people benefitting from the launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users trying to communicate with one another but those who are producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated content that is monetizable on social platforms."
Yes. The main use case for LLMs remains blithering.
And in a close second-place, to cheaply/easily counterfeit signals that we are/were treating as indicators of human things like "intelligence", "time-investment", "emotional involvement", "distinct identity", etc.
I wonder how many traditional cover-letters / essays will vanish because the format has been so debased it doesn't mean anything, and people will say: "Just give me the core bullet-points."
Or that buying likes from bot farms is incredibly cheap.
I believe we’re already seeing this on Reddit where upon the initial OpenAI deal, there was an influx of obviously poorly generated AI posts, people flagged them, and they fell off pretty quickly. The posts that make it through now are the ones people can’t tell are AI, based on that feedback.
We’re training it in real time how to fool us.
There has always been those of course, but I think they will just end up becoming the default, rather then the fringes. And the thing with these smaller communities is that they are far less tolerant to their hosting platforms pulling dumb shit (like stating they will train AI's on the comunities content).
TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking, if you exclude their presence on social media itself.
If anything we already live in a post-scarcity world with regards to engaging content, starting a few years before the advent of generative AI. Why would AI generated content reverse that trend? Isn't TikTok's feed algorithm agnostic to whether a video is AI slop or user created? Isn't Instagram's? Are you really going to play No True Scotsman with "spaces" "prone to AI slop?" Shouldn't Kyle Chayka, who supposedly wrote a book on this, know that? Aren't there already too many good books, movies, TV shows, video games, operas, plays, etc. to consume?
The toughest thing about this article is it is longing for a world that hasn't existed for a long time. If anything, the New Yorker and the New York Times, by doing a bad job at being media companies, have reduced the amount of new narrative creative projects that can thrive, not increased it. They never look in the mirror. The fickle and sometimes vindictive personalities that work there are not allied with narrative creators.
The idea that discovering one or two diamonds in the rough offsets the incumbent cultural trends the New Yorker reinforces has long been dead - there is just way too much new stuff for any traditional media company to accurately review, report on and amplify. Everyone thriving on YouTube, Instagram, Steam, TikTok, hawking their shit, figured that out.
It's even crazier to me that Kyle Chayka, who wrote a book on this, misses the mark here - I mean he should know about non-negative matrix factorization, which basically was the beginning of the end of traditional media, he should be able to make the leap that invention that enabled accurate collaborative filtering at scale killed The New Yorker, not AI, or anything in between 2000 and now. He should know there's absolutely no reason that AI generated content would be treated any differently than any other bad content, by NNMF or whatever feed algorithm.
There's a possibility that the reason the NYTimes and Conde Nast have to reinvent themselves is because they do a bad job. To them, "A.I." is just another effigy, when the reality is that fewer and fewer people care what important New Yorkers think. Listen guys, it's not looking good for the writers, better to get your head out of the sand.
Imagine the doctor walking into the room and saying "Congratulations! The tumor is growing faster than your legacy cells."
If you care about narrative creative media, the best thing you can do is pay for it. Whatever that means to you. That is my remedy. The New Yorker isn't going to go out and promote Substack, and the deeper you think about why, the more you realize it is the New Yorker who are the assholes.
This isn't even factually correct, the New York Times has done well, and grown over the last decade. In particular their move in the early 2010s towards paywalled premium subscription content, away from advertising, which was lambasted at the time, was in hindsight a very smart move.
Yes, in the aggregate premium offerings don't come close to the size of the market of slop, it's always been a numbers game, but if you're talking about cultural trends, the people who run those slop factories read the Times and the Journal, they don't watch Youtube shorts themselves and probably keep their kids a mile away from it.
Cultural capital and literal capital aren't the same thing. Danielle Steel has made 800 million selling 200 smut novels, but that hasn't given her a lot of cultural status or influence. The people who make decisions and set trends don't read her books.