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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

> There is no insight to be gleamed.

AI-generated articles are the intellectual equivalent of empty calories.

I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out why someone decided to buy imgui.org, name-squatting an actual project, just to put a slop website on it mildly referencing the original project. It's not even trying to scam you.

I keep wondering whether these people that keep polluting the internet with their insightless slop even possess self-awareness. What motivates them to expend money and effort to contribute nothing to the world? Are they another example of a philosophical zombie?

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The answer is in your question. "Empty calories" is a multi trillion dollar business in the food world. It will be the same in the digital world.

McDonalds serves a need: human tend to get hungry.

What need does filling the Internet with AI-generated slop serve? No one is ever going to read those. As I've shown, sometimes they're not even selling anything.

The multi-trillion dollar business is for hyperscalers, but I don't get what slop creators get out of this. What are they spending money for?

> What are they spending money for?

To prepare for the future use of these resources.

I wouldn't underestimate the market for AI videos. From funny to hyperpolitical/propagandist.

One of the most globally recognized attribute of the recent US-Iranian war was the Lego cartoons. This sort of content will be soon churned out by everyone.

The propaganda lego cartoons I have seen were not AI slop. They were also perfectly doable in a traditional studio. The lyrics had meaning - insulting but a real one. They were not constrained to truth, but that seemed like normal propaganda lying rather then hallucinations. The lying was very purposeful.

"They were also perfectly doable in a traditional studio."

You can do fifty times more of them with AI, though.

"the russian firehose" and "flood the zone" have been proven to work, and work well.

that a human studio can make similar things is irrelevant; they're aiming for volume, one that is utterly all-encompassing, and they will succeed in that effort.

marketing is simply the same idea but pushed towards economic ends. instead of flooding the zone with memes to curate an entirely GOP worldview, they curate a lifestyle that creates anxiety that can only be remedied by buying a comically large pickup truck

I cannot tell what about domain squatting, but I've seen a "why" in seemingly innocuous Facebook groups about baking or such, which at the right time slowly transitioned to fake AI pictures and stories, and then to straight-out political propaganda. I'm talking Eastern Europe and russian "special operation" support propaganda. But a slop website won't have enough traffic to be worth such an action, so no idea.

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