Is 'AI slop' breaking the internet?

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has deleted a host of fake social media profiles generated by artificial intelligence after a backlash against what Gizmodo called an invasion of "AI-powered slop".

The AI avatars managed by the platform include "Liv", who "posts photos of children that do not exist, and "Jade", who "posts photos of her non-existent vinyl collection", said the tech site. "The AI apocalypse is here and it's far stupider and more depressing than we were promised."

Social media slop

Social media companies see generative AI technology "as a way of attracting new users and more content to their platforms", said the Financial Times .

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"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform…that's where we see all of this going."

The row over the AI Meta profiles reflects frustration over "how many of our social media spaces feel now", said Gizmodo. Platforms are "populated by undead posters" amplifying a tidal wave of the low-quality, AI-generated images and copy known as "slop".

According to The Times, of the top 20 most-viewed posts on Facebook in the US last autumn, four were "obviously created by AI". In the summer, there were only two, and none before that.

While there have long been fears AI image tools could be used to create ultra-realistic "deepfakes" to spread disinformation, "so far, the most viral AI images have been obviously fake and downright strange", said The Telegraph. The proliferation of free AI software has instead led to a "surge in slop, driven by scammers, spammers and the occasional genuine user seeking to go viral".

Search engine slop

The issue goes beyond social media. Google's search engine has been "slammed with a tidal wave of AI-generated slop" over the past year, said Futurism's tech column, The Byte. This has "polluted the company's search results", the site said, noting that one of the top Google Images results for William Shakespeare at the time of writing was clearly a creation of AI. "As far as we can tell, the English writer had five, not six, fingers on his left hand."

The integration of AI into Google search results last year has made the problem worse. A study conducted after its roll-out observed a "trend toward zero-click searches, with 60% of searches now resolved without users clicking links", said Search Engine Journal. But Google's AI Overviews frequently delivers "weird" and sometimes outright incorrect results, while stealing human-written content, said The Verge.

Navigating the new internet

The challenge of moderating and detecting content is "one that has always plagued the greater web", said Wired, but "the AI boom has simply super-charged the problem".

The issue is "likely to get worse before it gets better", Bo Bergstedt, a world-leading generative AI expert, told The Times. "It's just what happens when everybody suddenly has tools to create an image or text or music or video or whatever by just typing a prompt."

The best option for internet users navigating this emerging reality, is to "slow down" and adopt more of a "journalistic practice". "If I see something that's strange or odd, I double-check it. I go and search for it afterwards to see if I can find other sources."