My latest: Generative AI is enabling a brute force attack against the algorithms that control reality. AI slop is taking over every algorithmically controlled social media platform and search platform, and the tech platforms are helping: www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a... - ThreadSky

jasonkoebler.bsky.social • 1 day ago

My latest: Generative AI is enabling a brute force attack against the algorithms that control reality. AI slop is taking over every algorithmically controlled social media platform and search platform, and the tech platforms are helping:

https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a-brute-force-attack-on-the-algorithms-that-control-reality/

Comments

basilmai.bsky.social•1 day ago

I block accounts every time I see AI posted on any platform and I think it has helped see less of it.

tuckfriendly.bsky.social•1 day ago

Holy fucking shit. Bleak doesn't begin to describe this. Ai suicide, by which I mean people's feeds will drive them to kill themselves, is almost certainly going to become a thing. I feel like I wanna give Jason a hug. Reporting this cannot be fun.

shiftlefti.st•1 day ago

I've anecdotally been noticing platforms like Facebook applying these post-processing veneers to uploaded photos that would ostensibly be for aesthetics, but seem to make real photos harder to distinguish from AI slop

302czar.bsky.social•1 day ago

That's it. Bring back AltaVista.

flatline42.bsky.social•1 day ago

Tom would have never done this to us.

davidtenn.bsky.social•1 day ago

I've been blocking that shit when it pops up in my feeds. Whoever the sender/poster is - 30 day pause at minimum. I see crap claiming to be abandoned houses and archeological sites and fake car wrecks. block it all as soon as I see it.

meritcandour.bsky.social•1 day ago

Reactionaries have all their hopes
tied up in AI now, to help them
uncover & destroy their enemies.
It appears AI’s not ready yet and
it’s kind of too late anyhow.
To all earthly power, there are limits.
Try telling them that, though🤣

Steve From Virginia:
https://economicundertow.com

spaghettijaguar.bsky.social•1 day ago

There’s already some who are starting to develop blocklists for image searches. https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

zakariyarashid.bsky.social•12 hours ago

Read my blog about When A.I. felt too much: https://medium.com/@zak00rashid/the-empathy-paradox-when-ai-felt-too-much-f27946838559?source=friends_link&sk=240dc0a7ffc1fccaaecbbf78c5fc36ad

rogue-rider.bsky.social•1 day ago

anxioudacity.bsky.social•1 day ago

I’m a big fan of the “people will eat cat food from the floor because they’re hungry” vibe from these guys.

possible.bsky.social•1 day ago

I guess the okay part of this nightmare is that the people who care about reality will be funneled into those sites/apps with clear simple sorting and blocking algorithms (like Mastodon and BlueSky (for now)) so we can find each other.

fromtherostra.com•1 day ago

Techno-overlord broligarchy chuds taking the wrong lessons from sci-fi (as usual):

misctakes.com•1 day ago

they're definitely trying it here too. Noticeable uptick in LLM reply bots in the last week.

worldcitizen1994.bsky.social•1 day ago

Thank you for writing this. And those vile videos are yet another sign that there are lot of seriously sick people in our world.

dcminx.bsky.social•17 hours ago

📌

admiralofthefleet.bsky.social•4 hours ago

It undermines people's beliefs about what is reality, that's enough said.

(I admit I didn't read and just fulminate what popped up in my brain) I do save it for later reading tho.

ben-wojdyla.bsky.social•1 day ago

I genuinely don't know how I'm going to teach my five year old how to discern for objective reality. I've been trained on 30 years of internet and the edge cases are beginning to get hard for me.

upfishing.bsky.social•1 day ago

Spend a week in the woods, no phone, no electrons. Make sure the kid has a 'just enough' sleeping bag, ya know, a little cold all night..

ben-wojdyla.bsky.social•1 day ago

What you see in nature is easy. She's already identifying bugs plants, building dams in streams, chasing butterflies, picking dandelions - all the normal kid stuff.

It's the internet stuff down the road that'll be a problem. She's not a "connected" kid, the extent of her device time is...

ben-wojdyla.bsky.social•1 day ago

...PBS kids games on Mom's phone for about 20 minutes a week while we're out to dinner. We're not hippies or anything, just trying to have her not addicted to the intense marketing aimed at kids.

But eventually she'll need web skills, and how do you teach "savvy to decades of highly evolved scams"?

azbikenerd.bsky.social•1 day ago

As someone who is ok at this, I think kids should watch a ton of real live-action video and look at a ton of real digital photos that you have pre-screened. When I was a kid, stuff being on a real news channel or website was reliable as a screening tool. Now you're the screening tool...

azbikenerd.bsky.social•1 day ago

When I was a kid, my dad would make comments about advertising while I watched TV like "see that bird in the background? every second and every centimeter of the ad is something they want you to see. think about why they decided to show you that".

flatline42.bsky.social•1 day ago

I mean, I have 30 years of experience going back and forth between real and fake shit on the internet and it's starting to sometimes get hard for me. Expecting a 5 year old to learn skills that are becoming only marginally useful after 30 years of experience is a tall ask.

80s-crop.top•1 day ago

I wondered if this would be a 'natural' occuring phenomena. A kind of telephone/chinese whispers where junk spewed by AI gets reabsorbed as it is published to the internet, and fedback in to new LLMs and RAGs. I never thought it would be something people would actively try to do.

80s-crop.top•1 day ago

but I guess people will try and game any system they can. Circuit bending for the AI age.

bemeredith.bsky.social•1 day ago

I appreciate the use of McDonalds and gas station sushi as metaphors. I call much of online content junk food for the brain - fast, cheap and bad for you.

mviktoro.bsky.social•1 day ago

Russia figure this attack surface out first and has been exploiting it for months

flatline42.bsky.social•1 day ago

Sounds like we're swiftly entering the "dark forest of the internet" territory. I know that my larger usage of the internet is growing more narrow as AI slop sloshes over everything. I think I frequent about 6 places now on the internet, and most of them are siloed off from the public.

codykinski.bsky.social•1 day ago

Damn, Jason, I'm glad you're reporting on this because the rest of us are otherwise being overwhelmed by this fast moving tsunami of glop. Please keep it and 404 coming. It's one of the few ways we'll be able to keep our heads up.

foreverambre.bsky.social•1 day ago

Damn near everyone looking to generate revenue on FB and Instagram is sharing this fake story & people in the comments are eating it up.

The minute Zuck announced he was gonna start paying for viral moments, the firehose of shit started spraying in every direction.

jasonkoebler.bsky.social•1 day ago

i am getting a lot of like, blatantly fake, AI-gen sports news too

garysmith.bsky.social•1 day ago

Yes, right? This baseball off season was ridiculous. There's always been trade speculation and nonsense floating around to fill that downtime, but this year there's been dozens of similarly named "baseball news sites" spewing clickbait and blatant lies, to the point that I no longer read any of it.

garysmith.bsky.social•1 day ago

And in addition to containing lies, it's confusingly written and sometimes doesn't even seem to have a point. And oddly, much of it also contains typos, so I'm not sure if it's completely AI-generated or if semi-literate people are cobbling together AI-generated text. Blech.

foreverambre.bsky.social•1 day ago

🙃

foreverambre.bsky.social•1 day ago

Opened FB just after this and the first post I see is Devin fighting the good fight. I don’t follow him, don’t know who he is, it’s a big coincidence (or was it 😅) I was served this content but, I ain’t mad about it. If only this was all I saw

realannemarie1.bsky.social•1 day ago

There needs to be a look at how AI is affecting politics.
Trump looks healthier and better than we know he is. Mainstream media is picking images of him that have been sweetened by AI. His sphincter mouth is replaced by a broader smile. Skin smoothed, jowls and neck no longer lumpy.

realannemarie1.bsky.social•1 day ago

How were images of Harris manipulated to emphasize stereotypes of Black women?
This is just the national stage. Local politics will be wild in the coming years.

Democrats have been way behind on regular Social Media. Is AI on their radar?

dirtside.bsky.social•1 day ago

makes me glad I'm not using any algorithmically controlled social media platform (I'm only on Bluesky and Mastodon) or search platform (Kagi). fuck LLMs

torrleonard.bsky.social•1 day ago

“AI slop is taking over every algorithmically controlled social media platform”

I’m not seeing any “AI slop” in my IG or FB or LinkedIn.

noospheric.bsky.social•1 day ago

So from your sample size of 1, you conclude that anyone saying otherwise is just making things up.

bossdokins.bsky.social•1 day ago

I don't see it either, but if you look at For You feeds, and stray off the track of people you are directly following that's where the hellscape begins.

torrleonard.bsky.social•1 day ago

I’m not on the “Following” tab on IG or FB, and I still never see “AI slop.”

The article is alarmist nonsense.

bossdokins.bsky.social•1 day ago

I wouldn't say it is alarmist nonsense, it is very real.

Some part of avoiding it lies in curating your feed, but it would not take you too long to trigger these recommendations to you.

ricyrick87.bsky.social•1 day ago

One side experience isn't the same for others, so we have to be open that people are seeing this slop, even if one isn't seeing it themselves

quannum.bsky.social•1 day ago

That's a pretty naive conclusion

izaaak.bsky.social•1 day ago

It does seem to rhyme with “climate change hasn’t warmed things up at MY house” and “sea level rise hasn’t flooded MY town”

jasonkoebler.bsky.social•1 day ago

This piece is long but the tldr is that Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Google Search are fucked and are going to increasingly collapse into AI hellscapes as spammers realize they can repeatedly attack the algorithms with whatever works. Ad industry is brute forcing, SEO is brute forcing

rogue-rider.bsky.social•1 day ago

Profound.

rogue-rider.bsky.social•1 day ago

And terrifying bc people are so fly clueless.

schneideref.bsky.social•1 day ago

What kind of ads are these and how may they reduce time spent scrolling?

kelpkelpkelp.bsky.social•1 day ago

Results are increasingly both wrong and vague. It is getting VERY hard to search from something even a little bit detailed, or from even a few weeks ago, and find any relevant results.

rtex.bsky.social•10 hours ago

I've been noticing the effects on text-based platforms with vote-based rating systems like Reddit, where I'm increasingly using the date on which content was posted as an indicator of the degree of "AI awareness" I have to read it with.

sensitivepapi.bsky.social•1 day ago

Do you think Bluesky is resistant to the same attacks?

torrleonard.bsky.social•1 day ago

https://bsky.app/profile/torrleonard.bsky.social/post/3lklmbaf5qs2e

jasonkoebler.bsky.social•1 day ago

Generative AI is eating the internet. If it's not your experience yet, it will be soon. Here is my Instagram Reels algorithm ... uhh, nsfl i guess but this is what it is:

nromdotcom.cloud•17 hours ago

Just watching someone scroll through a "normal" Reels feed of cute animals and people yelling about things makes me feel a little dizzy.

Watching just that short clip of genAI reels though made me feel downright detached from reality.

allosaur.bsky.social•1 day ago

Really bad time to have schizophrenia

circlesquared.bsky.social•1 day ago

*10 seconds into this vid*

Me - New Nightmare Fuel just Dropped

jasonkoebler.bsky.social•1 day ago

This Instagram Reel has been viewed 362 million times, which is more than every article that 404 Media has ever published, combined, then multiplied by like, 20-30x

dukecarge.bsky.social•1 day ago

thank you!!!

jasonkoebler.bsky.social•1 day ago

This strategy has reached the advertising industry. Highly targeted, brute-forced ads are the future of ads as well. Here's just one example but I have seen tons and tons of stuff like this:

surfdude29.ispost.ing•1 day ago

just checking, is there supposed to be sound on this video? I'm not hearing anything 🤔

jdavey.bsky.social•12 hours ago

I’ve had problems with videos uploaded to @bsky.app not containing the audio that the original does.

andrewgarton.bsky.social•17 hours ago

Rapidly rendering much, if not all of pop culture internet useless. It already feels like it's chasing its own tail, consuming itself. Waiting for the Mr Creosote effect.

https://youtu.be/373B9U4Dd60?si=dVW3oH6D3oM5A-2y&t=283

larissafae.bsky.social•1 day ago

does this mean we have to go back to askjeeves

amazingxc.bsky.social•1 day ago

I've set my default on pc to Startpage

shaidorsai.bsky.social•1 day ago

1) I remember a @greatdismal.bsky.social novel where a main differentiator between rich and poor was that the rich had “curators” that filtered and vetted their internet content, so they didn’t become unmoored from reality
2) This is an EXCELLENT reason to digitally archive reference and NF books

dylanschenker.com•1 day ago

Why would you want to filter this stuff out? It's perverse, alien, surreal. Why hide anything that doesn't conform to reality?

radiumskull.bsky.social•1 day ago

For one thing, some people will believe anything they see on Internets.

dylanschenker.com•1 day ago

We are talking about melting mutating monstrosities

radiumskull.bsky.social•1 day ago

I know, like the one they elected President. The stupid people, I mean.

dylanschenker.com•1 day ago

...touché

shaidorsai.bsky.social•1 day ago

(Also brings to mind the setting in “Cyberpunk 2077” where the “Old Net” was basically a howling wasteland of rogue AIs, and everything had to be firewalled off from it

radiumskull.bsky.social•1 day ago

Now that I've seen this idea, I actually want to go live there.

jflamman.bsky.social•1 day ago

@bsky.app should start labeling this type of content similar to how they're labeling porn.

cabritomarrento.bsky.social•1 day ago

this one was actually nice

disobedientlib.bsky.social•11 hours ago

Algorithmically controlled social media (i.e. every social media platform) is the problem. And there likely is no stuffing the AI evil genie back into the lamp. Only solution I can come up with is to abandon all social media...

justafrenchcat.bsky.social•1 day ago

😱😵‍💫
What a clusterfuck.

mennovdbos.bsky.social•1 day ago

Great write-up, small correction: Susan Li is Meta's CFO, not their CEO.

mikecook82.bsky.social•1 day ago

rodneylives.bsky.social•1 day ago

There are those of us, such as myself, who haven't been affected much. That's because we're internet old-timers who don't generally get our information from algorithmic sources.

I'm a Metafilter member. I read blogs and listen to podcasts. The social media I use is Mastodon and Bluesky.

rodneylives.bsky.social•1 day ago

I think the people harmed the most by AI slop are those who came to the Web when Facebook and Twitter became big. It could well be that algorithmic social media becomes much less popular because of this, and if that happens I won't rue its passing.

dandelorean.bsky.social•1 day ago

We can no longer participate in algorithm driven social media. I've gotten rid of my fb, my Twitter - we need to rip ourselves out as much and as hard as possible to kill these viral weeds that threaten our perceptions of reality.

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