Boiled Frogs: AI Slop, Phishing, Deep-Fakes and Spam, Spam, Spam, by Charles Hugh Smith

Has the Internet’s garbage overtaken the Internet? From Charles Hugh Smith of oftwominds.com:

We’re frogs in a pot that’s being heated so gradually that we no longer notice the sewage is extinguishing the utility of the Web.

Let’s take “Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome” and direct it on the Internet, the digital realm that is now central to modern life The incentives are making money from attention, i.e. clicks, engagement, etc. by any means available, and a burgeoning universe of cons, deception, extortion and fraud.

And with those incentives, the outcome is an ever-expanding river of toxic sewage, a river of AI slop, deep-fakes, phishing, clickbait and spam, spam, spam on every device, every platform, every screen.

This is not inconsequential. A physician-correspondent recently reported that he was researching a cardiovascular condition online and realized the article he was reviewing was AI slop, a conglomeration of inaccurate diagrams and plausible-sounding nonsense slapped together to get whatever meager income would be generated by a modest number of views.

That’s the incentive the Big Tech platforms set up: since it’s a low-odds gamble that any post will go viral on a large enough scale to make serious income, the incentive is to post 1,000 AI slop posts which each collect 1,000 views. In other words, make it up on volume.

Since the Internet is global, people in low-income nations have an incentive to generate AI slop to earn what is a pittance in developed nations. The barrier to entry is low–anyone can produce veritable mountains of AI slop with free tools and low-cost bandwidth–and the gains, however modest, are welcome if paid work is scarce.

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