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ipsento606
Tade0
To me it had, in a way, the opposite effect - I started appreciating non-AI content more.
Good art has something that is difficult to reproduce if one isn't already an artist who is just using AI as a medium - it's intentionality.
Take for example Floor796[0]. Every little detail counts and while you could use AI to generate single characters or even the whole thing, you'd inevitably find details which have no reason to be there. You could then remove them manually or modify your prompt or input image so that those you know about won't appear, but AI being AI will keep sneaking in new ones.
The longer your prompt, the more intentional everything becomes, effectively making it the art piece.
harrall
I don’t think it’s intentionality.
It’s style.
A lot of people regard technical measures as the signal of quality. The most realistic painting, the most expensive purse, the most technical flip on a skateboard, the most well drawn AI art.
It’s a cheap way to judge quality because you don’t have to understand what makes something good.
AI is really showing this divide.
badc0ffee
But then some people recognize that technical excellence is not the most important thing, and extend that to assuming that technique does not matter at all. And so we get this constant drip feed of absolutely terrible conceptual art (with an AI-generated artist statement, can't leave that out!) in every single local art scene.
robot-wrangler
If there's anything more tragic than wealth without taste, it is technique without vision
dec0dedab0de
AI might actually help in this regard. Where you may have someone who has good taste, and can create a unique style, but lacks the skill to execute on the technique. Kind of like a song writer that can't play an instrument, but can hum a tune to the band, and articulate subtle changes they want.
Of course, current AI is not even close to that yet, but decoupling creativity from technical ability could actually be a good thing in the long run. Though to be honest, I am generally pessimistic on it.
fluffybucktsnek
And what makes a style good (as objectively as it can get, anyways)? Why would it be the defining factor of what makes art good?
santoshalper
Yeah, but you have to realize we are on the losing side of this war. The armies of bullshit now have an incredible advantage that actual art can never have. At least in the past, there was some equilibrium. Bullshit was cheaper to make than art (or any other quality product), but now it has become infinitely cheaper to produce, and much more expensive for us to separate from the bullshit.
Think about this for a moment - it takes a company of 8 people to make 3000 podcast episodes a week. It would take far more than 8 people to listen to that many podcasts. How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff? What happens when it's 30,000 episodes per week? 300,000. What possible hope does art and craft have against an army that is effectively infinite.
We can hope that the cream will rise to the top, but I am not optimistic. I genuinely believe we are watching the end of art and human creativity as it is absolutely drowned is mass slop.
tl;dr - we're fucked.
nancyminusone
>How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff?
Categorize, curate, and share. The war is only for your attention. I have favorite creators now, and they would cease to be favorite if they suddenly started sloppin' it up. The best of them recommended cool things made by other people, who in turn recommended more things, and so on.
If instead you peddle bullshit, it won't take long to be identified as a bullshit vendor, even if you have 1000x the bullshit of the next leading brand.
Not everyone will get the message especially if you mainly consume algorithmic feeds - we all seem to have that relative who thinks you would enjoy being sent an AI Jesus image every other week.
neaden
The simple answer is every single AI podcast is the chaff. Everything this company makes can just be ignored.
drowntoge
It feels like I will forever mourn the totally self-inflicted loss of the Internet. I feel like I will never get over it, so much so that I wish I had never experienced its (brief) moment of brilliance. I feel sorry for my younger self for thinking it was here to stay.
elmomle
It was a very special time when the Internet was full of people's open, personal gardens. I feel fortunate for having experienced that because it showed me what's out there if I look, and I want to cultivate the pleasure of finding such things and sharing them with people I care about.
Melatonic
Kagi SmallWeb still has a lot of interesting stuff like the old internet
nyeah
It's not self-inflicted at all. Users didn't enshittify the sites we used to enjoy.
gyomu
The saddest part to me was realizing that pretty much no one gives a shit.
I knew that they were plenty of careless people with no taste for truth or quality in the world, but I didn’t realize there were so many of them.
Especially so amongst my friends and family members and coworkers. Here’s someone who’s now sending AI generated messages for daily communication. Here’s someone who’s now using AI generated slop art to promote their work. Here’s someone who turns to ChatGPT for any random question they have. No regard for beauty or truth or personal expression or the quality of expert work, only hooked to the “get this done” machine.
biscuits1
"The growth of AI feels . . . like losing a limb"
Indeed. Figuratively, generatively, and of course, generationally.
undefined
MarkusQ
> The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb
Or gaining a new, oddly misshapen and inexplicably placed limb of no apparent purpose or utility.
BobaFloutist
That will randomly and unpredictably try to take over tasks from your other limbs, hijacking your somatosensory system so you can't tell when it's doing so without actively looking at what you're doing.
dylan604
I think you just described my cat's tail
mizzao
It seems like Black Mirror's "Joan is Awful" is here, but instead of a quantum computer generating personalized content, we just have an endless parade of meaningless slop.
encom
>an endless parade of meaningless slop
This is, increasingly, the front page of HN. Direct slop is uncommon, but not rare. I skip any headline that mentions AI. But sometimes you get baited, you start reading, and it's about AI anyway. A few days ago there was an article about someone hacking some device, and it was just the author vibe-hacking with AI.
It is not interesting.
I have intense AI fatigue. Make a containment board for AI sloppers. It's so much worse than all the previous fads combined, like blockchains and Rust rewrites. I'm not even anti-AI, but the exposure to it is just overwhelming and unrelenting.
funimpoded
It reminds me of how movie special effects making-ofs got super boring when most of the work started being done with computers end-to-end.
But with everything.
parliament32
> the front page of HN
I think I've "flagged" more links this year than my last 13 years on this site combined. I'm sure it's unproductive and doesn't really do anything, but it makes me feel a touch better. I'm so over the slop I think I'm actually visiting HN markedly less because of it.
On the plus side, there has been a (predictable) uptick in slop-flagging browser extensions over the last few months. Once a good locally-hosted version exists, I think it'll take its rightful place alongside ad blockers for tech-minded folks.
_dwt
I think at this point the containment board is the entire Internet. I have no idea how, but we all need to "Atlas Shrugged" this shit and start over somewhere else with something else.
dontwannahearit
[flagged]
munificent
> What have you lost exactly?
Connection to other humans.
Imagine your favorite third place[1], a library, park, bar, etc. The place you regularly go to get connection to people without having to jump through all of the hoops to create and organize an actual event. It's a way to satisfy your innate need for conviviality without requiring much effort or willpower, which are always in finite supply.
You've been going to this place for years. You're a regular. You've made friends with other regulars. It feels good to be a familiar face and to see those familiar faces. A kind of warm sense of safety that we have evolved to experience since we first sat around a fire in prehistoric days. That sense of "Ah, good, I'm here nestled among my tribe."
Now imagine how it feels to walk into that room and discover that half the seats are occupied by mannequins. Each mannequin has a loudspeaker attached to it constantly playing random word salad.
Some of the regulars are still there, maybe. It's hard to see them through all the plastic limbs or hear them through the cacophony of meaningless noise.
How does being in that space make you feel? Now compare it to how you felt before the dead-eyed inanimate bodies showed up. That's what we've all lost.
CooCooCaCha
I’m so intensely sick of this attitude. We are losing things with technology. Important things. Human things.
Looking under a microscope at one specific instance and saying “eh it’s not that bad, you’re overreacting” is disingenuous or at least putting your head in the sand.
bombcar
Imagine a library. You go in, grab a book, and start reading.
Imagine the same library, but it's the Unseen University's Library - you go in, grab one of any book ever written, and start reading. You've gained something!
Imagine the library is now the Library of Babel, it contains every possible book that could ever exist - https://libraryofbabel.info/browse.cgi
You've definitely lost something. You'll never hit "random" and find anything of value.
dontwannahearit
You want human things? Put down the technology and go and connect with some humans.
But yes, the original poster with their allusions to lost limbs and "pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.." is overreacting, depressed or both.
The slop will continue until it is no longer profit-making for someone.
qotgalaxy
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sambapa
Have you lost a limb?
dzink
The economist in me immediately asks: Where is the financial incentive to do this? Just the same way the programmer would ask what the stack is. Some possibilities:
1) Money laundering - large content farm someone can argue makes xyz in revenue to hide an alternate source of revenue.
2) Ad fraud - leading up podcast charts or SEO results to attract clicks to sell ads. Bot farms could also be making clicks to pretend sell ads as well.
3) Attempt to dominate the niche for sale of knitting products. Or to pretend to dominate it so they can sell their the business later at a larger multiple.
4) Test the waters of a much bigger engine for doing 1-3 above in an innocuous hidden subject, before they do it with elections or some other more profitable field. Regulatory waters as well - seeing what they can get away with.
Feel free to brainstorm more incentives for making something like this.
williamdclt
I don't understand your question, are you asking what's the financial incentive to AI-generate thousands of podcasts a week? Isn't it obviously the income from streams and/or ads?
Carp
Did you read the article? Headcount went from 300 to 8, number of podcast per day went up and apparently listenership went up.
surgical_fire
This only works if there are people willingly listening to crap.
Perhaps there are.
bluGill
Are they? Or do they think they are listening to something real?
I've enjoy reading alt-history at times. However I can only enjoy this when it is clear that this isn't real history. Often one of the more enjoyable parts is authors notes of how real history differs.
I have heard some human written songs that really sounded real and tugged at the heart strings - until I found out it was fiction, and then I was offended. The key here is that it showed someone good (to modern ideals - they all considered themselves good Christians) existed in a timeline where they where we know almost nobody was good.
catapart
the bitch of it, though, is that it doesn't only work if people listen to it. it also works if a bunch of AI bots can convincingly fake people listening to it. and, of course, those types of bots exist and have financial incentive to continue faking it, too.
at some point, these two competing interests are going to find out that they're paying each other to stare at each other's dwindling profits, but my bet is that it's going to be a while yet before that wake up call. and it will be an even longer churn into something else because no one is going to admit that they were funneling money into nonsense for years. they're going to "adjust strategies" to "modernize against changing markets" for "new potential growth". all shit that takes a long time to do because it's a half measure aimed at saving face to investors. so it'll work for a long time just based on the momentum of bullshit. =/
Romario77
they said, podcasts had 12 million downloads. 750k weekly at the moment.
They get people listening. And when you download you don't know it will be crap AI slop.
I now get a bunch of this in youtube - just endless drivel about some theme I am interested in. They create so much crap it's hard to see which one is real. I started banning the accounts that are making AI crap, but there are so many now.
thechao
I think the question he's asking is this: is it an ad ouroboros, or is there some other (nefarious?) intentionality behind it?
My hot take: porque no los dos?
ytoawwhra92
Podcast network is an established and proven business model. You spend money to make episodes, you make money from ads. You make a bunch of different podcasts with a bunch of different target demos to reach a wider range of listeners and this grows your revenue and makes it more consistent. It's not complicated.
The specific incentives for starting a slop network are the promises of increased margins via reduced production costs (don't have to pay any pesky creative types) and more rapid growth via reduced production time (you can theoretically produce an episode in about the time it takes to listen to one, perhaps less).
I explored starting an AI slop network a few years ago. The tech wasn't quite ready at the time. My motivation was far more base: watching numbers go up.
qotgalaxy
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afandian
It's scandalous that no-one has yet posted Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon "Bullknitters".
https://www.instagram.com/p/C2OQtokvzCa/
(or google image search)
penguin_booze
Related: Four Yorkshiremen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE.
xnorswap
Personally I think it's scandalous that the now top comment is an off-topic reference to something tangential to the title, and nothing to do with the article, which isn't really about knitting at all, except for being the hook to which the author was pulled in to the world of AI podcasts, and consequently found their output rather lacking in content.
You could substitute the word knitting for almost any hobby, and the article would read almost the same.
It's an article about the soulless content-free world of AI podcasting, and about how AI output is about validating the emotions of the listener rather than meaningful content.
afandian
That wasn't meant to be the top comment, it was meant to be buried somewhere round the bottom!
I did read the whole article and have some thoughts about it. But they are pessmistic and difficult, so I'd rather share something fun.
My on-topic thoughts are that I just spent a long weekend in good company playing music and chatting. Returning to quotidien life made me think the solution is to get as far away from computers as possible, and back to the in-person interaction that we're evolved for.
A big reason IMHO that we're susceptible to phony bullshit (whether it's knitting podcasts or broadcast propaganda) is that we're not evolved for it, and it misses many of the contextual clues present in in-person interaction for which we are evolved.
duxup
The summary but no content thing is interesting. I’ve seen it in many forms and I’m not sure why it plays out that way. Maybe the summary is tied to the prompt tightly? The rest not?
I saw some bots on Reddit that were very odd in that if anyone asked a question in relation to something like an news article some account would respond with a non answer but sorta summarized bit of the article. If you responded “that’s not really what I asked” you got an even odder response.
This isn’t that strange as people will do that in a way… but i noted it because I saw a flurry of those accounts in Reddit and then they vanished.
munificent
> The summary but no content thing is interesting. I’ve seen it in many forms and I’m not sure why it plays out that way.
I would guess that it's because the incentives and goals are different.
The point of a summary is to entice a listener to begin the podcast. So it has to offer the promise of interesting depth.
Once they've started listening, all the body of the podcast has to do is be soothing enough to get the user to keep listening until the next ad comes on. It has no need to actually keep the promise unless the listener is paying enough attention to hold it accountable.
divbzero
> All of the images in this post were generated by an ai in response to the simple two-word prompt “lovely knitting”
Touché.
roxolotl
Wow I’d never have expected Kate Davies to show up on Hacker News. I think it’s important to understand her background a bit when she talks about knitting as a matter of life and death. She was a scholar of 18th century literature before she suffered a stroke young[0]. She focused on knitting as a means of recovery and never looked back. She built a business and a community and attributes a lot of her physical and mental health to knitting.
So while this post hopefully hits a chord for anyone in a creative field she embodies a particular type of person for whom slop is a genuine risk to their being. Not their job; their whole personhood. In a world where slop has chased out the humanity of things and the bullshit machines fill all content what are the chances someone like her could build a second life better than her first?
0: https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2015/01/28/five-years-on-part-...
getpokedagain
Wild. This kind of empowerment and long lived effort is the type of story we should be sharing.
I'm concerned that we've taken an amazing character like this and turned the world against her for frankly a bet against human intellectual development.
surgical_fire
> Not their job; their whole personhood
I hate so much that while I read your reply this particularly phrasing was grating to me.
There's nothing wrong with it, and I have no doubts you, whoever you are, wrote it.
What annoys me to death is that a perfectly fine language construct is tarnished to a point that a mere glance reflexively caused me to wince, and I had to actively interpret it as fine.
bellorap
Interesting, sounds like a similar experience to my reading of this reply
The root comment brings insight and value and stakes out a human position. I don’t see a need to snipe from the hedges
edbaskerville
I think maybe they were saying that their personal AI slop detector had produced a false positive on "whole personhood", and they felt sad about that? Or perhaps I'm missing it.
quibono
Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?
chromacity
HN sends tens of thousands of views to AI-farmed articles about why AI is good or why AI is bad. These articles get upvoted to the front page literally every day. They don't say anything interesting, but many of us just like having our existing beliefs recited back to us.
So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down.
There is a huge market for content that makes you feel smart without requiring thinking and makes you busy without requiring work. I'm not not saying it's inherently bad. I'm listening to music on my daily commute and it's the same thing: just enjoyable filler so that you can do something other than getting angry at other drivers. The internet just weaponized the formula, and now AI is the equivalent of nuclear weapons I guess.
surgical_fire
How is a listen to a podcast counted?
If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen?
Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.
ghostly_s
As I understand Spotify et al may do something a bit more sophisticated, but the traditional model for podcast analytics purely tracks downloads, which could very well be your client auto-downloading a subscribed episode you never play. I don't think anyone actually has visibility of "listens". And the traditional model for ad sales is a creator (or an agent on their behalf) emailing a brand "Hey, we make this podcast which gets X monthly downloads, want to buy an ad read?" I think they usually point to iTunes store rankings to somewhat support these claims but again, iTunes just tracks downloads. (Obviously, this is all rife for fraud.)
ytoawwhra92
In some ways it doesn't really matter because once you've got enough data points you'll know what percentage of views result in an ad click (or whatever) and then you can figure out how many views you need to hit your revenue targets.
undefined
ryukoposting
By McHealy's logic, we ought not be concerned about that. After all, it's low-stakes content.
charles_f
It's reminding me of twitter. I occasionally open it, half of the content I see is AI garbage (and by that I mean, poor quality AI generated stuff that is obviously AI), and 95% of the replies are bots responses, which aren't even AI based (most of the time not it's garbage, unrelated text)
jrmg
My podcast app downloads way more podcast episodes than I actually listen to.
Zarathustra30
I occasionally put on a (human-made) podcast for the word-sounds rather than the content. I can imagine others do the same without caring whether it is human-made.
justzisguyuknow
If the sonic quality of a human voice is what you're seeking, then I imagine a generated voice will still be less appealing, no?
psychoslave
No, but to misinform people you have two main strategies: limiting through tailored scarcity and dilute in extra-generic overabundance. Don’t get it wrong: both can be combined and even can sometime overlap.
It doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Equally saturating all channels, metrics and indicator is enough to create hindrance so preventing relevant information to spread in meaningful time.
Attention is all you need, so distraction is all that will be given.
ikr678
Also, fracturing audiences to infinity.
undefined
api
I listened to a podcast a while back (human authored I'm pretty sure) about low-quality gutter level streamer content and how popular it is, speaking of personalities like asmongold and a vast number of even worse imitators.
This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LARPing as one) telling you about their boogers and then being racist and then playing video games for 6 hours.
But it's wildly popular. Millions of people stream this kind of shit for hours every day.
There's a lot of people out there who just want to numb their brains, and there seems to be no floor. You can just keep making it dumber. The stuff people stream (and doom scroll) on the Internet makes 1980s daytime soaps look like high art from a lost golden age.
So it's not at all surprising that millions of people listen to low-quality un-curated AI slop podcasts.
I actually unsubbed from the podcast I heard. Meta discussion of crap like this isn't much better than the content itself. Keep driving. Do not look at the car accident.
I had kind of an epiphany like that in the last year. The Information Age means information is free. It costs $0 and is produced to infinity. That means you are not missing anything. Your attention is actually 100% yours, and if you choose to ignore the car wreck that's fine. There are infinity car wrecks. There are infinity everything. Keep driving.
bluGill
The problem is I want to live in the "correct information age" - that qualifier is hard to find. I suspect that correct will cost money. Unfortunately I don't know how to pay for it. Many of the major publishers are also using AI with questionable fact checking. Where I most need correct information is my local small town news, and there isn't even a newspaper anymore. (there is the nearby big city newspaper, but they don't cover my local issues well)
compiler-guy
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
--H. L. Mencken (or at least attributed so.)
tyg13
The vast majority of people tuning into those kinds of slop streams are not really active listeners. It's more akin to turning on the radio while you work/clean/perform some other task that doesn't require strict focus or attention, with the added benefit that you can personally interact with the streamer (chat) when you have attention to spare. But I'd wager most viewers never directly interact or even pay much active attention to the stream at all.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same dynamic is playing out with these AI slop podcasts.
alphawhisky
One of the real costs of the end game attention economy is that when your "car" crashes, noone is going to stop to help. When the market you engage in gets swallowed up, everyone will buy the swill that outcompetes you on perceived surface level value. Communities get fractured. Organizations that used to be community pillars (church) become self serving. All these things create a positive feedback loop of intellectual degradation.
Michelangelo11
> one of the most pernicious things about this particular kind of bullshit is the way it casts any form of critical scrutiny as a terrible failure of sensibility.
What a great line. And you'll probably notice this technique being used by very skilled bullshitters and master manipulators: any request for rigor or scrutiny is met by something like genteel condescension. You're treated as if you've committed a breach of etiquette, and that's one of the reasons the technique is powerful -- you're likely to feel embarrassed and, following that, to back off.
nyeah
Great point. This happens on forums too. For example if Kate opposes knitting bullshit, a common strategy is to characterize Kate as 'hostile', 'overheated', 'overreacting', etc. Kate's actual argument doesn't need to be addressed. We just rule that Kate isn't posting content, she's causing conflict or experiencing an unfortunate emotional state.
This strategy also indirectly helps overworked moderators by penalizing disagreement, which in turn discourages flame wars.
Kate's critics can even say they support Kate. They just want to help her deal with her emotional overload.
tlb
I like how the pictures got more and more sloporific through the essay.
It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a mountain of slop. In theory, recommendation algorithms ought to surface the best stuff, but that doesn't seem to align with incentives. Sad.
Michelangelo11
Yes, I noticed and appreciated the sloporific (great word!) quality, too :) I stopped midway for a sec to try and figure out an image, then eventually realized they were just getting more nonsensical on purpose.
onemoresoop
Or even worse, it gets fed back into the AI slop machine
frereubu
I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.
latexr
At the start of Good Omens, there’s a scene where demons are sharing their recent misdeeds. A couple of them are sharing “classic” demon stuff like killing and possessing, but Crowley (the protagonist demon) shares more modern evil deeds, such as creating traffic jams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens
I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.
kombookcha
It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of really intense suffering.
philipallstar
I thought it was that he altered planning documents and even went and moved physical markings to make the M25 the shape of the ancient evil sigril Odegra (this is from memory; I just read it a lot as a teenager) so every angry drive round it powers that sigil.
latexr
Yes, I think you’re right. And if I recall correctly, near the end he’s trying to get somewhere but gets stuck in traffic by the same problem he caused.
shagie
https://youtu.be/M0S3a32RzEo with David Tennant as Crowley.
It's a well done scene that is properly faithful to the original.
globular-toast
Whoever decided adding silly audio effects to an operating system is surely one of these lesser devils. Just think of how many people have been aggravated by a colleague's laptop when it "wakes up" every day, or an inappropriate notification sound during a presentation or something. On any desktop PC I interact with I do my bit by disabling all sound effects before I continue.
nephihaha
I think Good Omens may have been influenced by the 1960s version of Bedazzled. In that, Peter Cook's version of the Devil spends much of his time creating petty annoyances such as scratching vinyl records and putting them back on shelves, breaking parking meters so drivers get fined, and ripping the last pages out of Agatha Christie whodunnits etc. Definitely a touch of Douglas Adams in there as well.
siddboots
For a long time I thought that the AdSense business model was ultimately doomed because I assumed that people hate ads as much as I do. It turns out I was just wrong about what most people are willing to put up with.
latexr
I remember visiting a friend over a decade ago, and for some reason I had to use their computer for a bit. I was immediately thrown aback by all the ads everywhere and installed an ad blocker before anything else. They were very grateful, but the part that surprised me was they were annoyed by the ads but never thought to look for some way around it. It never even crossed their minds it could be done or to search for it.
dmd
All human progress in history has been due to a VERY small handful of people who think “this is bullshit, things could be better”.
The vast majority of people accept what they see as the way things are and it never occurs to them that things could be different.
thevillagechief
It's always absolutely shocking using a regular person's computer. How can they live like this? I have lived in this ad-free bubble for so long that I forget that's not the real world. If I had to live without adblockers, I don't think I'd ever visit the internet.
globular-toast
Similarly, when my partner moved in I told her about the network-level adblocker and she kinda scoffed at it saying ads don't bother her. A few years later she started complaining that when she's out of the house she gets ads.
lesuorac
I really doubt it's going to die out.
I think a lot of the value in these AI Podcasts is just the self-validation of the listener. It really doesn't matter to the listener if there's nothing between Egyptian socks and Revelry because the point was to feel good not to learn.
But also because I've had a long standing pet peeve with news articles that include random ass stock footage in articles. If humans can get away with include a picture of _any_ ship when talking about a specific ship (that may have never been in the harbor the picture shows) then why does the AI need to be correct?
hasteg
[dead]
nilirl
I'm afraid it'll lead to a weird music-ification of content.
Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition.
AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention.
Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.
pjc50
It's definitely the sort of thing that Crowley from Good Omens would be working on.
Tade0
Just like Big Tobacco moved onto greener pastures in the developing world, Big Slop is not targeting specifically us, but the billions of new internet users who connected over the past decade:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS
There's this (now old) meme called "Italian brainrot" - AI generated characters with vaguely Italian-sounding names like Bombardiro Crocodilo (note the incorrect spelling of the Italian word for crocodile).
One character stands out - Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Not only does it not sound Italian at all, that last word rang a bell.
Sahur (or Suhur) is the meal eaten before dawn during Ramadan.
After some digging I discovered this whole category originated in Indonesia. The country experienced an absolute explosion in the number of internet users in recent years and is home to internet phenomena which spread globally, but few in the west seem to realise that.
sharadov
That's how characters are named in "Steal a Brainrot" , a Roblox game.
revolvingthrow
Boomers love slop. Even when they know it’s ai (and it can be increasingly difficult to tell even for people who don’t struggle to send an email) they love it almost as much as they love political ragebait, and they love political ragebait more than their own families. My ancient grandpa is on some facebook groups and they share bottom of the barrel ai videos and images all day. If it can be consumed with zero effort, it’s great. They couldn’t care less about whether any care of effort was involved in its creation, whether it has any value whatsoever, whether it’s made up bullshit. Not a whit.
They also have money and can vote, so there will be an endless avalanche of slop being generated every single day, enough to bury organic content ten times over.
mwigdahl
Eventually they will all die, and then the upcoming Gen-Z and -Alpha will save the world with their well-documented refined tastes for artisanal, purely human short-form video slop.
Lalabadie
Yeah, people will reflexively filter out the slop, eventually, but they'll do it by leaving the places that have been rendered worthless by its persistent presence.
The particular type of innovator ghoul that's enabled by generative AI dreams of filling the entire internet with bullshit content. Aggregators (media and content) should be actively pushing them out for their own long-term survival, IMO.
firefoxd
I didn't have the words to explain to my mother why those AI health/advice/story/etc videos she shares are harmful.
> While a liar displays an underlying respect for the truth in the very act of intentionally distorting it, “the essence of bullshit”, Frankfurt writes “is not that it is false but that it is phony.” For Frankfurt, then, bullshit, is discourse from which incidental matters like truth and reality have been completely hollowed out and replaced by performance and simulation.
She would often say "but I happen to know that some the underlying information is true." The answer is the videos are phony, even when part of it happens to be true.
telesilla
I can absolutely recommend the book On Bullshit, it's a tiny read and makes an excellent gift. Kate's article summarizes it very well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
This reddit comment puts it perfectly:
"What’s it about? Frankfurt tries (successfully) to define bullshit (rather academically). In short, a bullshit artist is solely focused on persuasion and making an impression, not caring about truth. Paradoxically, bullshit can be true.
What makes it bullshit is how it is created - shoddily, hastily and without regard for fine work. A gifted liar does their thing carefully so that the truth cannot be found out. A bullshit artist just flings it out, overwhelming skepticism with sheer volume, until something sticks with the audience."
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1pidpb2/on_bullshit_...
An 1980s take on something that has taken over our 2020s digital airwaves, indeed.
thechao
I'm from Texas and we use bullshit & tall-telling as an entertainment art (this is my background; I do t think it's specific!). This definition of bullshit is spot on; I'm pretty proud of my ability to bullshit-for-entertainment, so AI bullshit really grinds my gears... it's so bad.
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Increasingly, my reaction to AI-generated content of basically all types is simply a deep, resonant sadness.
The growth of AI feels a little like losing a limb - there is an initial shock of sadness, an initial dose of loss, an initial sense of what has been taken away.
But then for months and years afterwards, the daily occurrence of some other little humdrum experience, and only at the moment of the encounter does one think, "Ah yes, this too is forever changed."
Like sounding the depths of a dark well, where every day you lower the rope a little further, but every day there is nothing to feel but a pointless swinging in a vast, unquantifiable emptiness.