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AI-generated slop is quietly conquering the internet. Is it a threat to journalism or a problem that will fix itself?
AI-generated slop, or low-quality text, images and video, seems to be proliferating on the internet. What effect could it have on the online news ecosystem?
The word slop “conjures images of heaps of unappetizing food being shovelled into troughs for livestock” and was first applied to AI-generated content on online messaging boards, writes New York Times journalist Benjamin Hoffman. Similarly, the now-infamous Willy Wonka experience held in Glasgow earlier this year could be billed as real-life ‘slop’: the event really did take place, but the AI-generated visuals and text used to advertise it belied a much lower-quality reality. Another concern of Wachter’s is what she calls recursion: the idea that AI-generated text, easier, faster and cheaper to produce, will proliferate on the internet, eventually being input back into LLMs as training data, in a feedback loop leading to a gradual erosion of quality and value.
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