Half of the content on the internet is now AI-generated. An AI entrepreneur takes it further, saying, “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI.”
The phenomenon has given rise to a new term for AI-generated material: slop.
Tech reporter Frank Landymore breaks the news about what has happened to the online realm in his Futurist article Over 50 Percent of the Internet Is Now AI Slop, New Data Finds. The research used an AI-detector that classified an article consisting of more than 50% of material written using a large language model as AI-generated. Actually, says Landymore, there is some good news here. The percentage, now at 52%, is actually down a bit and seems to have plateaued.
It may be because AI content farms are realizing that their shoddy slop isn’t being picked up as much by search engines and chatbot responses, with the firm finding 86 percent of articles in Google Search were written by humans, and only 14 percent AI.
It is indeed good news that articles found on Google are mostly written by human beings. Too bad that many online users have switched to AI to do their searching.
An example, though, of AI slop populating the internet is real estate listings. Not only are realtors using AI to write their sales copy on how great the house is, some are using AI to edit and drastically enhanced the photographs of the property.
Tanya Chen at Slate quotes one real estate shopper:
DeAnn Wiley was on the hunt for a new rental in Detroit earlier this month when she had the displeasure of arriving at a property that looked nothing like what was advertised online.
The photos made the home look brand new, only to get there and see the usual wear and tear and the old ‘landlord special,’ ” she told Slate. She tweeted the stark, even hilarious differences between what was posted and what she saw in person.
Her listing appeared to show a pristine, albeit A.I.-generated, house with smooth textures, clean walls and windows, a nice green lawn, and a bench out front under bucolic lighting. However, the photo she said she took in person showed a much shabbier house, featuring uneven grass and cluttered with yard equipment where the bench was supposed to be.
The practice is becoming pervasive. Says Chen, “In recent months, homebuyers, renters, real estate agents, and photographers have noticed an uptick in A.I.-rendered images in listings—some with fake staging and altered details, and others that seem to show entirely different houses.” Supposedly, realtors have kept this out of their “multiple listing service” (MLS), the proprietary digital database they use to sell properties. But don’t buy sight unseen a home you see on online public sites.
Another attempt to monetize slop is a new company called Inception Point AI that is planning to put out thousands of podcasts that are completely and apparently quite openly generated by AI.
Inception Point boasts that it can produce each episode across more than 5,000 of its podcast shows for $1 or less each.
That means that if only 20 people listen to an episode, the company — which is currently bootstrapped and has yet to pay out salaries to its employees, according to the Reporter — claims it could turn a profit.
Whether anybody wants to listen to robots drone on about a subject is an untested question. . . .
For its podcasts, the Inception’s AI chooses topics based on Google data and social media trends, according to the Reporter. It then launches five different versions of each show to see if any of them stick. To double down on search engine optimization, some of the podcasts’ titles are extremely basic, such as “Whales,” a show about whales. . . .
“We might make a pollen podcast that maybe only 50 people listen to, but I’m already at unit profitability on that, and so then maybe I can make 500 pollen report podcasts,” [CEO Jeanine Wright] told the Reporter.
“Besides pumping out thousands of AI podcasts,” says Futurist‘s Victor Tangermann, “Inception Point also aims to turn AI-generated personalities into influencers on social media.”
To Wright, it’s a given that human creators will be replaced — a fate she thinks should be celebrated and capitalized on, not feared.
“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,” she told the Reporter.
More recently, researchers at Harvard and Stanford offered a possible explanation for why. Employees are using AI to create “workslop,” which the researchers define as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”The promise of AI has long been that it would help streamline tasks and boost productivity, making it an invaluable asset for workers and one that corporations would pay top dollar for. Instead, the Harvard and Stanford researchers found the prevalence of workslop could cost larger organizations millions of dollars a year in lost productivity.
Illustration by Ron Mader via Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0
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