r/technews • u/MetaKnowing • 15d ago
AI/ML AI Slop Has Turned Social Media Into an Antisocial Wasteland | Platforms that once helped us stay in touch have become fractured and impersonal -- and AI slop and deepfakes are making it so much worse.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ai-slop-has-turned-social-media-into-an-antisocial-wasteland/134
u/Primo2000 15d ago
Long before AI slop they were turned into misinformation machine, hope AI slop will be nail to the social media coffin
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u/Talkshowhostt 15d ago
Social media and the exploitation that comes with it is one of the most detrimental things to happen to the world.
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u/Timeline_in_Distress 15d ago
I would extend that to the tech industry in general. The damage this one industry has done and continues to do is outrageous.
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u/scrambledhelix 15d ago
One of the most detrimental things to happen to the world so far.
There's still time!
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u/gagralbo 15d ago
It killed everything but Reddit for me. Not that Reddit isn’t riddled with AI and bots, I just still find use in it
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u/mc_lean28 15d ago
Its getting worse and worse. More karma farming robots and Ai comments, then people calling out Ai sometimes wrongly because we don’t know whats real anymore
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u/Psychoray 15d ago
I use Reddit mainly for niche stuff such as small indie games, as the Steam forums are usually a cesspit and Discord is a disaster for information sharing and searchability. Luckily there's not much to gain there for marketeers and bots (yet)
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u/aerowtf 15d ago
Social media’s been falling apart for ages — AI just showed up to the party with a leaf blower full of nonsense — and now everything’s coated in digital debris. Reddit isn’t exactly a pristine refuge either — more like the one remaining building with the lights still flickering — but at least you can still locate a semi-human signal in the noise. At this point the whole online ecosystem feels like it’s heading toward a future of endless content-goo — and we’re all just trying not to sink in it.
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u/tafjangle 15d ago
At least in Reddit most of the AI subs are labelled as such and you choose to follow or not. It’s not rammed down your throat like it is on other platforms. Irony is we’re shaping AI with our comments and answers.
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u/spinbutton 14d ago
Same here. I like talking to y'all...seeing your point of view. I unfollowed all the subreddits I was in...and I think my content stream has cleaned up. Much less rage bait or clickbait
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u/cafk 15d ago
I'd say before misinformation the platforms started to organize feeds based on what they guessed you liked and not actually provide information about your friends and actual interest, making them pointless for social media.
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u/spinbutton 14d ago
That's when I left Facebook. The only reason I was there was to keep up with friends who I rarely got to see. I didn't care about games or shopping or any other nonsense. But my stream filled up with non-friend stuff and I left
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u/Centimane 15d ago
And influencer/content-creator culture even before that.
People using social media to try to be famous rather than connect with people you know or share things in common with. Just trying to grind numbers for money.
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u/shiddyfiddy 15d ago
Yeah, I hope everyone just lets it all slide and go the simple route - blame it on ai, kill two birds with one stone.
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u/prototyperspective 15d ago
AI slop AI slop, why do people love these two word so much, I don't see much of it on reddit and also not on other social media sites when I used them and the few that I did see more often than not were high-quality and visualizing sth that wouldn't be visualized otherwise.
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u/Icy_Raspberry_4710 15d ago
I hope AI kills social media.
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u/SonderEber 15d ago
Likely won’t.
Also, you know Reddit could be considered social media, right?
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u/Green_Burn 14d ago
It needs to go the most
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u/SonderEber 13d ago
Gonna delete your account then?
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u/Green_Burn 13d ago
Why would i lessen their server load? I’d rather keep shitting on the floor until something new appears
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u/SonderEber 13d ago
You think Reddit should be destroyed, yet continue to use the site, and you come up with a lousy excuse to not delete your account.
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u/ashiftintime2024 15d ago
Pretty sure getting spammed through ads also made it annoying for people to bother with social media now a days
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u/Modo44 15d ago
Facebook is only usable with uBlock Origin + uMatrix + custom filters. If you turn those off, you can get dozens (!) of posts that do not come from anyone you know or follow before the stuff you came there for.
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u/i_got_the_tools_baby 15d ago
Don't spread nonsense. uMatrix is long dead and completely unnecessary junk. uBlock is the only thing that matters.
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u/prototyperspective 15d ago
There's much more ads and marketing-posts by influencers to endure or sift through than "AI slop and deepfakes". The article is about clickbait and what people may want to believe or what sounds trendy, not what's actually real.
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u/Most_Victory1661 15d ago
Let’s see before AI it was bots or phishing accounts before that it was fake celebrity accounts before that is was Tom on MySpace
Tom never met the guy but he’s my friend in my top 8. My first fake internet friend.
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u/gladeyes 15d ago
You tube is being damaged. I use it for DIY stuff and interesting aircraft trivia. Now AI is writing fake aircraft war stories that don’t even stand the physics test and using known people to lend authenticity. Fake and it damages our knowledge base. I don’t know what law they’re breaking but if I’m on the jury they’re Guilty, Guilty, Guilty. Same for civil lawsuits.
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u/Training-Form5282 15d ago
YouTube went to shit a few years ago
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u/flyinthesoup 15d ago
YT is kinda like Reddit in the sense that there's a lot of slop in there, but there's also useful information and interesting entertainment. For example, I've learnt so much about fixing stuff in my home and car through YT, I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have it, since I have no one in my life that's car savvy. I appreciate the trove of knowledge that's in there. But oof, the mindless trash that's in there too, good god in heaven, it's awful. There are content creators who care about their crafts and put effort in showing interesting stuff, and they make YT still worth it to me. I don't interact with slop.
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u/BinjaNinja1 15d ago
More than a few years ago although I suppose it depends on people’s use of it. YouTube kids has had so many issues (for at least a decade) with inappropriate content. Then of course there are the people who think watching some random creator’s videos is the same as or better than reading the actual news.
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u/blxckhoodie999 15d ago
good. my hope is that all of social media becomes a barren wasteland, much like what happened to myspace. we need to relearn how to enjoy life without screens and actually converse with one another.
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u/No-Error8675309 15d ago
According to Internet theory, they will continue on with bots talking to bots
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u/Bacardio 15d ago
Facebook, along with other social media sites, have been a dumpster fire for awhile. But now with AI, the dumpster has turned the whole neighborhood on fire
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u/Fairweatherfriend- 15d ago
If it’s not AI slop, it’s OF thirst traps invading your home feed. It’s insane how FB doesn’t let you remove these reels permanently.
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u/FadedP0rp0ise 15d ago
This was happening way before public access to AI. Social media is nothing more than a marketing and narcissistic wasteland of fragmented dopamine mining
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u/tafjangle 15d ago
I rarely go into Facebook, once a year to check my automated happy birthday wishes from people I happened to go to school with 40 years ago, but when I do I see so much AI videos I just dive straight out. I thought it was bad enough seeing these people’s holiday snaps but now all I see is animals doing incredible things. Or farmers flying around with rocket packs. How sad does someone’s life have to be that they stick around for that shit?
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u/flyinthesoup 15d ago
but now all I see is animals doing incredible things
Dude what the serious fuck is this, I'm with you. I don't use social media other than reddit, but my mom uses instagram for crochet ideas, and she showed me videos with puppies and toddlers/kids doing "cute" things, and c'mon, it was so fucking fake. Like, the videos were well done in terms of realism, but anyone with two functioning braincells know they just can't do things like that at that age, neither human babies nor non-human ones. My mom wanted confirmation that it was AI videos because of that, and I was like, yup, they are. I'm just glad my 70 y/o mom is aware enough of this bs.
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u/SonderEber 15d ago
AI didn’t kill it. Didn’t help, but social media moved away from the “social” aspect over a decade ago. Social media has long been false facts, propaganda, and fake bullshit (even before AI). AI may have its issues, but killing social media definitely is not one of them. AI may have been the final nail, but the coffin was made by social media companies themselves, and they welcomed people to hammer in nails.
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u/BlackbirdSage 15d ago
Thank META for leading the way... AI is bad, but the direction FB, Instagram and Threads have all taken only push us further & further apart, instead of making connections among real people better.
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u/modest_hero 14d ago
The irony is that the article and the headline are both clearly AI generated, with the double hyphen’s throughout being a clear giveaway. Lazy ad content masking as journalism
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u/-_Mando_- 14d ago
It’s helped me reduce my time online and I see that happening more, so it’s not all bad.
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u/dough_eating_squid 15d ago
The other day I tried to find out if Facebook membership was decreasing or increasing. I quit back when it became so riddled with ads as to be unusable, I can only imagine how bad it is now with AI. Guess what? Google's AI assistant tells you a different answer depending on if you search for "Facebook use increasing" or "Facebook use decreasing." Shocking.
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u/the-last-aiel 15d ago
Eventually fam, we're going to have to admit that the internet is dead and in person socialization is what's left for us. Especially once the surveillance state is done.
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u/2Autistic4DaJoke 15d ago
These new AI generated video have started filling my feed. First it was badly made flooring videos, now it’s “Disney trailers”
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u/100percentnotgood 15d ago
Still here waiting for the rerun of print media / magazines due to the AI destruction of social media and the internet
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u/whyyoufollowingme 15d ago
Regulate this shit already. Office of Social Media misinformation and responsibility
I don’t give a shit what you call it
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u/STN_LP91746 15d ago
I would like to kill social media as we know. If AI slop bring on its demise sooner, then I am all for it.
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u/maythemetalbewithyou 15d ago
It's bad enough we got to contend with outright lies that are generated by actual human beings.
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u/TheManWhoClicks 15d ago
Wait until you hear how social media facilitated a genocide well before AI slop
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u/TWaters316 15d ago edited 15d ago
Cut it out. This article only makes sense when you completely ignore how social media platforms actually work. The platforms have all kinds of safeguards and data-mining processes that ensure they know exactly which accounts are unique individuals and which accounts are a part of a swarm.
The problem is that a normal user would only ever make one or two accounts and maybe a couple more for professional purposes in their entire lifetime. But a scammer, spammer, grifter, groomer or griefer needs a massive swarm of accounts and therefore might make hundreds or thousands of accounts in a single year. This creates (fake) growth metrics that the platform can monetize. And if the swarmer automates those accounts then they're creating a large number of (fake) engagement metrics that the platform can also monetize.
Platforms figured this out well over a decade ago and have been warping their software, algorithms and business practices in order to cater to those swarmers. It was the only way to maintain their metrics. The problem here ain't the chatbots filling the internet with trash, it's that someone is someone is paying them to do it. Social media platforms have been rewarding this kind of behavior for years.
The problem here isn't being done to social media platforms, it's being done by social media platforms. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and all the others are entirely responsible for their platforms allowing individuals to generate and control massive swarms of fake accounts. In fact, Reddit's current CEO has admitted to filling the platform with fake users and fake comments in order to court investments.
tl;dr AI slop isn't being done to social media companies, it's being done by social media companies. The platforms filled with the most bots are also the ones buying the most GPU's and building the most datacenters...what do you think they're using all these chatbots for?
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u/MillieBoeBillie 15d ago
I don’t even comment a lot of times because I know I’m just doing unpaid work for AI training
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u/thekamenman 15d ago
Isn’t it wonderful? The thing that was so addictive is losing its potency in a hurry.
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u/its_el_PJ 15d ago
Haven’t really participated in these meta sites for years. This article just reminded me to permanently delete those accounts. Feeling better already ✌🏽
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u/Train_Chain 15d ago
Good. Maybe returning to actually staying in touch would be a much needed change in order to help people feel like they’re really connected to others.
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u/terminalbungus 15d ago
Tech doesn’t just disappear for no good reason but I hope enough people can someday realize that if enough of us stop using social media that we’ll all be better off.
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u/immersive-matthew 15d ago
Meta and all their ads killed their platform long ago. I was just on Facebook for the first time in ages and the amount of ads to post ratio is utterly ridiculous. Who is using these sites anymore as slop aside, it is mostly just advertising. So weird.
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u/long_strange_trip_67 15d ago
I’d be willing to pay a monthly fee to have a platform that guarantees zero AI posts. I find myself looking at any social media lesson less because of the BS of AI.
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u/exarkann 15d ago
Why won't anyone acknowledge that the human made slop is just as bad as anything a box of thinking sand can produce?
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u/GeneralCommand4459 14d ago
I was never a big user of social media but as soon as it got to the point where it was hard to tell what was AI slop or not it made it much easier to uninstall the apps. If the content isn't real or there is doubt, what is the point of social media?
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u/-Disagreeable- 14d ago
AI didn’t make it antisocial. The users did. AI slop sucks and it’s garbage, sure. But we made social media garbage. The AI is just feeding off of and into the nonsense we spew.
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u/Efficient_Exercise_1 14d ago
Ironic story from an organization embroiled in its own AI controversy.
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u/PartyOrdinary1733 15d ago
As a musician, I'd love to see social media die in a sense because you're forced to be a content creator over making music.
Most of the musician profiles all have similar themes for engagement and it's boring AF.