Generative AI spammers are brute forcing the internet, and it is working.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.17-153712/https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a-brute-force-attack-on-the-algorithms-that-control-reality/

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.

What this means, and what I have already seen on my own timelines, is that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by AI-generated content because of the sheer amount of it. On top of the quantity of AI slop, because AI-generated content can be easily tailored to whatever is performing on a platform at any given moment, there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of “reality” online. I no longer see almost anything real on my Instagram Reels anymore, and, as I have often reported, many users seem to have completely lost the ability to tell what is real and what is fake, or simply do not care anymore.

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    SEO (search engine optimization) has dominated search results for almost as long as search engines have existed. The entire field of SEO is about gaming the system at the expense of users, and often also at the expense of search platforms.

    The audience for an author’s gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google’s algorithm.

    Slop is not new. It’s just more automated now. There are two new problems for users, though:

    1. Google no longer gives a shit. They used to play the cat-and-mouse game, and while their victories were never long-lasting, at least their defeats were not permanent. (Remember ExpertsExchange? It took years before Google brought down the hammer on that. More recently, think of how many results you’ve seen from Pinterest, Forbes, or Medium, and think of how few of those deserved even a second of your time.)
    2. Companies that still do give a shit face a much more rapid exploitation cycle. The cats are still plain ol’ cats, but the mice are now Borg.
    • TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.orgM
      2·
      9 hours ago

      The audience for an author’s gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google’s algorithm. I know this sentiment gets repeated a lot, but I’m not sure it’s universally true. I know back in 2012/2012 my wife was very invested in a bunch of bloggers along the lines of Pioneer Woman. A lot of the posts on those blogs were a mixture of personal anecdotes and recipes and I know my wife was there for both. It’s frustrating when you’re ready to cook and just want the recipe, but that’s not the only (or maybe even the primary) way that a lot of these cooking/homemaking blogs were made to be consumed, I don’t think.

    • The_Decryptor@aussie.zoneEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      For a while Google let you blacklist domains from search results, fantastic feature so of course they killed it off.